MAGA Report Cards — Data Centers & AI

State of the State: Texas Is 40th Overall. Greg Abbott and Texan Republicans in Congress Aren't Helping.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:59:28 +0000

Texas is big and Texas is rich. But on the things that decide whether a Texas family gets by — enough food on the table, safe care for a pregnant woman, a fair start for a kid — Texas keeps landing near the bottom.

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Add up the 17 measures we track across all 50 states and Texas ranks 40th. That number describes where the state already is. It does not, by itself, prove any one politician put it there.

Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015, and many of the decisions behind those numbers are his rather than Washington's: whether Texas expands health coverage, who regulates the grid, where school money goes, what a doctor is allowed to do for a miscarrying patient.

Republicans also hold 24 of Texas's 37 filled U.S. House seats, both of its Senate seats and the attorney general's office. One House seat is empty, and that's a story too. Here is what all of them did on top of the numbers above, and what each has been busy with instead.

What Texas's Republicans in Congress voted to cut

Texas is already 49th of 50 states on food insecurity, from the USDA's own data — second-worst in the country at feeding people — and it already has the highest uninsured rate of any state, for children and adults alike. Its Republicans in Congress then voted for a budget bill that cut both health coverage and food assistance. Take them one at a time.

KFF's allocation of the Congressional Budget Office's estimates projects that Trump's budget bill will leave 480,000 more Texans without health insurance by 2034 — 1.4 million once you count the Affordable Care Act premium tax credits that expired at the end of 2025 and that the bill did not extend. Texas also stands to lose $27.9 billion in federal Medicaid funding over ten years.

That lands on a state where, in 2024, the Census Bureau's American Community Survey put 13.6% of Texas children and 21.6% of working-age Texas adults without any coverage at all — the highest rate in the country in both cases, against national rates of 6.0% and 11.3%. And the hole is not only Washington's doing. Texas, under Abbott, is one of the few states that never expanded Medicaid, which the Texas Tribune reports has contributed to that rate. Turning the expansion down was a decision made in Austin, and it is his.

Another $10 billion is stuck on top of that. The Trump administration is holding up Medicaid payments Texas hospitals were counting on, which the Texas Hospital Association counts at $27 million a day. Ken Paxton fought that exact case against the Biden administration, won it, and put out a news release calling it a "major nationwide legal victory." Against this administration, he has filed nothing.

On food: 1 in 4 Texas kids faces hunger, and about 3.47 million Texans — 11% of the state — get SNAP benefits every month. The same bill squeezed that program too.

Every Texas House Republican named below voted for it.

What 49th on women's health looks like

Texas ranks 49th of 50 states on women's health and reproductive care, from the Commonwealth Fund's state scorecard. Second-worst in the country. Here is part of why.

Texas has a near-total abortion ban, and Abbott signed it. On May 19, 2021 he signed the law that banned abortion after about six weeks and paid members of the public at least $10,000 to sue any doctor who performed one. "Our creator endowed us with the right to life," he said at the signing ceremony. The law took effect that September. After the Supreme Court overturned Roe, a criminal law followed, threatening doctors with up to 99 years in prison.

Doctors then started waiting. ProPublica's statewide analysis of hospitalizations for second-trimester pregnancy loss found that after the ban, the rate of sepsis in those cases jumped more than 50%.

Josseli Barnica's case is what that waiting looked like. She was 28, a mother, and 17 weeks pregnant when she was admitted to a Houston hospital on September 3, 2021, days after the law took effect, with a miscarriage her doctors recorded as "in progress." More than a dozen medical experts told ProPublica that her doctors should have emptied her uterus then to head off an infection. Instead her husband arrived from a construction site to hear what she said the medical team had told her: "They had to wait until there was no heartbeat. It would be a crime to give her an abortion."

She waited 40 hours. Three days after she delivered, she died of an infection — sepsis, her autopsy said, with "retained products of conception." The experts who reviewed her records called her death preventable, and called the case "horrific," "astounding" and "egregious."

Barnica never asked for an abortion. Neither did Nevaeh Crain, who was 18, or Porsha Ngumezi. Texas's own Medical Board has since disciplined three doctors over the care those last two received — one for discharging Crain while she had a 103-degree fever and had screened positive for sepsis. Each doctor was ordered to take eight hours of continuing education.

Even the Republican-led Legislature conceded something was wrong and passed a bill to clarify the ban's medical exceptions. The ban itself stands.

The data centers

The biggest new fight in Texas isn't in Washington. It's over giant warehouses full of computers that run artificial intelligence, and the electricity and water they drink.

Greg Abbott spent years bringing them here. In November 2025 he stood next to Google's CEO and called Texas "the epicenter of AI development." The grid operator now says companies have asked to pull 474 gigawatts off the Texas grid — more than five times the most electricity Texas has ever used at once — and about 90% of those requests are data centers. We laid out that record here.

Then, in August of an election year, Abbott announced a pause and an audit. Regulators set the delivery date for the report at December 10. Election Day in Texas is November 3. Texans vote 37 days before the state tells them what it found.

Texas's own Agriculture Commissioner, a Republican, called the pause "smoke and mirrors" and said Abbott is stalling so his donors' projects can be grandfathered in.

The public schools

More than nine in ten Texas kids sit in a public school. The state spent this year moving money the other way.

The private school voucher program is Abbott's. He campaigned on it, and on May 3, 2025 he signed the $1 billion bill creating it, telling the crowd he had promised school choice when he ran for reelection in 2022. Texas launched the program for 2026-27 with that $1 billion. In September 2026 the state's comptroller, Don Huffines, asked the Legislature to double the program's base funding to more than $2 billion. Nearly 110,000 students have been funded and more than 106,000 families are on the waitlist. Paying for the waitlist too, the comptroller's office said, would come to about $4 billion over two years.

Here is the part that decides who this is for. State data shows that 70% of the families who have joined the program or hold pending invitations were already in private school or home-schooling. This is not mostly money helping kids leave a failing public school. It is mostly money for families who had already left.

Meanwhile the public schools are cutting. The Legislature put nearly $8.5 billion into schools last year, earmarked for teacher pay, educator training and special education, and districts told a Capitol hearing in June that it did not stop the cuts. Austin ISD is closing a $181 million shortfall. El Paso's district is short nearly $53 million. Before last year's bill, Texas students had gone six years with no comprehensive funding increase at all.

And Texas is short of teachers. The state employs more educators on H-1B visas than any state in the country, and districts use those visas for jobs they have already tried and failed to fill locally — above all bilingual education, which sits on Texas's own official teacher shortage list, in the state with the largest share of students learning English in the country. Abbott says he wants "exactly zero", and he wants it to reach the teachers already standing in Texas classrooms. In the rooms Texas cannot staff, it would become illegal to keep the teacher who took the job.

Three of the Texans below — Keith Self, Randy Weber and Brandon Gill — went a step further and cosponsored a one-sentence bill to abolish the Department of Education outright.

Texans are still paying for the last grid failure

Before the data centers, there was Winter Storm Uri. 246 people died. Craig Goldman chaired the Texas House Energy Resources committee in the session that followed, and his committee advanced a bill that put $3.5 billion of the gas companies' storm costs onto customers' bills through April 2039. The weatherization rules passed after the storm have caught almost nothing, and a 2025 state audit found why: regulators issued two violations across 8,732 inspections, and never compared what companies actually did to the state's own best practices. The gas companies set their own standard, and passed.

Texans will be paying that off for another 13 years, while the grid takes on the biggest new load in its history.

The agency that let that happen is Abbott's too. He appoints the Public Utility Commission's board, which was expanded from three members to five after Uri, and the Tribune reported that he took over the search for the grid operator's chief executive — a process he has no formal role in — with one person involved saying he had "total veto power."

What it costs to live here

On September 4, 2026, in Lubbock, Abbott named the thing Texans tell pollsters they care about most and promised to fix it. "Now I want to make Texas number one for affordability," he said. He has been governor since January 2015. Here is what those eleven years did to three of the bills that arrive at a Texas house.

Property taxes. Abbott signed an $18 billion package in 2023 and called it the largest property tax cut in state history. By the comptroller's own count, statewide property tax levies were $51.2 billion in his first year in office and $89.4 billion in 2025. He is now running on cutting them in half by zeroing out school property taxes on homesteads, a promise that does nothing for the 39% of homesteads that already owe no school tax and nothing for the state's 4.1 million renters.

Homeowners insurance. "The average annual homeowners' insurance premium in Texas has risen 79 percent in six years," Abbott said on August 24, 2026, ordering the insurance commissioner he appointed to do something about it. In 2025 the Legislature killed both bills that would have addressed it: a roof-hardening grant program that passed the House, and a rate-approval bill that passed the Senate. Insurance was not among the seven emergency items Abbott named that February, and not among the eighteen reported on his summer special session call either.

The electric bill. The data centers above run on a sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost the state $3.2 billion over two years, and the grid operator's own $33 billion transmission expansion shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers. Abbott now says data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers." He also wants to break up the San Antonio utility that says it has the cheapest residential rates in the state, on behalf of retail providers whose political action committees have given his campaign at least $230,000.

Three bills, one shape. The problem built for a decade while he held the office that could act on it, and the answer arrived in the campaign.

The seat that isn't being filled

On April 14, 2026, Republican Tony Gonzales resigned from Texas's 23rd District. He quit amid allegations that he had a sexual relationship with a staffer who later took her own life, an affair he had denied and then essentially admitted in a talk-show interview. Abbott has still not called a special election, and the seat is not on track to be filled until January — roughly 260 days empty. A Democrat resigned in California the same day. Voters there have already picked his replacement.

That is the empty seat: about 800,000 Texans with nobody voting for them.

The Republican nominee waiting for that seat is Brandon Herrera, a gun YouTuber who called a child a "c*m trophy" while attacking Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action after the Sandy Hook shooting. When reporters asked Texas Republicans about it, they walked away. He has also called Social Security "a joke" after his own campaign website promised to protect it.

The rules of the election itself

Texas ranks 46th of 50 on voter turnout. Its Republicans have spent the year working on the map and the polling places rather than the turnout.

In 2025 the Legislature redrew the congressional map mid-decade to target five Democratic-held seats. Two federal judges blocked it, finding "substantial evidence" that it was racially gerrymandered in a 160-page opinion. The Supreme Court cleared it for use in the 2026 midterms anyway, over the dissents of Justices Kagan, Sotomayor and Jackson.

Underneath that, the same work is happening county by county. Galveston County held its March primary under one map and adopted a different one in June, telling a court the reason was to "increase partisan performance." Tarrant County's Republican majority voted to cut 92 Election Day polling places, taking the state's biggest swing county from 316 sites in 2022 to 224 this November.

The rolls themselves are moving too. More than 1.2 million Texans sit on the state's voter suspense list, over 6% of all registered voters, with the election weeks away. Abbott has said Texas caught 6,500 noncitizens on its voter rolls. His own office had confirmed 581.

