WASHINGTON, D.C. – On November 18, 2025, the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee held a hearing titled Frontier Technologies, Industrial Efficiency, and Pro-Innovation Policies. Members engaged with witnesses on how we may increase labor productivity through technological advances, including how the technology itself can improve industrial output, and which government barriers can be eased, providing an injection of economic output, and helping with affordability across multiple sectors.

This hearing explored the development, diffusion, and effective regulation of those technologies, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and robotics

“We must focus on policies that address the changes in workforce demographics to ensure a strong, growing economy. New technologies and innovation will increase productivity, boost economic output and increase wages,” said Chairman David Schweikert. “Our population for prime aged workers is declining. Encouraging higher birth rates won’t meaningfully change our workforce for decades, and any serious expansion of immigration requires a level of public consensus that is not feasible in today’s climate. Therefore, if we’re honest about the math, the most immediate and scalable path forward is boosting output per worker by leveraging emerging technologies that can drive real, measurable gains in productivity.”

Witnesses included Will Rinehart, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Niccolo De Masi, Chairman and CEO of IonQ, Evan Beard, co-founder, CEO and Chief Engineer of Standard Bots, and Ruth Whittaker, Director of Technology Policy at Third Way.

The hearing included the following discussions:

Chairman Schweikert (R-AZ01): We are losing our working population, but we must continue to produce and grow economically. Technology and innovation are best to keep America leading and thriving in the global economy.

Watch Chairman Schweikert’s remarks here.

Chairman Schweikert: What happens in a society where we have fewer 18 year-olds- today than we had 20 years ago, and next year we are going to have fewer. The year after that we have fewer and the year after that we have fewer. At the same time, our aging population is growing, in fact, double the number than we had 20 years ago.

How do I keep wages growing?  How do I keep productivity in society growing?  How do I actually have the cures for afflictions?  Because if five percent of Americans account for more than half of healthcare costs, maybe the morality is not spending more money on maintaining people's misery, but curing it.

Are we about to get so much better and faster in curing diseases and answering the universe's questions? Or are we about to do what so often happens, where we get so worried about the displacements in society, which are important, that we actually slow down the very thing that could have created productivity. How close are we?

Niccolo De Masi: We have been running applications and selling cloud access and systems for the last five years, and we have expanded into other branches of the quantum ecosystem.  So, quantum from our perspective is very much now. When I think about job creation and where we are from that perspective, quantum computing, quantum networking, quantum sensing, we have created this industry from scratch, and it is just inflecting. We are solving problems that cannot be solved with all the supercomputers and history combined.

As our machines become more powerful, we are taking down more and more of the workflow. As we have demonstrated, we can turn a month of classical computation work on some genome problems - quantum chemistry problems - into a day. Soon it will be a year of work and eventually it will be a century of work into a day.

Chairman Schweikert: How do we convince Americans of the morality of a whole new type of antibiotics, cures for diseases?  Because both of those things are happening from AI right now, and where do you think it goes?

Will Rinehart: I think some of the best stories are in medicine. There are incredible stories.  For example, my mother was on a cancer drug that the newest generation are going to give people extended life years. It is those sorts of examples that I think people are naturally seeing.  

In health, I think there are huge advances that can be made. The newest technologies that we are talking about using, foundational models that bring in genomics, that bring in DNA, that bring in a whole bunch of material science. I think that these stories need to be told.  And as people do recognize them fundamentally, they recognize that these new technologies can help them.

I am not going to deny that there are not problems with AI systems. That is for regulatory bodies, for legal systems, for courts, for laws, to address. All of these things are there to ensure that we have safeguards. But at the same time, I think people are naturally seeing as medicine is advancing, as healthcare is advancing, as some financial products are advancing, I think people are naturally seeing that there are benefits to the newest generation of AI systems.

Chairman Schweikert: When will AI design Mr. Beard's next robot? Have you started to experiment with the embedded sensors now?  

Evan Beard: There are some people working on tools for automating CAD design and electrical engineering. It is a little bit behind, so they are not very prevalent right now. I think we are a few years away.

