A Schumer lands in OpenAI’s Washington operation

Jessica Schumer, daughter of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), is joining OpenAI to run its government outreach and partnerships in the Northeast, the Washington Examiner reported on September 8. By OpenAI’s own description, her job covers statehouses and local governments. Congress is outside it.

Axios broke the story on September 5. It reported Schumer as one of three hires, confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson, that expand the company’s global affairs team on state policy. Caulder Harvill-Childs takes the Southeast. He previously managed public policy for Meta and worked for Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns. Thomas MacLellan covers state cyber defense policy and brings more than 20 years of experience, including Palo Alto Networks, Symantec, FireEye and the National Governors Association. The outlet described the three as policy professionals with Republican and Democratic ties as well as industry experience, hired as bipartisan efforts to regulate AI pick up across the country.

OpenAI said Schumer’s role is focused exclusively on state and local public policy, not federal advocacy. It also said she will not take part in advocacy before the Minority Leader or his staff regarding OpenAI’s business.

The states are where OpenAI’s top lobbyist, Chris Lehane, has put the company’s effort. Axios calls the approach “reverse federalism”: large, powerful states adopt similar rules, and together they become a de facto national standard. It is a way around Congress’s inability to pass tech laws while states race ahead. The same report says OpenAI has so far successfully influenced the AI transparency laws in California and New York. New York is one of those two states, and that likely helps explain why OpenAI gave the Northeast to the person who had been Amazon’s top public-policy official there.

Schumer, who studied at Harvard and Yale, has worked in both business and politics. Under Obama she was chief of staff of the Council of Economic Advisers. During Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign she was policy director for Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA). The Washington Examiner presents those Democratic ties as part of OpenAI’s rapid expansion in Washington while lawmakers argue over how to regulate the industry.

The federal fight is still going. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) recently introduced a bill that would ban the development of artificial superintelligence, warning that advanced AI systems could become capable of operating beyond human control. Other tech companies have made hires like this one as a Democratic-controlled House becomes possible, along with the congressional investigations, subpoenas and hearings that could follow. Meta, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg grew closer to Trump after his 2024 election win, gave $5 million each to the Democratic-aligned House Majority Forward and Majority Forward and the same amount to each of the GOP-aligned American Action Network and One Nation, according to a Wall Street Journal report. That comes to $20 million, split evenly between the parties. Meta had earlier contributed $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee.

At the state level, the current fight is over data centers. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) signed an executive order setting new requirements that restrict data center development, rules he called the most stringent in the country, and the AI industry pushed back. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a similar order earlier in August. After that, Sam Altman called on AI industry leaders to do a better job of explaining the technology’s benefits to the public, as the backlash against the industry and data center construction grows. Voters have repeatedly raised concerns about the buildout, including that it will push up utility prices where the facilities go up. Trump, who has made US leadership in AI a priority, wrote on Truth Social that “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement” and that he “can’t believe” voters have made it a top issue ahead of the November midterms.

Later, on September 11, the Revolving Door Project criticized the hire in The American Prospect. It wrote that Schumer had recently been leading a major Amazon campaign in New York City against expanded worker protection measures from Zohran Mamdani’s administration, and argued that her move to OpenAI reflects a revolving-door arms race for lobbying talent.