The candidates up for reelection

Texas sends 24 Republicans to the U.S. House. The seventeen running for reelection in 2026 have a report card on this site. Here's something about each of them:

August Pfluger chairs the Republican Study Committee and wrote the blueprint for the next budget bill, saying the point of the process is that Democrats can't block it.
Beth Van Duyne called this "the golden age of DOGE." The Government Accountability Office then reported that DOGE couldn't show its work on 96% of its claimed grant savings.
Brandon Gill filed a bill to stop people from buying a hot meal with food stamps. The option he calls a loophole exists for SNAP recipients who are elderly, disabled or homeless.
Brian Babin's campaign paid the Federal Election Commission $26,700 after a donor pleaded guilty to funneling $37,000 in corporate money to it through his own employees.
Craig Goldman — the Uri bill above. His one law in Congress so far killed an efficiency rule the Energy Department said would save $1.3 billion.
Jake Ellzey announced a "historic investment" in rural health care. He voted twice for the law that made it necessary, which cuts $137 billion from rural Medicaid.
John Carter's last in-person town hall was in 2013. When 150 constituents held one for him, they brought a life-size cutout.
Keith Self calls the national debt "an existential threat to our Republic," voted for the $3.4 trillion bill, then introduced a bill to stop bills like it.
Lance Gooden is under House Ethics investigation. The committee won't say what it's about; Gooden says it's his spending. His first move was to call the investigators "dishonest unelected bureaucrats."
Michael Cloud wrote a bill that would put every federal agency on a countdown to abolition — including the ones that warn Texas about hurricanes.
Monica De La Cruz told donors on leaked audio that "it's not that people don't like me, it's that people don't know me yet." She has never held an in-person town hall.
Nathaniel Moran spoke against site-neutral Medicare payment, the one change that would lower what patients pay for the same service. The hospital lobby has given him $20,000.
Pat Fallon sits on the Oversight panel built to work hand in hand with DOGE and went on Fox Business to call it a chance to "fix our Republic".
Pete Sessions put it in writing that a $7 billion Ponzi schemer was "a man of great strength, character and financial stability".
Randy Weber has represented the Texas coast for 13 years. He called $5 million for the Ike Dike a win; the barrier carries a $35 to $57 billion price tag.
Roger Williams, a second-generation auto dealer, slipped an exemption for car dealers into a rental-car safety law at midnight. It got him an ethics investigation and was stripped out.
Ronny Jackson kept paying for a private Amarillo dining club with campaign money after the ethics office told him to stop, and changed what he called it.

And the party's Senate nominee is Ken Paxton, the sitting attorney general, whose own party's voters picked him over a record of indictments, an impeachment and abuse-of-office findings that we laid out in full.

Above them all on the ballot is Greg Abbott, who has been the Governor of Texas since 2015. He signed the six-week abortion ban that pays strangers $10,000 to sue a doctor, in the state that ranks 49th on women's health. He signed the $1 billion voucher bill, where 70% of the families taking the money had already left the public schools. He spent years recruiting the data centers, then flip-flopped when it became politically convenient. And he is running on affordability after property tax levies rose from $51.2 billion in his first year to $89.4 billion, and home insurance premiums rose 79%.

Compare Texas to Other States →

A Texas Deputy Searched 80,000 Surveillance Cameras for a Woman Who Took an Abortion Pill. Then an AI Wrote Part of the Report About It.

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 13:01:31 +0000

In May 2025, a deputy at the Johnson County Sheriff's Office in Texas ran a search across a national network of more than 80,000 license plate cameras to find a woman. She was not wanted for a crime. She had taken an abortion pill.

The person who wanted her found was her abusive partner.

On September 2, 2026, 404 Media's Jason Koebler reported what the sheriff's own records say about that search — documents obtained by journalist Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald and shared with 404 Media. Two things in them are worth sitting with.

The deputies knew there was nothing to charge her with

The incident report was written in part by an artificial intelligence tool — Axon's Draft One, which generates police narratives from body camera audio. Sergeant Damien Bethel used it. Here is what the machine wrote about that day's conversation:

Deputies discussed the legal implications of the situation, noting that while the girlfriend self-administered the abortion pill, there were no criminal charges applicable under current Texas law.

So the same case file contains both a nationwide camera search for her and the deputies' own conclusion that she had broken no law. The passage saying so was drafted by software.

That is the part that should stop you. A search of 80,000 cameras is a serious use of state power. Part of the document recording it was produced by a tool that turns audio into prose, and the prose it produced contains the admission that no law had been broken.

Flock's CEO told police customers a different story

Flock Safety is the company that runs the camera network. Its chief executive, Garrett Langley, has repeatedly told the story a different way. In leaked audio of him briefing the company's law enforcement customers — obtained by 404 Media, recorded by Signal Akron — he said the woman "was in an abusive relationship and the family was concerned that she was in danger."

That reframes everything. A worried family looking for a woman in danger is a sympathetic reason to search. It is also not what happened.

The police records contain no mention of a concerned family. The request came from her abusive partner. The company's CEO described a search initiated by the abuser as one initiated by relatives worried about the abuse.

Flock's police customers heard the version with the concerned family in it.

Why the camera network matters more than the one case

The point of a system like this is that a local deputy can query cameras far outside his jurisdiction. One officer in one Texas county reached 80,000 cameras nationwide.

Now put an abortion ban next to it. Eighteen states ban abortion at six weeks of pregnancy or earlier, and Idaho makes it a crime — two to five years in prison — for an adult to transport a pregnant minor toward an abortion her parents do not know about, with no defense that the abortion itself happens in a state where it is legal. In 2025, an estimated 142,000 people crossed a state line for abortion care. The infrastructure to track a car's movements across the country already exists, is privately operated, is sold to any department that can pay, and — on the evidence of this case — gets used on a woman nobody could lawfully charge, at the request of the man abusing her.

This particular search happened in a state where, as the deputies themselves worked out, taking the pill is not a chargeable offense. The system does not check that first. The deputy does, afterward, in a report an AI helps write.

Texas has been buying this quietly

Texans have been paying for these cameras without being asked. A board appointed by Greg Abbott turned a $1 fee on every car insurance policy into at least $30 million of Flock cameras — money collected to fight catalytic converter theft, spent on a network that logs where people drive. Abbott shut the program off the night before the Texas Tribune published the story.

Shutting off one funding stream does not delete the cameras, the searches already run, or the records of where people went.

What the record shows

In May 2025, a Johnson County, Texas deputy searched more than 80,000 license plate cameras nationwide for a woman who had taken an abortion pill, at the request of her abusive partner. The incident report — written in part by Axon's Draft One AI — records that deputies had determined no Texas law made her chargeable. Flock Safety's chief executive later told the company's police customers that the woman's family had asked for the search out of concern for her safety. The sheriff's records mention no family at all.

Source

Jason Koebler, "Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion," 404 Media, September 2, 2026. Records obtained by Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald. Image: Spumoni Collective for 404 Media.

Mike Rounds Pays His Senior Adviser More Than $153,000 a Year. Meta and a Tobacco Giant Were Paying Him Too.

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 10:44:00 +0000

The man who runs Senator Mike Rounds's political operation has two employers. One of them is you.

Robert Skjonsberg has worked for Rounds for more than a decade. He managed Rounds's first Senate campaign in 2014, served as his chief of staff from 2015 to 2022, and is now his senior adviser. Rounds's Senate office paid him more than $153,000 in the last 12 months on record.

At the same time, POLITICO reported on September 7, Skjonsberg has been a registered lobbyist in South Dakota — since 2023 — for more than a dozen clients. The list includes Meta, the tobacco company Altria, the conservative Freedom Foundation, the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, the South Dakota Dairy Producers and the South Dakota Pork Producers.

The records POLITICO reviewed had never been reported before.

What the Senate's rules actually say

This is not a gray area the Senate has failed to think about. The Senate Select Committee on Ethics publishes the rule in plain language on its own conflicts of interest page.

Anyone on the Senate payroll earning an annual rate of pay above $25,000, and employed more than 90 days in a calendar year, may not:

Affiliate with a firm, partnership, association, corporation, or other entity for the purpose of providing professional services for compensation;

Permit his or her name to be used by such a firm, partnership, association, corporation, or other entity;

Practice a profession for compensation to any extent during regular office hours in the employing Senate office.

The committee spells out what that leaves: an employee below the higher salary line "may provide professional service for compensation, but only as a solo practitioner, without affiliating with a professional services entity."

Skjonsberg is listed on the website of 605 Strategies, a South Dakota government affairs firm founded in 2012, as a "co-owner" and "founding member." The firm itself does not appear on his lobbying registrations; his own name does. The firm's own site, as the Daily Caller noted, credits him with guiding Rounds to victory in the 2002 governor's race, his 2006 reelection, and his Senate wins in 2014 and 2020.

There is a second, stricter tier for staff paid at or above $151,661 — the 2026 figure — which bars paid professional services entirely. POLITICO reported that Rounds's office paid Skjonsberg more than $153,000 over the last 12 months on record, but that he did not cross that threshold in calendar year 2025.

The bills that followed

The reason the rule exists is that a person cannot separate what they learn in a Senate office from what they sell in a statehouse.

Since Skjonsberg registered to represent Meta last year, Rounds has introduced several bills on artificial intelligence, including one that would create a commission to study what AI does to the American workforce.

Rounds also sits on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture. This year he introduced legislation to open new grazing land for the cattle industry, and legislation to stop people and companies controlled by foreign adversaries from buying American farmland and agricultural businesses. Skjonsberg's client list in Pierre includes the state's dairy producers, its pork producers, and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers.

Nobody has shown that a bill was written to order. That is not the standard. The standard is whether the arrangement creates a conflict, and two ethics watchdogs said it plainly.

"It's wholly inappropriate for somebody who's working as a Senate staffer to be lobbying, [even if] it's only at the state level, because you can't draw this line or wall between all the kinds of information you gain," said Meredith McGehee, an independent congressional ethics expert who used to lead the watchdog group Issue One. "To me, this is pretty much a no-go, and it's an outside employment that should not be permitted."

Craig Holman, a lobbyist for the advocacy group Public Citizen, went further: "It poses the most obvious conflict of interest I can imagine. Serving a public official, you're supposed to be working on the public's behalf, but then simultaneously working as a hired lobbyist, you're now working also on some private special interest's behalf and getting directly paid for it."

What Rounds's office says

Rounds's spokesperson, Dezmond Ward, told POLITICO that the office's general counsel "consulted with the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Ethics, which provided guidance to make certain there was and is no conflict of interest," and that "Senate Ethics guidance continues to be followed today."

The guidance itself is not public, and POLITICO's account does not include it. A senior staffer for the ethics committee did not respond to POLITICO. Skjonsberg did not answer questions about the scope of his work.