This is one of the fundamental transformations right now, is that you can actually show a robot what to do. It trains an AI model, and now it can do it autonomously. This is important as it allows us to automate so many more things in this country and we have a real window to bring back manufacturing by being a leader in physical AI.  

Chairman Schweikert: In Japan, they face an aging population, and they are looking into using robotics and AI for senior care and automate it as much as possible. We have 67 million Baby Boomers; how do you think automation in senior care will evolve?  

Evan Beard: I think that it is an important use case for robotics. It is one that is important to us and that we want to get to. We have folks on our team that have those types of disabilities, including our founding team, and we think that robots have a place to be able to give folks their autonomy back and to be able to be independent.

Chairman Schweikert: We see from our own data there is this hunger to age in place. If I can have a wearable, basically wearing a medical lab, I support you being allowed to prescribe based on that data. If you start to head that direction, have I actually started to break through my shortage of medical practitioners, my ability to age at home, my ability to be much more autonomous as an individual, because you can put it behind the privacy chip in your phone and stay safe? Am I being pathologically optimistic? 

Ruth Whittaker: I think it is a useful exercise to figure out what is the most optimistic case. I think what is exciting about AI is that in practical terms, as we have seen with robotics and other sorts of wearable tech, is that it can be the solution to a lot of the problems that we are thinking about. But it can also be a tool that can help us think through those problems in the first place.

Therefore, as we implement AI, as businesses and innovators use AI to help their research, it can help them get to answers faster. Even if technology itself might not be the answer right now, it can help humans figure out the answer in the future. 

Chairman Schweikert: Think of the number of barriers that we as policymakers and administrations have done. What are the governmental and legal tort barriers that we need to take on to bring the positive things of automation, automation, AI. Is that too ethereal?

Niccolo De Masi: I have been trying to pull all this together, effectively the areas where you have seen all the limitations. There are lots of different barriers throughout the entirety of the economy. There is occupational licensing. There are a whole bunch of things that I think we are going to have to very seriously look at in the next couple of years, to ensure that innovation, that people are protected, but also that we allow for innovation.

Chairman Schweikert: How do I get the people I work with here to sort of think through that these leaps, these sort of punctuated equilibriums of new levels, that would require you and quantum to make it work?

Niccolo De Masi: I am hugely optimistic about the coming years and decades, because technology has improved every aspect of lives when you stand back and look over a medium time horizon for the last, century if not centuries. There has to be obviously some consideration of the balance of safety and efficiency when it comes to classical AI and hallucinations.

The good news is that quantum does not hallucinate. It is deterministic. I think that in the long term we will see quantum AI supersede classical AI, and it will be great for the regulatory regimes that we like to be in, as well as great for the way job creation works, where people like machines amplify their domain expertise and their efficiency.

Chairman Schweikert: What scale and investment is needed? If I have $100 billion being spent on building these and you show up in two years, is this almost a stranded investment?

Niccolo De Massi: It is not. Today your phone, your laptop still has a CPU and a GPU in it. And there will be a day when you have a CPU, a GPU and you have cloud access or a QPU. 

We are focused on taking problems that might take a century or even a millennium or a million years or a billion years and turning those into days and we hope hours. We are not focused on the microsecond turnaround times. So, the future is bright, because you see GPUs growing the total economy on top of CPUs. You will see our quantum process units grow the computer space in the economy on top of GPUs and CPUs as well.  

Additionally, In the long term, you will see of course more quantum workflows, because less power is required. But you will see quantum data centers get created probably in the same space.

Chairman Schweikert: What do you think your business (Robotics) will look like five years, ten years from now?  What will be the models you are going to be producing? Is it still going to be a cable pulling, pulled by a motor lifting something?  Or is it going to be organic?

Evan Beard: There has been a shift to brushless or permanent magnet synchronous motors, and there are some people working on new motor technologies like radio flux, axial flux motors rather, where you can just use a circuit board to create a good part of the motor, which makes it cheaper and more affordable.

