The Man Who Documented America's Robot Policy Problem Is Now Writing the Solution

When Brendan Schulman walks into a room where U.S. robotics policy gets written, it matters which company he is carrying. As vice president of policy and government relations at Boston Dynamics, he has spent years watching the gap between what robots can do in a lab and what the U.S. government actually does about it. On March 17, 2026, Schulman took a seat at the table that is supposed to close that gap.

The Special Competitive Studies Project, a bipartisan nonprofit that studies the intersection of AI and national security, announced the formation of its National Security Commission on Robotics for Advanced Manufacturing co-chaired by Ylli Bajraktari, SCSP's president; Senator Ted Budd, a Republican from North Carolina; and Senator Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan. The commission has 14 additional commissioners alongside the three co-chairs. Schulman is one of those 14. The others include Rev Lebaredian, Nvidia's vice president of Omniverse and simulation technology; Keith Strier, AMD's senior vice president for global AI markets; Dr. Ayanna Howard, dean of the engineering college at Ohio State University; Dr. Chinedum Okwudire, a professor at the University of Michigan; and Dr. Elisabeth Reynolds, a principal research scientist at MIT's Industrial Performance Center. General Motors, FANUC America, Path Robotics, Intrinsic, Mytra, and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory are also represented.

The commission will spend one year examining how to rebuild American manufacturing capacity through robotics, and is expected to deliver recommendations in March 2027.

The urgency is not abstract. SCSP's underlying analysis, published alongside the commission announcement, paints a picture of a country that leads in robot brains but is losing the machine. China now accounts for 54 percent of all new industrial robots installed globally each year, compared with 9 percent for the United States, according to data from the International Federation of Robotics cited in SCSP's research. China is already a net exporter of industrial robotics systems. Beijing backed that production capacity with a $138 billion state-backed venture fund — a figure reported by the International Federation of Robotics in March 2025, part of a longer-term effort expected to attract nearly 1 trillion yuan over 20 years — to accelerate domestic robotics companies. Meanwhile, Deloitte projects the U.S. manufacturing sector will face a shortage of nearly 2 million workers by 2033, a demographic crunch that makes robotic automation not a luxury but a prerequisite for keeping factories running at all.

The security dimension has sharpened recently. In a March 17, 2026 House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing, executives from Boston Dynamics and Scale AI testified about the risks of Chinese robotics systems operating inside U.S. infrastructure. Matthew Malchano, Boston Dynamics' vice president of software, told lawmakers that China has dozens of companies producing robots similar to Unitree's widely sold humanoid platforms, and that those systems contained software vulnerabilities potentially allowing an attacker to seize control of fleets or access camera feeds. Rep. Vince Fong, a Republican from California, noted that data from those robots was being transmitted to China. Global Times, a Chinese state media outlet, dismissed the hearing as mounting anxiety and envy, a response that will feel familiar to anyone who watched Beijing respond to earlier U.S. concerns about Chinese drones, solar panels, and electric vehicles.

The four pillars the commission has identified reflect the scope of that problem. It will look at creating a national framework to synchronize public and private investment; securing a talent pipeline for robotics engineers and specialized technicians; setting measurable benchmarks for robotic integration across supply chains; and driving the policy and capital conditions for U.S. leadership in robotics hardware, software, and the underlying component supply chain.

What the commission cannot do is spend money or pass laws. It is an advisory body. Its influence will depend on whether the White House and Capitol Hill treat its recommendations as a starting point or a shelf document. Industry has been here before. A National Commission on Robotics Act was introduced in February 2026. What is different now is the combination of the worker shortage data and the China security hearings that have moved this from academic concern to bipartisan urgency.

The test for Schulman and his fellow commissioners will be whether they produce recommendations that can survive contact with a fragmented Congress, a skeptical budget process, and the simple reality that robots still cannot do most of what factory work actually requires. The gap between a robot that demos well and one that holds up on a line for eight hours a day, five days a week, in a facility that is 90 degrees and full of metal shavings, is where most industrial automation projects quietly die. Closing that gap is the actual work. The commission's report will show whether the people in the room understand that.

The commission is expected to publish its final recommendations in March 2027.