Two clients moved to distance themselves. The Association of Equipment Manufacturers said it has not worked with Skjonsberg since March 2026. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said Skjonsberg's contract ended after South Dakota's legislature wrapped its 2026 session that same month. Altria did not respond.

Rounds already takes the money directly

The lobbying arrangement is not the only place Big Tech money reaches Rounds. It reaches him through the front door too.

Rounds sits on the Senate Banking Committee, which writes the rules for banks, payments companies and cryptocurrency. His donors this cycle include $70,100 from the artificial intelligence company Anthropic — $68,600 of it from people who work there and $1,500 from its PAC — $56,400 from people at Alphabet, Google's parent, and $36,000 from people at Andreessen Horowitz. The cryptocurrency industry's super PAC spent $411,748 supporting him while he sat on the committee that writes crypto rules. Counting everything raised since 2020, only 5% of his money came from small grassroots donors, which ranks him 78th out of 100 senators.

His independent challenger, Brian Bengs, put the money at the center of the race last week. "He has taken over $215,000 American dollars from AI data center interests, and is backed with hundreds of thousands more from super PACs that support big tech interests," Bengs told South Dakota Public Broadcasting on September 3, as Dakota Free Press reported.

This keeps happening, and it is always the same shape

A senator's most trusted aide is worth a great deal to the industries that senator regulates — not because the aide will hand over a secret, but because the aide knows what is coming, who is movable, and how a bill gets written.

Ohio's Jon Husted has the same problem. His senior adviser and counsel collected $22,652 from a Columbus lobbying firm while working in Husted's office, which produced a formal complaint asking the Senate to investigate Husted himself.

And Rounds has been here before, at the other end of his career. As governor he privatized South Dakota's EB-5 green card program, handing it to a private company owned in secret by the state employee who gave out the contract. It ended with a bankrupt beef plant, roughly $100 million of foreign investors' money gone, and a cabinet secretary dead six days before a grand jury was set to indict him.

What the record shows

Mike Rounds's Senate office paid Robert Skjonsberg more than $153,000 over the last 12 months on record. During that period Skjonsberg was also a registered South Dakota lobbyist for more than a dozen clients, among them Meta and the tobacco company Altria, and is listed as a co-owner of a South Dakota government affairs firm, though that firm is not named on his registrations. Senate rules bar a staffer at his pay grade from affiliating with such a firm or letting it use his name. Since Skjonsberg registered for Meta, Rounds has introduced multiple AI bills; from his seat on the agriculture spending subcommittee, he has introduced bills touching industries Skjonsberg is paid to represent in Pierre. Rounds's office says the ethics committee cleared it; the guidance itself has not been made public.

Source

Jacob Wendler, with Andrew Howard, Senate aide's lobbying side gig raises ethics questions, POLITICO, September 7, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin.

Joe Lombardo's Ad Attacks Aaron Ford for Voting for Nevada's Biggest Tax Increase. The Man Lombardo Made His Chief of Staff Voted for It Twice.

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 07:23:30 +0000

A campaign ad for Joe Lombardo flashes a line across the screen about his Democratic opponent, Attorney General Aaron Ford:

"FORD VOTED FOR THE LARGEST TAX INCREASE IN NEVADA HISTORY."

That is true. It is also a Republican achievement, and the man Lombardo picked to run the governor's office voted for it too.

What the 2015 tax package actually was

Nevada's largest tax increase was enacted in 2015 and valued at $1.3 billion at the time. It created a gross receipts tax on business, raised the payroll tax, extended taxes that had been due to expire, and raised the cigarette tax.

It was spearheaded by Republican Governor Brian Sandoval, working with the gambling and resort industry. Republicans controlled both the Nevada Senate and the Assembly at the time, and the package cleared the state constitution's two-thirds requirement in both chambers comfortably.

The Senate voted on it twice, and the tally was 18 to 3 both times. Ford voted yes both times. So did eight Senate Republicans, Nevada Current editor Hugh Jackson wrote on September 6 — among them Ben Kieckhefer.

Kieckhefer voted for the package on final passage on May 15, 2015, and again on June 1, when the Senate accepted the Assembly's version and sent it to Sandoval. He went on to become Joe Lombardo's first chief of staff, ran the governor's office through the 2023 legislative session, and stepped down in January 2024.

Jackson's column names a second man, James Settelmeyer, and on that one the record is split. Settelmeyer voted for the package on May 15. On June 1 he was one of the three no votes on the version that actually became law: the Senate journal records "NAYS—Goicoechea, Gustavson, Settelmeyer—3." Lombardo appointed him to run the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources on January 6, 2023, less than two months after his Senate term ended, and he stayed there until March 27, 2026, when he left to run — unsuccessfully — for the Republican nomination in Nevada's 2nd Congressional District, with Lombardo's backing.

If casting that vote disqualifies a person from being governor of Nevada, Lombardo handed his own office to a man who cast it twice.

The other ad has no receipts

A second anti-Ford ad, from the Lombardo-aligned Better Nevada PAC, says Ford voted to raise taxes 15 times, totaling $3 billion.

Jackson asked the political consulting firm November Inc. — whose Jeremy Hughes leads Better Nevada PAC, per the firm's own website — to identify each of those 15 votes and their dollar amounts. The firm did not respond.

At least two of the votes, and about half of the $3 billion, appear to be the 2015 Sandoval package again. Which is to say: about half the ad's biggest number is one Republican governor's tax bill, counted twice.

Hughes also managed Sandoval's 2014 reelection and consulted on Mark Hutchison's campaign for lieutenant governor that year, according to the firm's website. Hutchison, later a Better Nevada PAC fixture, came to the lieutenant governor's office straight from the Republican side of the state Senate and was a vocal supporter of Sandoval's 2015 agenda.

The data center half of the same ad

The ad's other charge is that Ford is bad because he has supported tax breaks for data centers.

Lombardo supports data centers. He said so on video on May 14, 2026: "I support data centers because they bring jobs, investments, and economic growth to Nevada."

He said it three days after AI investor Ben Horowitz and his wife Felicia gave Better Nevada PAC — the same PAC now running the tax ad — $1 million. A week later the wife of Switch's founder gave $1 million more. We laid out that timeline last week.

So the ad attacks Ford for a policy Lombardo holds, using money from the industry that policy benefits.

What it adds up to

Joe Lombardo's campaign is attacking Aaron Ford for a 2015 vote that a Republican governor asked for, that eight Senate Republicans cast alongside him, and that the man Lombardo would later hire to run the governor's office cast twice. The same ad attacks Ford over data center tax breaks that Lombardo publicly supports, and the PAC behind the companion ad took $2 million from data center money in the two weeks around Lombardo's endorsement of the industry. When a reporter asked for the receipts behind the ad's "15 tax increases" claim, the firm running the PAC did not answer.

Source

Joe Lombardo and the largest tax increase in Nevada history by Hugh Jackson, Nevada Current, September 6, 2026. Photo: Nevada Current.

Tommy Tuberville Says Alabamians Worried About Data Centers Are Repeating Chinese Propaganda. As a Senator He Bought and Sold Alibaba — and Was Late Disclosing About 130 Trades.

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 06:53:20 +0000

Tommy Tuberville has one explanation for why so many Alabama towns keep voting down data centers, and it is not their water bills.

In July he told the Alabama Sheriffs Association that his neighbors in Cullman, Bessemer, Fort Payne and elsewhere were repeating talking points from China. "They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow," he said, and called their concerns "bull crap."

On September 2, 2026, Doug Jones — the Democrat running against him for governor — pointed at Tuberville's own Senate financial disclosures and asked a question about that.

"Scare tactics about China don't acknowledge the fact that on 14 different occasions, while a United States senator, Tommy Tuberville, bought and sold stock and options in Alibaba."

Alibaba is a Chinese company. It is also one of the largest builders of AI and data centers in China.

The disclosures are not in dispute

Jones is an opponent, and opponents make claims. This one has been reported for years by outlets with no stake in an Alabama governor's race.

CNBC reported in January 2022 that Tuberville — described in the piece as a China critic — had, with his wife, bought Alibaba shares across three purchases between December 14 and December 21. Business Insider, reading the same filing, put the couple's total at between $115,000 and $250,000, and noted that his disclosures the previous June showed he held Alibaba put options as well. On January 14, 2022, three more options trades ended the Alibaba position.

Six months earlier, CNBC had reported that Tuberville violated the STOCK Act — the federal law requiring members of Congress to disclose their trades within 45 days. He was late on roughly 130 stock and options trades made between January and May of 2021, worth somewhere between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million. One of the trades he was late reporting was a sale of Alibaba put options.

His office said at the time that he had been unaware of the trades and that financial advisers made them.

That explanation is worth holding onto, because it is the same shape as the argument he is making now. When the trades look bad, he did not know about them. When Alabamians raise concerns, they are the ones being manipulated.

What Jones is actually asking

Jones raised a broader figure too: more than 250 trades disclosed in Senate financial filings, in the range of $5 million to $14 million, involving companies tied to artificial intelligence and data centers.

His ask follows from it. Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Alabama while the state writes rules, and a package of ethics changes to go with it: full transparency, a ban on nondisclosure agreements between developers and legislators, a prohibition on destroying records, and a ban on state officeholders trading stocks while in office. He asked Tuberville directly to divest from AI and data center companies.

"Alabama can build data centers, but we can do it right with appropriate guardrails," Jones said. "And Alabama can do it without a governor who trades the stock of these companies."

What Tuberville said back

His campaign declined to answer Jones directly. It pointed instead to an opinion piece Tuberville published the day before, in which he laid out a data center plan: local communities get the final say, developers cover the full cost of the energy and water they use, they replace what they consume, and they are taxed at the highest property tax rate.

That is a more accommodating position than "bull crap," and the shift is itself the story. Two months ago the people asking for exactly those guardrails were dupes of the Chinese government. Now the guardrails are his platform.

What he has not done is answer the money question. He was also asked, in August, to debate Jones, and declined: "There's so much difference between us. I mean, there's no reason to get up there and argue about differences of opinion."

The money keeps arriving

Whether Tuberville personally profits is only half of it. Last month we wrote about the other half: twenty-five days after he called Alabamians' data center worries "bull crap," a data center developer gave his campaign $25,000.

Data centers are becoming a defining Alabama issue, and Jones says it is not breaking along the usual lines. "It crosses party lines. It crosses racial lines. It crosses economic lines," he said.

Alabama towns are being asked to host facilities that draw enormous amounts of power and water, in a state where residents will pay the utility bills either way. The man who wants to run that state has told them their worries are foreign propaganda, has taken money from the industry, and spent his Senate years trading the stock of the companies building it — including a Chinese one.

