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Please hold: Washington is coming for customer service. This week, FCC chairman Brendan Carr proposed rules aimed at bringing more call-center work back to the United States, including disclosure when customer service is handled overseas and a proposal to require call takers to be proficient in "American Standard English."
Carr wrapped it in the language of consumer protection and his "Build America Agenda." Democratic Senator Ruben Gallego, who sponsored bipartisan legislation in Congress last year, supplied the more human version: "If you’re calling customer service, chances are your day isn’t going great."
Quite so. But there are actually three anxieties at play at once. The first is obvious: scams, robocalls and outsourced service. The second is cultural: a growing official preference for English-first politics, reinforced by President Donald Trump’s March 1, 2025, executive order designating English as the official language of the United States. The third, however, is the one politicians would rather not put on speakerphone: the same class of customer-service work that Washington says it wants to repatriate is already being thinned out by automation.
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The bipartisan legislation would require disclosure on whether the "person" answering the phone is an AI bot. But America is having a patriotic argument over who should answer the phone just as the phone is learning to answer itself.
Common Knowledge
The FCC has explicitly tied the proposal to consumer protection. Carr says that "protecting consumers is central to the FCC’s Build America Agenda," and the agency says it will vote this month on reforms designed to encourage telecom companies to bring call centers back to the U.S. and examine whether overseas call takers should be required to be proficient in "American Standard English."
Senator Jim Justice, the Republican co-sponsor of the 2025 Keep Call Centers in America Act, said: "West Virginians and all Americans deserve good service. When folks pick up the phone and ask for help, they shouldn’t have to deal with AI robots or be routed to someone across the world." That sentence is doing several jobs: it is anti-bot, anti-offshore, and pro-worker all at once.
The left also sees the appeal. Gallego’s version of the same bill says Americans should be able to talk "to a real human being right here in the U.S." and that companies should have to tell consumers if they are talking to "an AI bot." The Communications Workers of America union went further, calling the bill "much needed legislation" that protects U.S. call-center jobs from the "growing threats posed by artificial intelligence and offshoring." It warned that companies are using AI "to deskill and speed up work and displace jobs."
That is why the familiar left-right framing is misleading. Both sides contain nationalists now.
Uncommon Knowledge
Washington may be trying to repatriate a category of work that technology is already eroding. BLS says customer-service representatives held about 2.8 million jobs in 2024 and will still generate roughly 341,700 openings a year through 2034, largely because people leave the occupation. But BLS also conservatively says it is projected to decline by 5 percent over that period, with less demand as "their tasks continue to be automated" and as self-service systems, apps and social media handle simpler interactions.
Both the FCC proposal and the 2025 bipartisan Senate bill treat offshoring and AI as versions of the same problem. The Keep Call Centers in America Act would require disclosure when customer service is handled overseas; require disclosure when a "nonhuman, artificial intelligence or machine" is being used; allow consumers to request transfer to a U.S.-based human agent; and direct the Labor Department to report to Congress on federal call-center work and job losses associated with AI in customer service. The competition is no longer simply Akron versus Manila. It is Akron versus Manila versus AI.
The consumer-protection wrapper is shrewd because Americans loathe scam calls. The FTC said in December that unwanted-call complaints in fiscal 2025 remained about 48 percent lower than in fiscal 2021, though overall complaints rose, and that the Do Not Call Registry had grown to about 258.5 million active registrations by September 30, 2025. But those numbers also show the mismatch. The government’s own anti-robocall machinery has already reduced part of the nuisance. What remains is not merely illegality. It is the broader sense of alienation—scripts, accents, bots—that customer service has made normal.
That is why the "American Standard English" phrase matters so much. A purely technocratic rule would have stuck to disclosure, transfer rights, and fraud risk. Once regulators begin talking about "American Standard English," they are no longer just refereeing a market, but refereeing belonging. Trump’s English-language executive order made the argument explicit, saying that a common language promotes "unity," "a shared American culture," and civic participation.
Nationalism is being rebuilt via administrative details. But machines don't care about nationalism and they are the ones most likely to win. America may yet get customer service back home. Home may increasingly mean a server controlled by a tech giant.
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