On March 5, 2025, Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Stephanie Bice (R-OK) and Senators Todd Young (R-IN) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), all commissioners on the National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology (NSCEB), introduced the America’s Living Library Act of 2026 (H.R. 7832, S. 4023). The bill would direct the Secretary of the Interior to begin a project to collect, catalog, and sequence genomic information of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes on U.S. public lands. According to an NSCEB fact sheet on the bill, the first phase of the project would select a set of National Parks for sample and data collection, eventually expanding to all public lands, “covering the breadth of organisms in the United States.” The effort would establish collections of the physical samples, in addition to a public database for genomic data storage. The fact sheet states that collecting biological data could provide important scientific insights and ensure that future artificial intelligence (AI) models have the appropriate training data needed to unlock breakthrough discoveries in medicine, agriculture, and industrial production. According to the fact sheet, the bill would:
- Establish a sampling, collection, and sequencing process that follows National Park Service and Department of the Interior standards for collection;
- Create opportunities for education and outreach related to science, biological data, and nature, at the selected National Parks;
- Create a public database to store genomic information gained through this effort, to include high quality, standardized, AI-ready datasets;
- Create collection and storage capacity for biological samples in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Smithsonian Institution;
- Engage with a broad set of stakeholders to ensure public views and ideas are incorporated into program implementation; and
- Establish or designate an existing office with the U.S. Geological Survey to carry out the America’s Living Library project.