What the filings show

Tommy Tuberville told Alabamians that opposition to data centers in their own towns is Chinese propaganda. His Senate financial disclosures record that he and his wife bought between $115,000 and $250,000 of stock in Alibaba, a Chinese AI and data center giant, that he held put options in it, and that the position was closed out in January 2022 — and that he was late disclosing about 130 trades worth between $894,000 and more than $3.5 million, one of them an Alibaba options sale, in violation of the STOCK Act. Doug Jones puts the wider total at more than 250 disclosed trades in AI and data center companies and has asked him to divest. Tuberville's campaign declined to respond and he has declined to debate.

Source

Doug Jones questions Tommy Tuberville's stock trades and data center stance — Kayla Davis, WVTM 13, September 2, 2026.

John James Says His Data Center Priority Is 'Frankly Local Control.' He Voted Three Times in Committee to Ban States and Towns From Regulating AI for a Decade.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:48:15 +0000

John James, the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan, has built his data center message on one idea. He said it at a gubernatorial debate in early July:

"My priority is frankly local control, protecting our water, protecting and preventing pollution, making sure that electricity bills do not go up... We absolutely cannot have an additional data center until we protect the people and communities."

He said a version of it again on CBS's Face the Nation days before the Michigan Advance published its findings: "My position is we need to have a plan to protect our communities. Until we do, then we have to make sure that we have local control."

In Congress, he voted for a provision that would have taken local control away — for ten years, from every state and town in America — three times in committee, and a fourth time as part of the bill on the House floor.

The provision

The Michigan Advance went back through the votes. In May 2025, James voted for the House version of H.R. 1, Trump's budget bill. Buried inside it was this:

"no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce, during the 10-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act, any law or regulation of that State or a political subdivision thereof limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems entered into interstate commerce"

Ten years. No state law, no county ordinance, no township rule that singled these facilities out. The bill's own definition of an artificial intelligence system is "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — a data center, in other words. A Michigan community that wanted limits on one would have had nowhere to go.

James did not just vote for the overall bill and let the fine print slide past. He sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where the language was written, and he voted for that specific moratorium three times:

Twice to advance it out of committee.
Once against an amendment that would have stripped it out of the bill.

Someone handed him the chance to delete it, and he voted no.

He was told exactly what it would do

This was not an obscure provision whose effects only became clear later. The National Conference of State Legislatures — a bipartisan group representing state legislatures of both parties — wrote to the Energy and Commerce Committee warning against it.

The ban, its CEO Tim Storey wrote, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders," and would "severely limit the ability of states and localities to make decisions regarding the siting and operation of these large-scale projects, raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

Rising ratepayer costs. Zoning stripped. That is the list James now campaigns on protecting Michigan from. He was warned it was the list, and he voted for it anyway — three times in committee.

The moratorium did not survive into the final law. That is not a defense of the votes; it is a description of what happened to the provision after he cast them.

What his campaign said when asked

The Advance put the votes to James's campaign. Spokesperson Alyvia Bailey's answer:

"John James voted for H.R. 1 to deliver historic tax relief to working families across the country. His approach to data centers has been clear: no new data centers until we protect our people."

The Advance reports that Bailey did not directly address the questions about the moratorium votes.

That is the whole answer. He voted for the bill for a different reason, and his current position is his current position.

Michigan is not confused about where it stands

An EPIC-MRA survey taken August 22 through 28 found 73% of Michigan respondents opposed the federal tax breaks and policies designed to speed up data center development.

Meanwhile the head of James's party is on the other side of that. In a Truth Social post on Monday, August 31, Trump said the country should "let Data Reign," and that communities that push back "want to end up being backwards and poor." James has aligned himself closely with Trump and took his endorsement in the primary.

So James is running as the local-control candidate against a president who just called the people asking for local control backwards and poor — with a voting record that matches the president rather than the campaign.

Michigan Republicans keep discovering this issue late

James is the second Michigan Republican we have caught running as a data center skeptic after voting for the AI moratorium.

Tom Barrett's ad says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers. The vote in that ad is from 2015 and was about a single building in Grand Rapids; since then he voted for the tax breaks that handed six AI companies $83 billion, backed the same ten-year state-regulation ban, and took money from Musk, Thiel, and the corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle.

James has his own version of the money problem. He took nearly $50,000 from DTE, Consumers Energy's parent company and their employees while both utilities were asking regulators to raise rates on Michigan families — the same electric bills he now promises to hold down.

He is not alone nationally either: three out of four Americans now oppose a data center near their home, and a run of Republicans who spent the last year helping the build-out along have recently discovered concerns.

What the record shows

John James is campaigning for governor of Michigan on local control over data centers. In May 2025 he voted for a budget bill containing a ten-year ban on any state or local government regulating AI systems, and as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee he voted for that specific ban three more times — including against an amendment to remove it. A bipartisan group representing state legislatures had warned Congress in writing that the provision would raise ratepayer costs and override local zoning. His campaign, asked about those votes, did not address them.

Source

Katherine Dailey, "As James pushes local control on data centers, past congressional votes sought to limit just that", Michigan Advance, September 2, 2026. Photo by Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance.

Joe Lombardo Declared His Support for Data Centers Three Days After an AI Investor and His Wife Gave the PAC Backing Him $1 Million. A Week Later Another Data Center Family Gave $1 Million More.

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 06:41:24 +0000

On May 14, 2026, Joe Lombardo, the Republican governor of Nevada, posted a video on X: "I support data centers because they bring jobs, investments, and economic growth to Nevada."

Three days before he posted it, a prominent artificial intelligence investor and his wife had given $1 million to the political action committee working to re-elect him.

Nevada has roughly 70 data centers running, being built, or planned. In the driest state in the country, they need the two things it has least of: water and electricity.

The eleven days

The Lever went through the campaign finance filings for Better Nevada PAC, the committee backing Lombardo's re-election. Three dates sit close together in May:

May 11 — Ben Horowitz and his wife Felicia Horowitz gave $500,000 each, for $1 million. Ben Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm better known as a16z, which has money in a long list of AI and data center companies.
May 14 — Lombardo posted his video endorsing data centers.
May 21 — Jessica Roy gave another $1 million. She is married to Rob Roy, who founded Switch, a data center company currently building facilities in Nevada. Switch has taken millions of dollars in tax abatements from the state, and Andreessen Horowitz is one of its major investors.

Two million dollars from two families invested in data centers, inside eleven days, with the governor's public endorsement wedged in the middle of it. The two donations are not even independent of each other: Horowitz's firm has money in the company Roy's husband founded.

Horowitz is a practiced political donor. He and his business partner Marc Andreessen each gave $2.5 million to Trump's 2024 campaign, and Horowitz later gave $2.5 million to Kamala Harris's.

Lombardo's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The $5 million that followed

A month later, on June 25, the same PAC received $5 million from the Republican Governors Association.

That is normally the least interesting line in a governor's finance report. Not this time. Since January 2025, the RGA has taken at least $8.5 million from people and companies invested in AI and data centers — including $3 million from Citadel founder Ken Griffin and $2.5 million from Paul Singer of Elliott Investment Management. Both firms are heavily invested in the industry.

So the money reached Lombardo through two doors. Two million came straight from the industry's families. Five million came through the party committee that the industry had also been filling.

He knows what data centers do. He says it does not happen here.

The most damning thing in the record is not a donation. It is Lombardo's own op-ed.

In June, writing in the Reno Gazette Journal, he called data centers "an opportunity to diversify Nevada's economy, strengthen our workforce and position our state as a national leader in technology and innovation for decades to come."

In the same piece he acknowledged that data centers are "known to use massive amounts of water… and raise electricity costs for surrounding communities."

Then he claimed "it isn't happening in Nevada."

Here is what was already on the record when he wrote that.

A January report from the Desert Research Institute, a science nonprofit, found data centers consumed 22 percent of all the electricity Nevada generated in 2024, and projected that could reach 35 percent by 2030. Working from the same report, The Lever calculated that Nevada's current development plans could have data centers drinking up to 16 billion gallons of water a year — about what 150,000 households use.

The report's authors put the water demand in terms a Nevadan can picture:

"Assuming the highest level of efficiency, the water needed annually for data center cooling under the projected load growth from NV Energy is more than 14,940 times the water needed for a single household, close to 17 times the water needed for an 18-hole golf course, and approximately six times the water needed for an alfalfa farm."

In May, NV Energy — the state's largest utility — issued its own report saying Nevada's future energy demand will nearly triple because of data centers.

This August, NV Energy sued Tract, a developer building two enormous facilities near Reno, alleging it is trying to push infrastructure and energy costs onto consumers, and to move the fight into a private court to avoid public scrutiny.

The utility is suing a data center developer over exactly the cost-shifting Lombardo says is not happening. Nevada has also handed the industry $340 million in state tax abatements since 2021.

"Those billionaire friends provide jobs"

Lombardo has not been subtle about who this is for.

In August he told the Latin Chamber of Commerce that data centers could be a "new gold rush," given the right guardrails. At a separate event, standing next to President Trump, he defended Trump's "billionaire friends" directly: "those billionaire friends provide jobs. And unless you take care of them, those jobs are absent."

That is the argument, said plainly. Take care of the billionaires or the state gets nothing.

Nevada's own cities are not so sure. Local governments across the state have begun issuing moratoriums on new data center construction while they work out how much power and water the things would take. That is what a government does when it does not know. Lombardo posted a video.

His Democratic opponent, Attorney General Aaron Ford, was pointed about the donations:

"Now we know why Joe Lombardo says he's 'wholeheartedly in support of data centers: He's bought and paid for by them. Taking care of his and Trump's 'billionaire friends' at Nevadans' expense is standard operating procedure from Lombardo. I'm running for Governor to pause and audit data centers' tax breaks and block them from raising our costs, because I fight for working Nevadans – not data center billionaires, like Joe Lombardo."

Ford has also sued the federal government over cuts to Nevada's already strained Colorado River allocation. Lombardo supports that lawsuit — while backing the industry that would drink 16 billion gallons a year of what is left.

This is the second time water and Lombardo's PACs have crossed paths

The committees backing Lombardo have been here before, and the subject was water then too.

We documented what happened after Nevada Gold Mines complained about the state engineer who wanted to cut its groundwater pumping: that regulator was fired a month later — the first state engineer removed since 1981 — and three months after that the company wrote a $500,000 check to Nevada Way PAC, the other committee backing Lombardo. Nevada Gold Mines has now given that PAC $1 million, more than it has given any other politician in the state — and Nevada Way PAC has passed $8.25 million of its own money into Better Nevada PAC.

The pattern is not subtle. An industry that needs Nevada's water writes very large checks to the committees backing the governor, and the governor's position lands where the industry wants it.

Lombardo is also not the only Republican whose data center enthusiasm arrived alongside the industry's money. We have tracked eight of them who spent the last year helping the build-out or taking its cash while three out of four Americans told pollsters they do not want one of these things near their home.

