• Maryland lost nearly 25,000 federal jobs in 2025, the most of any state, representing 5.4% of its federal workforce.
• The state has deployed Microsoft Copilot across government email and has 50+ agencies using AI tools. Lt. Gov. Miller believes the technology should “support thinking, not replace it.”
• Miller sees autonomous vehicles and traditional transit investment as complements, not trade-offs: Waymo for first/last mile connections, the Purple Line for the backbone.
A pedestrian stepped out from between parked cars on a San Francisco hill, and the car stopped. Maryland Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller was in the back seat.
There was no driver up front. Instead, a complex network of software and hardware had identified what a human driver might have reasonably missed, braked instantly, and the pedestrian walked across unharmed.
“I think if it was an average driver, that could have been an incident,” Miller told me. “A crash that could have occurred.”
“This generation particularly really wants to have access to transit.”
Maryland Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller
Miller is a transportation engineer by training. She spent her career, as she put it, “designing infrastructure built around one constant: that a human being would always be behind the wheel.”
Last month, riding in a driverless Waymo for the first time after a cybersecurity conference, Miller watched that constant dissolve. After years of false dawns, autonomous vehicles are operational in American cities, and, so far, are proving safer per-mile than people drivers.
For Miller, who was elected in fall 2022 alongside high-profile Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, that technology is representative of the challenge of good governance today: emerging technologies that are viewed as either problem solvers, or harbingers of collapse.
Rebuilding both jobs and infrastructure
No question Maryland has challenges to confront. It’s a brainy, highly educated state with well-regarded services stacked against high costs, high taxes and outward migration.
Maryland lost nearly 25,000 federal jobs in 2025, more than any other state. Federal employment represents roughly 10% of all wages in the state, and the cuts hit hardest in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, which are part of the DMV region coalesced around the nation’s capitol The state’s unemployment rate climbed from 3.0% to 4.2%, one of the sharpest increases in the nation.
Two years ago last week, the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed, killing six workers and severing a major artery for the Port of Baltimore. The rebuild won’t be finished until 2030, and the cost has ballooned from $2 billion to as much as $5.2 billion.
That’s the landscape in which Miller became Maryland’s first immigrant and first Indian-American lieutenant governor. Born in India, her family immigrated to the United States when she was 7 years old. She was a transportation engineer in Montgomery County, then spent the 2010s in the Maryland House of Delegates, with a special interest in STEM education and entrepreneurship. Insiders viewed her as a veteran legislative hand to support Moore’s ascendant and charismatic if inexperienced leadership.
I’ve long considered Maryland as a transit state: the Baltimore region is dense enough to allow it, and the neighboring DC region, which includes part of the state, has one of the country’s highest share of public transportation commuters. Fitting, then, that Miller spent so much time in the mechanics of transit infrastructure.
I first met Moore at a Baltimore economic development event in the early 2010s, not long after the publication of his best-selling memoir. Around that time, I took a reporting trip to Maryland that required an Amtrak to Baltimore, a bus, a ride hail on highways, a ferry across the Inner Harbor, and a MARC train to DC.
If transportation is one way to attract and retain business builders, Maryland has something to build on: It’s a dense state with real multimodal options — and real gaps. The transit-engineer lieutenant governor can do something, can’t she?
Truly, I wasn’t sure if she would be for autonomous vehicles as transportation infrastructure, or opposed, as research shows ride-hailing contributes congestion. Turns out she’s open.
“Waymo could really play a role in making sure that our transit systems are more connected,” Miller said. “It can really play a big role in supporting the first and last mile connections.”
Maryland passed initial AV legislation in 2025 (HB 1256), establishing safety standards and requiring law enforcement interaction plans before deployment. Additional legislation is moving through the 2026 session. Waymo already operates in California, Arizona, Texas, Georgia and Florida, and has announced plans to launch in Washington DC this year. Baltimore appears to be next on the list.