We are tracking those technologies. I think that those things help to make robots more affordable and more accessible to American manufacturers, and we are on top of those developments.

Chairman Schweikert: Ms. Whittaker, anything else you want to throw at us?

Ruth Whittaker: I think that the biggest takeaway if I could impart one thing is that we are really figuring out how AI can be used in practical terms right now. And to your point earlier, disruptions probably will happen. But I think that we have the tools that we need to address those disruptions, and we should not let the fear of that disruption hold us back from all the excellent use cases of AI that we have seen, that are possible.  

Senator David McCormick (R-PA): Frontier technologies, good for the global economy, domestic energy, manufacturing and competing with China 

Watch Senator McCormick’s remarks here.

Senator David McCormick inquired about how the use of frontier technologies will impact the global economy. More specifically, he was interested in how U.S. energy dominance fits into the overall strategy for America’s leadership in AI.

William Rinehart: America has an incredible supply of semiconductors, we have the talent, we have data, and we have the organization. The real thing that it seems in the near term that we face where we will be constrained is energy usage. Fundamentally, for the new AI economy to flourish, it really does come down to energy and semiconductors.

Senator McCormick was also interested in revitalizing the American manufacturing industry, and the challenges and opportunities in finding and developing skilled labor in the robotics sector and how it is essential to meet investment demand.  

Evan Beard: We've heard across the board that it is very hard to hire for manufacturing today, from machinists to welders to people who can help assemble. I think there's a couple of things that we can do to really lead in this area. I think if we have centers of excellence in partnership with community colleges, local universities and trade schools, where people get trained in the latest equipment and by experts in the field. We are having to do training ourselves, to create our own training programs to train robotics experts, because there aren't enough skilled workers in our field in this country right now.

Lastly, Senator McCormick asked how the U.S. compares to China and the rest of the world in regard to accelerating quantum computing.

Niccolo De Masi: China has invested heavily in state sponsored initiatives. We believe that we have a five-year lead over them. Presently IonQ does, but specifically because this administration has supported not just growth in our company, but also combinatory progress.

 

Congresswoman Spartz: Legal frameworks to expand AI, and ensuring small businesses remain competitive

Watch Congresswoman Spartz remarks here.  

Congresswoman Spartz was interested in ensuring broad access to the AI market and what the industry needs from Congress to address any legal framework to protect consumers and small businesses.

William Rinehart: There's a whole bunch of little things that probably need to be dealt with to ensure clarity when it comes to the legal frameworks. But fundamentally, I think what's interesting and new and important about AI is that it really does change the dynamics that small players can get into the market in a very major way. And we've, we've seen this, and I really think that that's what's great and innovative about, about this new technology.

Niccolo De Masi: the great thing about our company and industry is everything we're doing is creating jobs. There are no jobs today applied against problems that take a century to solve with a GPU data center (or take a billion years with a GPU data center). And so every time we advance our machines, we're making these problems accessible, and we're creating new industries. The government, this administration, has done a fantastic job of obviously creating an environment for IonQ to flourish. The free market mechanism is doing a good job of getting people forward, looking at how they're learning and being trained.

 

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN): Tennessee is leading in quantum computing. It’s important to build on public/private partnerships with our National Labs, Energy providers 

Watch Senator Blackburn’s remarks here. 

Senator Blackburn is looking to restart the quantum initiative in the US. Senate and providing a ‘sandbox’ for near-term applications. She asked why this would be important for innovators. She also discussed the importance or partnerships between innovators and the U.S. national labs, partnerships with utilities, and other private/public partnerships. She asked Mr. De Masi why emerging tech leaders should step into these partnerships.

Niccolo De Masi: As you know, $9 out of $10 spent on R&D comes from the private sector, but the $1 out of $10 from the public sector is important for sparking progress, particularly in early-stage projects. Our partnership with Oak Ridge National Lab is deeply important in advancing both quantum computing and quantum networking in the State of Tennessee, but also nationwide. What I think is the right partnership is creating the ecosystem for our industry’s success. That's true both at the state level and the federal level when it comes to broader applications.

 

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