What the filings show

Ben and Felicia Horowitz gave $1 million to the PAC backing Joe Lombardo's re-election on May 11, 2026. Three days later Lombardo posted a video declaring his support for Nevada's data center build-out. A week after that, the wife of Switch's founder gave the same PAC another $1 million, and in June the Republican Governors Association — itself holding at least $8.5 million from AI and data center investors — gave that PAC $5 million. In an op-ed that same month Lombardo conceded data centers use massive amounts of water and raise power bills, then wrote that "it isn't happening in Nevada," while the state's own research institute had already measured them taking 22 percent of Nevada's electricity and projected 16 billion gallons of water a year. His campaign would not comment.

Source

Freddy Brewster, "Nevada Governor Backed Data Centers Days After $1 Million Donation", The Lever, August 25, 2026 (archived copy). Also covered by The Cool Down and republished by Truthout. Photo: Getty Images via Truthout.

Trump Told Towns That Don't Want a Data Center They Want to Be 'Backwards and Poor.' He Signed the Order Giving Data Centers Federal Land, Fast-Tracked Permits and Taxpayer Loan Guarantees.

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 07:34:03 +0000

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that run artificial intelligence. It drinks electricity and water on a scale most towns have never had to plan for, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed it. That somebody is everybody else on the grid.

All over the country, people have been showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

On Monday morning, August 31, 2026, President Donald Trump answered them on Truth Social:

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor. If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign. The good news is that there are plenty of other places that want them. If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can't believe it is happening!"

That is the whole argument. Not "here is why your electric bill won't go up." Not "here is what the company has to pay for." If you don't want one, you want to be poor, and China is glad you exist.

He is not describing a fringe

Gallup asked. Between March 2 and March 18, 2026, it found that 71% of Americans oppose building an AI data center in their area — including 48% who are strongly opposed. That is more opposition than a nuclear power plant next door gets, which is 53%.

It is not a partisan number, either. Gallup found majorities in every party opposed, and 39% of Republicans were strongly opposed — not merely against it, strongly against it. Those are his own voters.

And the number has been climbing. In mid-August, an Embold Research poll published by Heatmap put opposition at 75%.

You could see the same thing in his own replies. Truth Social exists because Trump owns it, and its users still told him he was wrong. "I have to disagree with this one," wrote one. Another wrote: "I don't think it's so much that we are against data centers. What we are against is our electric bill shooting through the roof and our water supply going low. And this is happening."

The order he signed

The reason this is not just a bad post is that Trump is not a spectator here. He is the person who put the federal government's thumb on the scale.

On July 23, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14318, "Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure." It applies to any project drawing more than 100 megawatts of new electricity for AI, to any project whose sponsor has committed at least $500 million, and to the transmission lines, gas pipelines and substations built to feed them. What it does for those projects:

Opens federal land. The Interior and Energy departments are directed to offer sites; the Defense Department can lease out land on military installations.
Cuts the environmental review. Agencies had ten days to list the "categorical exclusions" — the pre-approved reasons a project can skip a full environmental study — that could be used to speed data centers through.
Points developers at contaminated land. The EPA was ordered to identify brownfield and Superfund sites for reuse.
Puts public money behind it. The Commerce Secretary was told to launch an initiative to provide financial support that "could include loans and loan guarantees, grants, tax incentives, and offtake agreements."

Federal land, a shortened review, and taxpayer credit — for the companies. For the town, a phone number to call.

His EPA has kept going in the same direction. It is now proposing to scrap the federal rule that requires states to tell you when an air-polluting facility applies for a permit near your home, and to let developers start building before the permit is approved. The one mechanism that reliably gets an ordinary person to a county meeting in time is the notice — and the notice is what's on the chopping block.

And in May 2025, almost every House Republican voted for a ten-year ban on any state, city or county enforcing a law that limits AI systems — a definition written broadly enough to cover the buildings, the cooling and the power hookups. The Senate stripped it out 99–1. The House vote still happened.

So when Trump says communities that don't want data centers should go ahead and be poor, he is talking about communities whose ability to say no he has spent the past year narrowing.

"China could not be happier"

The China line is not new, and it is not his alone. We have already written about the seven Republicans who decided the neighbors objecting to a data center might be on a foreign payroll — including four who asked federal law enforcement to open a file on them.

It is not an argument every Republican is making. Greg Abbott, who branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development" and whose state hands data centers a sales-tax break the comptroller now expects to cost $3.3 billion in a single budget cycle, says Chinese propaganda is not why Americans oppose these things. On August 3, 2026, Abbott paused new data center hookups in Texas pending a state audit — after years of selling the state to them.

Trump's response to that pause, in an August interview with Punchbowl News, was to call it a mistake:

"I saw Texas the other day sort of is against data centers. I think it's a mistake. And I'm not taking positions, I just think it's a mistake, because there are other communities that want it. When a community wants it, it means a lot of money is going to come into that community."

He also told Punchbowl data centers could be "bigger than oil."

The part about your bill

Vice President JD Vance was asked about the post on Monday and gave a more honest answer than the president did:

"I think probably 99% of the backlash to data centers has come in areas where building a data center means higher utility and higher electricity for the people on the ground."

That is the whole objection, stated by the administration's own vice president. His fix was deregulation — "if you build a data center, you should be putting power back into the grid, not taking it out."

Nothing in the executive order requires that. The order accelerates the building. The power plants are somebody else's problem.

Meanwhile the federal government's own forecasters are saying out loud what the county meetings are about. The Energy Information Administration expects U.S. electricity demand to rise for a fourth straight year — the strongest four-year growth since 2000 — and names the cause as "increasing demand from large computing facilities, including data centers." It forecasts residential electricity at 18.2 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2026, a nearly 5% increase over 2025, with parts of the East Coast rising as fast as 7% a year for two years running. In 2027, for the first time, commercial electricity use — the category that holds the hyperscalers — is expected to pass residential.

Republicans running for office have noticed, even where the president hasn't. Ohio Senator Jon Husted is the clearest case: his own party's Senate campaign committee wrote a memo calling his data center record an "anchor" on his campaign and told AI companies that fixing the public's view of data centers was up to them if he was to survive November.

The bottom line

Seven in ten Americans — including 39% of Republicans who are strongly opposed — don't want a data center built near them, mostly because of what the things use up: half of Gallup's opponents named data centers' excessive use of resources, and 18% each named their water and their energy. Trump's answer on Monday was that they are choosing to be "backwards and poor" and that China is delighted with them. Thirteen months earlier he had signed an executive order handing those same projects federal land, a shortcut around environmental review, and taxpayer-backed loans and loan guarantees — while his EPA moves to end the public notice that tells a town one is coming, and residential electricity heads to 18.2 cents a kilowatt-hour.

Source

Emily Chang, "'Let Data Reign': Trump goes all in on controversial data centers," ABC News, August 31, 2026. Additional reporting from Matt Novak, "Trump to Communities Fighting Data Centers: Have Fun Being Poor," Gizmodo, August 31, 2026. Photo: Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images.

Tommy Tuberville Called Alabamians' Data Center Worries 'Bull Crap.' Twenty-Five Days Later, a Data Center Developer Gave Him $25,000.

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 07:26:42 +0000

On August 7, 2026, a Dallas company called Applied Digital Corporation wrote a $25,000 check to the campaign of Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor of Alabama.

Applied Digital owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, in Tuscaloosa County. It has pulled some permits for an industrial project there. It will not confirm whether it is building a data center on the land. The Tuscaloosa Thread, which has been covering the site for months, describes the company plainly as one of the developers wanting to build a data center near Brookwood.

The people who live around those 1,300 acres cannot find out what is going in next to them, because Brookwood's own officials have signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Tuberville, meanwhile, has spent the summer telling Alabamians that their objections to data centers are not real.

What he said in July

On July 13, Tuberville stood in front of the Alabama Sheriffs Association in Opelika and dismissed the concerns of nine or more Alabama communities that have organized against data center projects — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Mobile. He said the worry about noise and the environment was "bull crap," and blamed the opposition on Chinese propaganda. We wrote that story at the time: Alabama Towns Are Saying No to Data Centers. Tommy Tuberville Says That's 'Bull Crap' — and Blames China.

That post ended on an open question — who is on the other side of the deal Tuberville keeps selling.

Twenty-five days later, part of the answer arrived as a campaign contribution.

The company, the land, and the gag order

Here is what is publicly known about Applied Digital in Alabama, and what is not.

It owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood, according to county property records.
It has received some permits for an industrial project on that land.
It will not confirm whether a data center is planned. An Applied Digital spokesperson did not immediately respond to AL.com's request for comment.
Brookwood Mayor Joe Barger has signed a non-disclosure agreement tied to data center proposals, according to city officials. So the town's elected leadership is legally barred from telling residents what it knows.
The company is developing a data center campus in Louisiana called Delta Forge 1 and has facilities in North Dakota, so it is not a small operator testing the waters.

Fifty Brookwood residents have signed up to speak at a public meeting about the project. They will be speaking to a mayor who cannot answer them.

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project"

Tuberville's campaign confirmed to AL.com that the senator met with Applied Digital recently. His communications director, Mallory Jaspers, drew a careful line around it:

"The meeting wasn't about the Brookwood project, it was an overview of how they communicate their projects to communities they want to invest in."

Read that again. The meeting was not about the specific project the company owns land for in Alabama. It was about how the company talks to communities it wants to build in.

Jaspers also said neither Tuberville nor anyone on his team has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Applied Digital. That is worth something. It is also not the problem. The problem is that the mayor of the affected town has signed one, and the man who wants to run the state took the company's money twenty-five days after telling those residents their concerns were nonsense.

Terry Grammer, a Brookwood-area resident who is currently raising money for legal fees to try to stop the project, told AL.com what it looks like from where he lives:

"This going on is almost like a pay to play deal. This is corruption at its finest."

The industry group asking the state to go easy

Applied Digital is a listed member of the Data Center Coalition, the industry's national lobbying group. Earlier in August, that coalition asked Alabama's Public Service Commission to make sure any new rules governing data centers and electricity rates allow "sufficient flexibility."

That is the fight that decides whether Alabama families or the data centers pay for the new power plants and transmission lines these facilities require. The industry is at that table. Tuberville's answer to the people who aren't is that they've been fooled by China.

This is not an Alabama-only pattern. In Wisconsin, Tom Tiffany campaigned against data center subsidies while taking $5,000 from the only registered lobbyist for the state's data center coalition. In Ohio, Jon Husted promised to protect people's electric bills while collecting $69,750 from the tech and utility companies driving those bills up. Same industry, same script, three states.

What $25,000 buys in this race

The contribution is not an outlier in size. Tuberville reported several comparable checks in August: $50,000 from Rapid Deployment Inc. of Mobile, $35,000 each from Trimed Billing Solutions of Hoover and K12 Management of Reston, Virginia, and $25,000 each from Schola Management of Birmingham, Newlight Healthcare of Austin, Advantage Capital Management of New Orleans, and Long & Long of Mobile.