But Miller isn’t abandoning traditional transit investment for the shiny new thing. The Moore-Miller administration has introduced the Maryland Transit Housing Opportunity Act of 2026, designed to build housing closer to transit centers and job hubs. The Purple Line — a light rail project connecting Montgomery and Prince George’s — is expected to open within 18 months.
She told me about a high-tech business owner in Gaithersburg who moved his entire company of several hundred employees seven or eight miles down Route 270 just to be near a transit center. His recruits kept asking: “Do you have transit close by?”
“The demand is really out there,” Miller said. “This generation particularly really wants to have access to transit.”
Nimbleness is the key, for policies and careers
The age-old challenge of delivering high-quality services is figuring out how to pay for them.
Trump administration cuts to the federal workforce hit Maryland harder than any other state, contributing to a ballooning state budget gap. One response was last year’s “tech tax,” a new charge to certain tech services (including contract software builders). But as Technical.ly recently reported, the state just meaningfully revised down its projection, from $500M to $110M.
Those figures are still too early to merit changing tack, Miller told me, defending the Moore administration’s navigation of a perilous time.
“There’s a lot of economic uncertainty right now across the nation driven by a lot of federal policy shifts,” said. Even still, “our FY2027 budget is balanced and it has no new taxes nor fees that are being introduced.”
That plan is working its way through the statehouse. Meanwhile, Miller said, the administration takes seriously efforts to find efficiencies within state government. For one, she said, Microsoft Copilot is embedded in the state’s email system, available to all employees. More than 50 agencies are using AI tools to draft reports, analyze data, build chatbots and accelerate benefits delivery.
Miller frames it carefully: AI should “support our thinking and not replace it,” she said. “The real value isn’t the tool. It’s how we’re using it.”
She uses AI personally to translate complex policy documents into plain language before meeting with the public, a practical application that sidesteps the existential debates about job replacement. When I pushed on how she weighs the efficiency benefits against the displacement risks, she acknowledged the tension but emphasized adaptability.
“We’re no longer just preparing people for a specific job,” Miller said. “We’re preparing them to be nimble and to adapt to changes.”
That means investing in what the administration calls “lighthouse sectors” — AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing, life sciences and aerospace—while building what Miller described as “adaptable skills” like digital fluency and critical thinking. The DECADE Act, passed to focus state resources on these sectors, reflects the bet. Miller cited state-backed investment firm TEDCO as one way the state is developing its economic future.
AI isn’t going away, but ‘we need to stay grounded’
Nationwide, Americans are taking a skeptical look at their elected officials and institutions. Much has been written on declining American dynamism, starting with a sclerotic infrastructure-building pace.
“When you’re building big projects, you have a lot of impacts on the environment, from wetlands to wildlife to air quality,” Miller said. “You need to get community input. You got to have public hearings. Then you got to get buy-in from federal, state, and local leaders. Then you need to get permits. And when you go from one agency to another, oftentimes they’re in conflict with one another.”
The result is frustration. People want the Key Bridge rebuilt in two years, not six. But Miller’s view is that the same participatory process that slows construction is what makes government AI deployment accountable.
“Those closest to the problem are going to be closest to the solution,” she said. “We want to hear what they have to say.”
When I asked what business owners actually prioritize when deciding to expand in Maryland, she said they consistently rank talent pool, quality of life, and transit access above taxes. The top request? Modernizing the regulatory process.
“Every one of them said modernizing the regulatory process,” she said. That’s where AI comes in: not to replace workers, but to cut red tape faster. Governor Moore, she told me, texts back at 12:30 a.m. He’s in her phone simply as “Gov.” Less is more, she said,
Maryland is betting it can hold two ideas at once: that AI will change almost every job, and that traditional public investment still matters. That autonomous vehicles can complement transit, not cannibalize it. That efficiency and accountability aren’t opposites.
Miller, the transportation engineer who put her life in the hands of a software driver in San Francisco last month, put it plainly: “AI is here. It’s not going away. But we need to stay grounded in the values that faith and family and community teach us.”