‘Big Beautiful Bill’ could impact Minnesota budget and state artificial intelligence policy

While the U.S. Senate puts the finishing touches on the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” in Washington, DC, state lawmakers in Minnesota will be watching and assessing the potential impact on the state budget and taxpayers.

The Senate bill, which still needs to be reconciled with a similar bill already passed by the U.S. House, is likely to impact every state budget.

RELATED: Senators hunker down for long day of votes on Trump’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts

Here in Minnesota, changes to federal funding for Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) could poke a hole in Minnesota’s state budget to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“The bill, when it comes to Medicaid, what it did was, it’s cleaning up waste, fraud and abuse in the system,” said Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer. Emmer says states like Minnesota, where there have been numerous fraud cases, could cushion the blow to their budgets by cracking down on waste, fraud and errors in providing benefits.

RELATED: Walz administration introduces anti-fraud legislation

“I’m not going to say that things aren’t going to change,” Emmer said in an interview in his Washington, D.C., office earlier this month. “What I’m saying is we’ve got to balance our budget at the federal level, and we’ve got $36 trillion in debt, we’ve got to find a way to pay off. The states and the federal government should be working together. We’re trying to do our part.”

5 EYEWITNESS NEWS also stopped by the office of democratic U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar to ask about her views on the budget bill making its way through the Senate, where she acknowledges Democrats in the minority can’t do much to stop the Republican agenda.

U.S. Senator Klobuchar is concerned about the impact on the national debt and the impact on Minnesota’s budget when it comes to picking up a larger share of Medicaid and SNAP funding.

“So what they’ve done is say okay we’re going to take five or ten percent of SNAP and we’re going to make the states pay for it,” she said in an interview on June 12. “In the case of Minnesota, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars. In the case of, say, Pennsylvania, it is a billion dollars. And forty-one states have balanced budget amendments, so they can’t actually do this. So there’s huge concern from very conservative Republican senators that this is just shifting things over to the states and they can’t afford it.”

RELATED: Emmer, Klobuchar discuss financial impact of budget bill

The budget bill could have another impact on Minnesota beyond the state budget. The Senate version of the budget bill has a five-year moratorium on any state regulation of AI technology. A Minnesota state senator who has been a leading advocate of legislation to regulate AI says she will continue her efforts in the next session regardless of what Congress does.

“I think the moratorium on states regulating a technology that has been completely unregulated by the federal government is really, really scary both as a state lawmaker, as a parent, and just as [a] regular citizen,” state Sen. Erin Maye Quade, DFL-Apple Valley, said in an interview with 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS on Monday.

State senator Quade authored a bill last session known as the “nudification bill” because it would have prohibited Minnesotans from accessing websites that allow you to create fake nude images. The bill passed the Senate, but not the Minnesota House, so it didn’t become law.

RELATED: Bill seeking to ban ‘nudification’ technology introduced in Minnesota Senate committee

A state law is on the books that regulates the use of “deep fake” technology in elections. The fate of that law remains uncertain until we know what is in the final bill.