He does not need the money. Tuberville ended July with $9.2 million on hand. His opponent, former U.S. Senator Doug Jones, had $1.7 million — and actually out-raised him that month, $622,000 to $289,597.

So this is not a candidate who took a check because he was desperate. It is a candidate who took a check from a company with 1,300 acres and a gag order in a town whose residents he had just called dupes of a foreign government.

Jones has called for a one-year moratorium on new Alabama data centers while the state updates its water and energy rules. Tuberville's position is that data centers are a "gold mine" and that opposition is imported disinformation. Only one of those two positions has a $25,000 contribution attached to it from a company that stands to build one.

What the filings show

Applied Digital Corporation, which owns 1,300 acres in Brookwood and will not say what it is building there, gave Tommy Tuberville's campaign for governor $25,000 on August 7 — twenty-five days after Tuberville publicly called Alabamians' data center concerns "bull crap" and blamed them on China. The town's mayor has signed a non-disclosure agreement, so the fifty residents signed up to speak at next week's public meeting cannot get a straight answer from their own government. Tuberville, who is sitting on more than $9 million, took the money anyway.

Source

Ruth Serven Smith and Hannah Denham, Data center company tied to Alabama project donates $25,000 to Tuberville campaign, AL.com, August 28, 2026. Photo: Will McLelland / AL.com. Additional reporting from Don Hartley, Tuberville Gets $25,000 From Data Center Developer With Land in Brookwood, Tuscaloosa Thread, August 28, 2026. Fundraising figures from Andrea Tinker, Jones outraises Tuberville in July; Tuberville retains financial edge in governor's race, Alabama Reflector, August 6, 2026.

Greg Abbott's Appointees Turned a $1 Car Insurance Fee Into 3,200 Surveillance Cameras. He Shut It Off the Night Before the Story Ran.

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 20:55:41 +0000

In 2023, Texas lawmakers added a dollar to every car insurance policy in the state. The reason was specific and it was written into the law: catalytic converter theft. A Harris County deputy named Darren Almendarez had been shot to death in a grocery store parking lot after interrupting catalytic converter thieves, and the bill was named for him. It passed the House and the Senate without a single vote against it, and Greg Abbott signed it on May 29, 2023.

The law says what the dollar is for. The extra money can be used "only for coordinated regulatory and law enforcement activities intended to detect and prevent catalytic converter theft."

Three years later, The Texas Tribune found that a state board whose members Abbott appoints has spent at least $30 million of that money building an artificial-intelligence surveillance network that tracks where Texans drive — at least 3,200 cameras, from El Paso to the Louisiana border.

On Thursday night, Abbott ordered every state agency to stop paying for them. The Tribune published its investigation on Friday.

What the dollar actually bought

The fee has raised an estimated $81 million. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority — a small agency run by a Department of Public Safety official and six board members the governor appoints — has pushed $50.8 million of it out the door in 234 grants.

At least 95 of those grants went to helping police departments buy and maintain roughly 2,000 Flock cameras. Another $15.9 million went to a three-year contract putting almost 1,200 more of them in the hands of DPS. In early August, with the money still flowing, the board approved $3 million more for 583 additional cameras along Texas tollways.

The grants ranged from $7,000 for two cameras in Bellmead, near Waco, to nearly $1.7 million for 201 cameras in Dallas. Some cities got their entire network for free: 165 cameras in Laredo, 150 in El Paso. In Temple, 84% of the city's Flock cameras were paid for by the state. In Cibolo, a town of 36,000 north of San Antonio, a grant took the camera count from 11 to 52.

A Flock camera is not a speed trap. It uses artificial intelligence to build what the company calls a "vehicle fingerprint" — your plate, your make, model and color, your bumper stickers, your dents — and stores it in a database that police departments across the country can search without a warrant. DeFlock, a watchdog group that maps the cameras, counts about 13,000 in Texas. By that count, the insurance fee paid for one in four of them.

The agency does not publish how much of its grant money went to cameras. The Tribune had to reconstruct it from board minutes and the agendas of 101 city councils and county commissions. Another 124 grants have no clear public record of what they bought at all, which means the real number is probably higher than $30 million.

The lawmakers who voted for it say they were never told

The senator who wrote the fee into law found out what it was paying for from a reporter.

State Sen. Carol Alvarado, who wrote the bill, and Rep. Jeff Leach, who sponsored it in the House, both told the Tribune that surveillance cameras were never discussed while the bill was being considered. "I did not have that in mind when we passed the bill," Alvarado said. "When I think of combating crime, I'm thinking … more boots on the ground, hiring more officers to tackle the crime or some type of undercover work."

Rep. Brian Harrison, a Midlothian Republican who voted for the bill, was blunter:

"In a million years, I never could have even contemplated that this would be used to fund what is effectively warrantless surveillance. Otherwise, I can't imagine it would have gotten unanimous support. I sure as hell wouldn't have voted for it if I knew some bureaucrat was going to redirect the money to Flock cameras."

Harrison also said he was "shocked and dismayed" that so few Republicans had spoken up, and said the governor should act. Rep. Mitch Little, a Lewisville Republican, told the Tribune the volume of data collected is "not something that is entertained, in my view, by the Fourth Amendment."

This is not a partisan complaint. The Democrat who wrote the bill, the Republican who carried it in the House, and a Republican who voted for it all say the same thing: the cameras were never part of the deal.

"There's nothing that they can tell us"

The board's chairman, Laredo Police Chief Miguel Rodriguez, told his own board in August 2023 that he hoped to use the fee money to "cover the entire state" with cameras.

By this year, a growing list of Texas cities and counties — Austin, Bandera, Hood County — had canceled their Flock contracts after residents objected. Rodriguez had an answer for that too. In April, discussing the DPS contract, he suggested putting state cameras on state roads inside the towns that had said no:

"I think that if for whatever reason you are within those jurisdictions that do not want Flock, let's get together with DPS, [so] that, you know, we can put those in state right-of-way. And there's nothing that they can tell us."

That is the chairman of a board whose members the governor appoints, explaining how to route around a city council that voted the other way. Rodriguez told the Tribune the state network provides a needed crime-fighting tool in areas hostile to the cameras.

The board's DPS member, Major Sharon Jones, who described herself as "pro Flock" and left the post on August 1, told a July grant meeting that the agency "must put a stamp on those who are spreading false information on license plate readers."

The misuse is not hypothetical

On August 21, an Angelina County grand jury indicted a Lufkin police officer on 100 counts of misusing official information, accusing him of using the area's Flock cameras to track 11 people for more than a year. Lufkin suspended its Flock program. In the past month alone, officers in at least six Texas departments and sheriff's offices have been put on leave, investigated, or charged over how they used the system.

Meanwhile, the crime the dollar was collected to fight is only part of what the cameras do. The authority's own report says the license plate readers were searched 62,000 times in 2025, and credits them with clearing about 1,660 catalytic converter theft cases. Police officials told the board the grant-funded cameras have stretched well past converter cases: a tire theft ring in Dallas, a hit and run, a "pattern of life assessment" built with Homeland Security to find a fugitive.

The pause arrived on deadline

Abbott's order came Thursday night. The Tribune had already sent his office questions about its findings. The story ran Friday.

Earlier that week, his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, had released an ad running in Texas college towns: "There's only 10,000 Flock cameras reading your plate, logging where you sleep and pray. No warrant needed in Greg Abbott's Texas."

And when Abbott's office finally responded, it did not say the state had made a mistake. The first thing it did was point somewhere else. "To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras," spokesperson Andrew Mahaleris said. The Tribune's reporting is about the state's share: at least $30 million in grants from an agency the governor's appointees control, plus a separate $28.5 million Flock contract held by DPS.

On Glenn Beck's radio show Friday morning, Abbott described a "crackdown" already underway and said the cameras "are being reduced dramatically." The crackdown he was describing was city councils canceling contracts and a county grand jury handing up an indictment — other people's decisions, in the same weeks his own board was approving $3 million for 583 more cameras.

Texans have seen this exact sequence from Abbott before. He spent eleven years courting data centers and letting their tax break balloon, then announced a pause in August of an election year that rural Republicans in his own state called "smoke and mirrors." When he ordered a study to answer Texans' questions about those data centers, the state's grid operator told regulators it was aiming for December 10 — 37 days after Election Day. The pattern is the same each time: preside over the thing for years, stop it the month the voters are looking, and take credit for the stopping.

He knows what his agencies are doing

The most telling word in this story is Harrison's: "bureaucrat."

Abbott is not a governor who loses track of his agencies. In June 2018, he ordered state agencies to run proposed rules past his office before they are published for public comment — a level of control nothing in the Texas Government Code requires him to have. He appoints six of the seven people on the vehicle authority's board. That board voted on the Flock grants in public meetings, year after year, since 2023. Its chairman announced the plan to blanket the state in 2023.

And Abbott's interest in what Texans do and where they go is not new either. His own reelection campaign is running an app that reads your phone's address book and tells you which of your contacts are Democrats, how often they've voted since 2016, and whether they've voted yet this year.

What the record shows

Texas lawmakers unanimously added $1 to every car insurance policy in the state to fight catalytic converter theft, and the law they passed says the money can be used only for that. A board that Greg Abbott appoints six of the seven members to has spent at least $30 million of it on 3,200 AI cameras that log where Texans drive and let police nationwide search that record without a warrant — including a $15.9 million state contract meant in part to put cameras within reach of towns that had refused them. The Democrat who wrote the law, the Republican who sponsored it, and a Republican who voted for it all say nobody ever mentioned surveillance. Abbott stopped the spending on a Thursday night, after a reporter called for comment and days after his opponent put the cameras in a campaign ad.

Source

Ayden Runnels and Alex Ford, "Abbott blocks state agencies from spending money on Flock cameras" and "How a $1 Texas insurance fee funded thousands of Flock cameras", The Texas Tribune, August 28, 2026. Photo: A Flock camera records drivers on Allen Parkway near downtown Houston, Aug. 24, 2026, by Jon Shapley for The Texas Tribune.

Five Republicans Took the AI Industry's Money or Bought Its Stock. One of Them Wrote the Bill That Would End Your Town's Say.

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:40:22 +0000

All over the country right now, ordinary people are showing up at city council meetings to ask the same three questions about the data center somebody wants to build near them.

How much of our water will it drink? What happens to our electric bill? And who decided this?

In Luther, Oklahoma, so many people came to that meeting it needed armed security and metal detectors. The town voted for a six-month moratorium. So did Oklahoma City, Edmond and Broken Arrow. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law. Oklahoma passed a law making the giant power users pay for their own infrastructure instead of putting it on everyone's rates.

