Hawley-Warner coalition

The Hawley-Warner coalition — a bipartisan group of nine US senators led by Republican Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Democrat Mark Warner (Virginia) — wrote to the Department of Labour, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Census Bureau in early 2026 urging the federal government to establish authoritative AI workforce data collection. The letter came into sharper focus in April 2026 when the Federal Reserve Board published a survey reconciliation study showing that three separate federal instruments produced AI adoption rates of 18%, 41%, and 78% for the same late-2025 period — a 4.3x spread that validated the Coalition's central argument that no usable federal benchmark exists.

The nine-senator group spans the two parties' tech-policy wings: in addition to Hawley and Warner, the Coalition includes Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, Tim Kaine, Jim Banks, John Hickenlooper, Mike Rounds, and Todd Young. The letter requested that federal agencies — which can act without new legislation — expand existing surveys to track AI adoption, displacement, and reskilling outcomes. The BLS subsequently skipped a scheduled GenAI workplace paper on 14 April 2026 without explanation, leaving a New York Fed consumer survey as the de facto federal AI labour measure.

The Coalition's cross-partisan composition gives it unusual weight: Hawley is among the most prominent Republican critics of big technology companies, while Warner has been a leading Senate voice on technology governance and national security. Their joint demand for data — rather than for prescriptive legislation — represents the lowest-friction political intervention available, and if successful would create the statistical infrastructure that all future AI workforce policy debates will require.