“Wow, okay.” This is, in fact, what Pope Leo said when our Secretary of State Marco Rubio inexplicably gave the Pontiff a small, crystal football engraved with the State Department seal before they sat down to talk about war and peace. Pope Leo, a known Chicago White Sox fan, was clearly weirded out by the gift – just like Steve Carrell was when he said those words in the movie Crazy, Stupid Love. While the terms “crazy” and “stupid” come to mind when reading the news of the day, I am referring to this movie for a different reason — it is a story about how someone who can’t get it together allows someone else to make decisions for them. This is why Crazy, Stupid Love is a good illustration of the health information policy theme in the One Thoughtful Paragraph below.
No one made these decisions for the federal agencies this week – they did it all on their own:
- CMS added electronic prior authorization as a use case in the Health Tech Ecosystem as part of an effort to prepare providers for payers’ upcoming prior authorization API implementation deadline on January 1, 2026. In the announcement, CMS stated that this builds on the 2025 payer pledge and “brings everyone else” — health systems, hospitals, physician practices, EHR vendors, and digital health developers — into the process of making electronic prior authorization work end-to-end.
- The FDA unveiled Elsa 4.0, the latest update to its internal AI assistant for agency staff, and consolidated application and submission data sources into a new unified platform called HALO.
- The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) launched the Intelligent Generator of Research (IGoR) program to build an AI-enabled research ecosystem that continuously refines disease models over time. The five-year program targets evidence generation, validation, and reproducibility challenges that slow biomedical discovery.
I’m so mad at you. I’m really mad at you for what you did. But I’m mad at myself too. This is what “Cal” (Steve Carrell) says to his estranged wife “Emily” (Julianne Moore) in the hilarious and poignant film Crazy, Stupid Love. It is a story about a middle-aged man who doesn’t want the divorce his wife is asking for, but he lets a young, stylish womanizer (Ryan Gosling) decide how he should dress and comport himself to get back into the dating scene. And just like Cal, who is mad at Emily and also himself, the federal government is mad at both the states and itself over how poorly AI regulation is unfolding. First, state governments are WAY out ahead on this (Maverick tracked 195 active state health AI bills between January 1 and March 31, 2026 – 5x as many during the same period last year, see brief here). Second, despite the Trump administration’s “Dear Congress, please preempt state AI legislation” note two months ago, there has been no movement to actually do so. And then, this week, all the lawyers that are left at the DOJ joined Elon Musk’s x.AI lawsuit challenging Colorado’s AI Act. It is the first publicly reported federal action challenging a state AI law under President Trump’s December 2025 executive order. That order explicitly named Colorado as a state imposing excessive AI regulation. [Note: Colorado lawmakers introduced a bill on May 1, 2026, to narrow the scope of the AI Act.] So, the feds are trying to explain to the states that they really shouldn’t regulate things like AI – this policymaking is too impactful for the national economy. Like the much cooler Ryan Gosling tells Steve Carrell in Crazy, Stupid Love, unless you are the billionaire owner of Apple Computers, “you’ve got no right to wear New Balance sneakers, ever.”