That is democracy working exactly the way it's supposed to. People noticed something, went to a meeting, and got a rule written.

The industry's biggest political spender has decided to make those rules impossible.

Its main political vehicle, a super PAC called Leading the Future, raised $125 million in 2025 and opened 2026 with $70 million on hand, CNBC reported. Its funders are Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, SV Angel founder Ron Conway and the AI company Perplexity. Its purpose, as CNBC described it, is backing candidates who support national AI regulations rather than state-by-state rules.

Strip the phrasing out and that means: one set of rules, written in Washington, that cancels the ones Luther and Edmond and Sacramento just wrote.

There is a second AI network in this election, and it wants the opposite thing. Public First Action — a nonprofit the AI company Anthropic gave a self-reported $20 million — bankrolls super PACs whose stated priorities include preserving state authority over AI rather than preempting it. It has spent millions of its own on congressional races. Both networks run their money through blandly named vehicles, and both are writing checks to Republicans. The industry is split on what the rules should say and united on paying the people who will write them.

Here are five Republicans on the receiving end of that money — or holding the stock.

Jay Obernolte wrote the bill that does the preempting

Jay Obernolte of California is the most powerful voice on AI in the House. He chairs the Science Committee's research and technology subcommittee, chaired the House AI Task Force, sits on Energy and Commerce, and is now chair of the House Republican Policy Committee.

On July 23, 2026 he introduced the FRONTIER Act. Section 9 says no state "may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers" in the covered areas — risk transparency, outside auditing, and incident reporting. There is no sunset date. As written, it is permanent.

Two of those three are things California's own SB 53 requires. The congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law his own state just passed.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture fund tapped Obernolte to launch a nonprofit called the AI Coalition, which sells early-stage AI companies — in its own words — "meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations." Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. We laid out that arrangement in full in August.

At the top of his own contributor list: employees of the AI company Anthropic, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count, with Andreessen Horowitz third.

Kevin Hern got $850,000 in a race he had already won

On June 2, 2026, Leading the Future told the Washington Reporter it would spend $850,000 backing Kevin Hern in his Oklahoma Senate race.

The Reporter's own words for that race: Hern "is on a glide path to the Senate." He had Trump's endorsement, in a state where the Republican nominee wins. He did not need the money.

That is what makes it worth looking at. In a close race, money is trying to win. In a race nobody can lose, money is buying something else — and Hern will spend six years voting on exactly the question Leading the Future was formed to settle. He sits on Ways and Means, which writes the tax treatment that decides how profitable a data center is to build.

Meanwhile four Oklahoma cities were pausing data centers and Gov. Kevin Stitt was signing a law to keep the industry's power costs off residential bills. Only 1% of Hern's money comes from small grassroots donors, ranking him #434 out of 440 House members.

Carlos De La Cruz was outspent by his own backers

Carlos De La Cruz has never held office. He's an Air Force veteran running in Texas's 35th District, a seat the Legislature redrew in 2025 to make winnable for a Republican.

His campaign has raised about $1.05 million. Outside groups have spent about $2.35 million on his behalf — per the FEC's own independent expenditure records. The two biggest: $1,492,321 from an AI-industry super PAC and $615,885 from a crypto one.

The AI group is called Defending Our Values PAC — a name that tells a voter nothing. That is deliberate. The Texas Tribune found AI-linked super PACs behind at least seven Texas congressional candidates, going by "generic-sounding names" and running ads that don't mention the technology — because polling shows most voters don't want data centers near them.

But this is the industry's other side. FEC records show that almost every dollar Defending Our Values has raised this cycle — about $8.2 million — came from Public First Action, the Anthropic-backed nonprofit that wants state AI authority kept, not cancelled. De La Cruz is not being carried by the preemption campaign. He is being carried by the people fighting it — and if he wins in November, he arrives owing them just the same.

Defending Our Values also put $808,341 behind Kevin Hern, who is already getting Leading the Future's money. Both AI camps, the same Oklahoma Republican. We traced the whole $2.1 million in De La Cruz's race in August.

Julia Letlow signed a gag order with Meta, then bought Meta stock

Julia Letlow of Louisiana signed a nondisclosure agreement on June 29, 2024 with Laidley LLC — a shell company belonging to Meta. It gave her confidential details of a $50 billion data center in her own district.

The agreement barred her from even acknowledging that the agreement existed. A member of Congress signed a contract legally preventing her from telling her constituents she was discussing a $50 billion project on their land.

Then, as WWNO and the Gulf States Newsroom reported, she started buying Meta stock — and Nvidia, whose chips run Meta's data centers. Her broker notified her on August 11, 2025, more than a month after she sold her last Meta shares. She did not disclose the trades until January 13, 2026, in the report that carried 210 late-filed trades from the previous two years — 100 of them, the Meta and Nvidia stock included, more than a year late, worth between $225,000 and $3.19 million. The penalty for that is $200, and it is often waived. Her office says she doesn't direct her own trades. We walked through the full record in August.

She is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate.

Lisa McClain's family bought into xAI a week before the Pentagon wired it into the military

Lisa McClain of Michigan is the No. 4 Republican in the House. On December 15, 2025 her husband bought between $100,001 and $250,000 of private stock in Elon Musk's AI company, xAI.

Seven days later, the Pentagon announced it was integrating xAI's Grok into its platform for military personnel. Three weeks after that it expanded the deal to classified defense networks. Musk later folded xAI into SpaceX, and when SpaceX went public in June, CNBC reported the family could be sitting on a paper gain of as much as $150,000.

There is no evidence she knew what the Pentagon was planning. What there is: a household with 1,443 trades in three years, two separate late-disclosure violations in a single year, and a seat on the Financial Services Committee. The details are here.

What it looks like where you live

None of this stays in Washington.

In southwest Missouri, hundreds of residents packed meetings to oppose a data center on the west side of Joplin, and most of the letters their city council received said no. One letter said yes. It came from their congressman, Eric Burlison, who told a forum in Carthage that "what the business is doing doesn't matter" and suggested the people asking about the water table were afraid of the unknown.

In Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules, while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs.

And this week, Trump's EPA moved to scrap the federal rule requiring states to tell the public when a facility applies for an air pollution permit at all — so you may not learn a data center is coming until the permit is approved or the concrete is poured.

Every one of those is the same move at a different altitude: take the decision away from the people who live there.

What the money shows

An AI super PAC funded by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI's president and Palantir's co-founder raised $125 million to elect candidates who will replace state and local AI rules with a single federal one. It committed $850,000 to Kevin Hern in a race he had already won. The industry's rival network — the one that wants states to keep their AI authority — put $1.5 million of the $2.35 million behind first-time candidate Carlos De La Cruz, more than twice what his own campaign raised, and another $808,341 behind Hern. Jay Obernolte, who wrote the bill that would permanently preempt state AI laws, helped launch a nonprofit charging AI startups up to $3,500 a month for "influence over the regulations." Julia Letlow signed a secrecy agreement with Meta and then bought Meta and Nvidia stock she disclosed over a year late, and Lisa McClain's family bought a private stake in xAI a week before the Pentagon wired its product into military systems.

Trump's EPA Wants to Scrap the Rule That Tells You a Data Center Applied to Pollute Your Air

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 07:14:35 +0000

Right now, if a company applies for a permit to put an air-polluting facility near your house, there is a federal rule that says the state has to tell you about it and give you a chance to say something.

The Environmental Protection Agency, run by Lee Zeldin, is planning to get rid of that rule.

Talking Points Memo's Nicole LaFond walked through the proposal, based on New York Times reporting. It covers a category of industrial facility that includes the thing communities all over the country are currently fighting: AI data centers, and the gas-fired power plants built to run them.

What the rule does now, and what happens without it

Today, when a company files an air-pollution permit application for one of these facilities, the state has to publicly announce it and take public input. That announcement is the entire reason ordinary people ever find out in time. It's what lets somebody show up at a county board meeting, ask what the thing is, and say no.

Take the requirement away and the notice becomes optional. As TPM puts it, residents may not learn the facility is coming until after the permit is approved — or after construction has already started.

An EPA spokesperson told the Times the change would "provide the state and local agencies most familiar with local issues the discretion to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation."

Read that carefully. "Whether" is doing all the work in that sentence. The other two words are about scheduling. "Whether" means a state can decide to tell you nothing at all.

It isn't the only thing they're doing

Per the Times reporting TPM cites, the EPA has also:

Proposed letting developers start building data centers before their permits are approved.
Exempted the gas plants that fuel many data centers from limits on the pollutants that cause acid rain.

So: build before you're approved, pollute past the acid rain caps, and don't necessarily tell the neighbors you applied.

About the words "minor source"

The proposal applies to facilities the EPA classifies as a "minor source" of air pollution. That category lumps together car repair shops, laundromats, landfills, steel mills — and data centers.

Environmental groups point out that "minor" is doing a lot of work too. A facility in that category can emit up to 250 tons of hazardous pollutants a year and still be a "minor source."

Two hundred and fifty tons. Every year. Minor.

Why data centers specifically

The EPA under Zeldin has recast its mission around making, in its own words, the United States the artificial intelligence capital of the world. That is a striking assignment for an agency whose job has historically been public health and the environment.

And it is happening at the exact moment the public turned on data centers — which is not a partisan thing. It is one of the few issues in 2026 uniting Americans across the political spectrum. The facilities drain local water supplies, they drive up electricity bills in the middle of an affordability crisis, and people don't like being told a hyperscale computing plant is going in next door after the fact.

We've written about what that looks like on the ground. Utility bills are already climbing hard in the states that welcomed these projects — Tampa Electric's rates up 86%, Ohio's bills up 53%. Three out of four Americans oppose an AI data center in their area, and eight Republicans took the industry's money before discovering their concerns. When towns actually organized against the projects, seven Republicans floated the idea that the opposition might be working for China.

This proposal is the next step in that sequence. When people find out, they object. So make it harder to find out.

Who is pushing back

A coalition of more than 200 environmental groups has filed objections, according to Common Dreams, which reported that the rule first surfaced at an EPA meeting in July. Lawyers from the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Center for Biological Diversity have all criticized it publicly.

This is also the second time this month we've written about this EPA and this industry. In August it approved two semiconductor chemicals whose identities are a trade secret, its own order recording that there are "currently insufficient data to assess these compounds."

What this costs you

Public notice is not a technicality. It is the only part of the permitting process built for people who don't have a lobbyist.

A tech company applying to build a gas plant knows the rules. It has lawyers who track dockets and engineers who write permit applications for a living. The family three roads over has none of that. What they have is a legal requirement that somebody tell them.

The EPA is proposing to take that away, on behalf of the one industry the public is currently most organized against.

