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Create a federal privacy floor with one interoperable rights interface, strong public and private enforcement, concurrent state enforcement, and room for stronger state protections that preserve national functionality.
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AI-researched, unverifiedLast Reviewed
Jul 12, 2026
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Create a federal privacy floor drawing on GDPR and CCPA, enforced by a dedicated federal agency, state attorneys general, and a private right of action. Require data minimization, privacy- enhancing design, correction and deletion rights, transparent practices, and interoperable consent and opt-out mechanisms. Preempt conflicting state requirements only where one national definition, role, interface, signal, contract field, or reporting format is necessary for the right to work. Preserve compatible stronger state protections and concurrent enforcement.
A usable national privacy right needs enforcement that reaches individual harm and a common interface that works across state lines. Targeted functional preemption protects that interface. Federalism remains a source of stronger protection, enforcement capacity, and policy learning above the national floor.
Primary — Privacy, Security, and Trust. This is close to a direct restatement of the core value itself: "we safeguard privacy and individual rights in a digital age" is this plank's entire thesis.
Evidence and correction make the right operational: independent audits must expose collection, retention, sharing, and enforcement failures, and people must be able to correct records, revoke permission, obtain a remedy, and force repeat violations to change the system.
Both 2022 and 2024 federal privacy proposals began with bipartisan leadership and failed to assemble a durable coalition around enforcement, preemption, civil rights, and business duties. The current 2026 vehicle is a House Republican bill criticized by Democratic committee leadership as favoring industry. The Innovation Party's delta is a functional preemption map paired with a private right of action. The national law supplies common definitions, roles, interfaces, signals, and reporting fields. States retain concurrent enforcement and room for compatible stronger protection. This resolves the floor-or-ceiling fight field by field and unpacks the several decisions usually concealed by the word "preemption." The Libertarian Party's platform doesn't stake out an explicit position on a federal privacy agency for the private sector specifically (its privacy plank is about government surveillance and Fourth Amendment protection, a related but distinct question). Libertarian-aligned commentary is generally skeptical of a new federal bureaucracy, which is worth naming as the clearest philosophical objection to Proposal 2 this plank doesn't fully answer.
The strongest good-faith objection is that targeted preemption can recreate the patchwork through litigation. Businesses may face fifty variants while courts spend years deciding which state rule changes substance and which one breaks the national interface. Consumers may struggle to know which right applies.
The answer is an operative map in the statute, common machine-readable interfaces, an expert agency with authority to maintain technical specifications, and expedited judicial review of disputed boundaries. Congress should state each preserved category and each preempted function. One general clause cannot carry the entire federalism settlement. Some state variation remains by design because it supplies stronger protection and policy learning. Shared interfaces keep that variation usable.
Consumers carry the continuing cost of federal inaction and the learning cost of a system that still permits some state variation. Businesses must adapt to stronger state duties above the floor, while the common interface reduces duplicate engineering. Federal and state regulators must coordinate enforcement and litigate boundary disputes. People with the least money to pursue a claim receive priority through agency enforcement, state-attorney-general authority, fee- shifting, and a private right of action.
CONST-10 (Technology Federalism). The federal framework supplies a national rights floor and interoperable format. States may go further through compatible substantive protections and concurrent enforcement. Preemption attaches only where conflicting implementation would break the shared right or function, which is CONST-10's stated test.
AI-08 (Cybersecurity & Bioweapons Dual-Use Risk). AI-08's proposed reporting registry and this issue's proposed federal privacy agency are structurally similar ideas (a dedicated federal body with enforcement teeth) applied to different data/risk categories, worth designing consistently rather than as two unrelated federal agencies if this plank and AI-08 both eventually move toward implementation detail.
AI-10 (Copyright/Training Data). AI-10's collective-licensing clearinghouse proposal and this issue's federal privacy framework both wrestle with the same underlying problem: how do you give individuals control and payment/consent rights over their own data or creative output at internet scale, when one-by-one negotiation doesn't work. Worth reading together once both get a full policy-mechanics pass.
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