What the record shows

The EPA plans to eliminate the federal rule requiring states to publicly announce industrial air-pollution permit applications and take public comment on them — a category that includes AI data centers and the gas plants that power them. The agency's own explanation is that states should decide "whether" to provide public participation at all. It has separately proposed letting developers begin construction before permits are approved, and exempted the gas plants that run data centers from acid rain pollution limits. Facilities in the affected "minor source" category can legally emit up to 250 tons of hazardous pollutants a year. More than 200 environmental groups have filed objections.

Source

Trump's EPA Clamps Down on Public Outrage Over Data Centers — the One Issue Sparking Bipartisan Revolt — Nicole LaFond, Talking Points Memo, August 25, 2026, reporting on The New York Times.

Seven Republicans Are Running on 'Local Control' of Data Centers. All Seven Voted to Take It Away for Ten Years.

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:21:04 +0000

A data center is a warehouse full of computers that run artificial intelligence. It drinks electricity and water on a scale most towns have never had to plan for, and somebody has to pay for the power plants and the pipes. Across the country, towns and counties have started saying no — or at least not like this.

So this year, a lot of Republicans started saying the same thing. Let the community decide. Local control. Your town, your call.

There is a problem with that. On May 22, 2025, almost every Republican in the U.S. House voted for a bill that would have made local control over data centers illegal for the next ten years.

That is the finding of a report published August 24, 2026 by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, written by its vice president of technology policy, Adam Conner. We pulled the roll calls ourselves. They are exactly what the report says they are.

The vote

Buried in the House version of Trump's budget bill was a section called the "Artificial Intelligence and Information Technology Modernization Initiative." One paragraph of it said that for ten years, no state and no city or county could enforce any law limiting, restricting, or otherwise regulating artificial intelligence models or systems.

That word "systems" is the whole ballgame. The bill did not define an AI system as software. It defined it as "any data system, hardware, tool, or utility that operates, in whole or in part, using artificial intelligence" — the buildings, the chips, the cooling, the power hookups. A data center is all of those things in one place.

The National Conference of State Legislatures, which exists to advise state lawmakers, read the language and wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May 2025 to warn exactly what would happen. Restricting states this way, the group told the committee, would "circumvent their authority to regulate the permitting, construction and operation of data centers within their borders" — "raising costs for ratepayers, jeopardizing zoning decisions that protect our mutual constituents and impacting existing infrastructure such as power grids and generating facilities."

The bill was not neutral about which direction the rules could run, either. It carved out an exception for state and local laws whose purpose was to "remove legal impediments to" AI or to "streamline licensing, permitting, routing, zoning, procurement, or reporting procedures" for it. Rules that made it easier to build a data center were fine. Rules that made it harder were banned.

The House passed the bill anyway. The roll call records 215 Republicans voting yes and two voting no — Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Warren Davidson of Ohio. Every Democrat voted no.

The provision never became law. The Senate stripped it out at 4:08 in the morning on July 1, 2025, on a 99–1 vote. Ninety-nine senators, both parties, agreed it had to go.

But the House vote happened. It is on the record, and it belongs to everyone who cast it.

Four of them voted for it four separate times

The floor vote is the one a member can shrug off as a vote on a thousand-page bill. Four of the members named here cannot use that excuse, because they sat on the committee where the provision was written and had to vote on it by itself.

Gabe Evans of Colorado, John James of Michigan, Tom Kean Jr. of New Jersey and Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa all serve on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The committee's markup ran through the night of May 13, 2025; Politico reported that the panel cleared the communications section — the one that "would most notably institute a 10-year moratorium on state AI legislation" — shortly after midnight. Three recorded votes touched it:

The committee's ranking Democrat offered an amendment, COMM19, to delete the ten-year ban from the bill entirely. It failed, 24 yeas to 29 nays. Evans, James, Kean and Miller-Meeks all voted no — they voted to keep it in.
The committee then voted 29–24 to send the section containing the ban to the Budget Committee. All four voted yes.
The committee voted 30–24 to transmit its full recommendations, ban included. All four voted yes.

Then they voted for it again on the House floor nine days later. Four votes. One of them was a straight up-or-down question — should this ban be in the bill, yes or no? — and they answered it.

Arizona, Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin: the promises

Andy Biggs is the Republican nominee for governor of Arizona. Asked in a July 2026 interview how he would handle the state's data center boom, he told KTAR News that "it becomes a local jurisdiction issue and the state's just got to make sure we take care of the water and the power situation." The bill he voted for would likely have made a state water-or-power requirement aimed at data centers unenforceable.

Ashley Hinson is the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate in Iowa. In an August 10, 2026 interview, she told Iowa's News Now that "these decisions are best decided at the local level," and that Iowans "want to know that their utility rates are not going to go skyrocketing" and that when they "turn on the faucet, not only is there going to be water that comes out, but that it's going to be safe to drink." She did not mention her vote.

Mariannette Miller-Meeks, who voted for the ban four times, told the same station in July that "people are rightly concerned about water usage and electricity rates going up," and that AI growth "needs to be done transparently. You need to have community involvement in this." Transparency rules and community sign-off are precisely the kind of documentation and permitting obligations that the ban she voted for four times would likely have blocked.

John James, also a four-time yes vote, is the Republican nominee for governor of Michigan. Asked in June 2026 for his data center position, he gave Spectrum News a five-part answer and led with it: "Local control. Don't increase my bills. Take care of my water. No pollution. Prioritize brownfields over productive farmland." Every item after the first would have to be written into a state or local rule to mean anything, and the ban James voted for four times is a ban on writing exactly those rules.

Tom Barrett of Michigan's 7th District is running ads on this. We covered one of them: a spot in which he says he "stood up to my own party" on data centers, built on a 2015 state legislative vote about a single building in Grand Rapids. On August 19, 2026, Semafor's Dave Weigel posted a clip from Barrett's virtual town hall in which Barrett denounces "proposals to nationalize decisions that would override local communities about their decisions around data centers." He had voted for one.

Tom Tiffany is the Republican nominee for governor of Wisconsin. "Data Centers" is the only page under the solutions section of his campaign site, and the second of his five standards is titled "Give local communities the final say." Under it: "No data center should be forced on a community that doesn't want it. Local residents should have the final say over what gets built in their backyard." His other four standards — ending tax breaks, protecting farmland, making data centers pay their own energy costs, banning secret nondisclosure agreements — are each a tax, a zoning rule, a fee or a documentation requirement aimed at data centers. Those are the words the bill he voted for used: a "substantive design, performance, data-handling, documentation, civil liability, taxation, fee, or other requirement" on an AI system. We have also written about the $5,000 Tiffany took from the only registered lobbyist for Wisconsin's data center coalition.

Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin's 3rd District posted on August 7, 2026: "My conditions for data centers have not changed and are not negotiable: 1) must have local buy in 2) cannot cover our farm land 3) zero increase in electric rates 4) must utilize a closed loop cooling system." Three of those four conditions are rules a state or a town would have to write and enforce, which is the thing he voted to ban. Van Orden is also one of seven Republicans who suggested the people opposing data centers might be working for China.

The other seven, and what their states are doing right now

The remaining members named in the report are not quoted promising local control. Three of their states have simply been exercising it — and every one of those actions is the kind of thing the ban would likely have stopped.

New Jersey. In July 2026, Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed a law putting large data centers in their own ratepayer class and making them pay for the grid upgrades they cause, so that everyone else's bills don't absorb the cost. The bill's own summary describes it as requiring utilities to "develop and apply special rules for certain data centers." A law that singles out data centers for special treatment is close to a textbook example of what the moratorium barred. Tom Kean Jr. voted for that moratorium four separate times.

New York. On July 14, 2026, Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an executive order holding in abeyance permit applications for data centers of 50 megawatts and up while the state develops statewide standards. Mike Lawler has attacked her for it. In an August 18, 2026 Fox Business interview, he said the message the policy sends businesses is "don't come here. Go do your business elsewhere." It was not his first. On July 17, 2026 — nine days after a planning board in his own district halted a data center expansion beside a reservoir that supplies drinking water across the New Jersey line — he went on the same network to argue that limits like New York's hurt innovation and push the industry toward China. Lawler at least isn't claiming to want local control. He had simply already voted for the ban that would likely have made New York's pause impossible.

Pennsylvania. The legislature passed an energy-and-water reporting requirement for data centers in July 2026, and on August 18, 2026 Gov. Josh Shapiro signed an executive order requiring developers to make legally binding commitments: pay the full cost of the electricity infrastructure they need "without shifting costs to Pennsylvania households and businesses," meet "strict water conservation requirements," drop nondisclosure agreements — and get local community approval before a permit issues. Brian Fitzpatrick, Ryan Mackenzie, Rob Bresnahan and Scott Perry all voted for the ban that would likely have made those requirements unenforceable. We wrote about that vote when all ten of Pennsylvania's House Republicans cast it.

Colorado. Gabe Evans is the fourth Energy and Commerce Republican. He voted four times.

Why "local control" is such a useful thing to say

Somebody pays for a data center, and it is not the company that builds it. It's the household on the same grid. We have laid out what that looks like in five states where the bills are already climbing, and what happened in one Kentucky district where three counties voted to slow the buildout.

The repositioning is not subtle, and it is not confined to these fourteen. A year ago Americans were split on data centers; now three out of four oppose one near their home, and we have already documented eight Republicans who spent that year banking checks from the industry and then discovered concerns.

Saying "let the community decide" in 2026 costs a candidate nothing. The vote that would have actually settled the question came 15 months earlier, when almost nobody was watching and the pressure inside the party ran entirely the other way. Since then the Trump administration has made preempting state AI laws an explicit goal — and, as the CAP Action report notes, its own proposals now claim to carve out local control of data centers specifically, which the report suggests is because the White House has noticed how unpopular the issue has become.

What the record shows

Two hundred and fifteen House Republicans voted for a ten-year ban on states and towns enforcing any law that limits AI systems, data centers included. Four of the fourteen named here — Gabe Evans, John James, Tom Kean Jr. and Mariannette Miller-Meeks — voted for it four separate times, including one straight up-or-down vote on whether to strike it from the bill. Seven of the members named here are now campaigning on giving communities the final say over data centers. The rules their own states have written this summer — New Jersey's ratepayer protections, New York's permit pause, Pennsylvania's requirement that a developer get local approval first — are the kind of rules that vote would likely have made unenforceable for a decade.

Source

Adam Conner, "Almost Every House Republican Voted To Block State and Local Governments' Ability To Protect Residents From AI Data Centers," Center for American Progress Action Fund, August 24, 2026. Photo: the Meta El Paso Data Center seen from above on August 13, 2026, in El Paso, Texas, by Brandon Bell / Getty Images, via CAP Action.

Greg Abbott Ordered a Data Center Audit to Answer Texans' Questions. The Answers Arrive 37 Days After They Vote.

Sun, 23 Aug 2026 13:03:45 +0000

On Thursday, August 20, 2026, Texas regulators quietly settled the only question about Greg Abbott's data center crackdown that actually matters.

Not what the audit will find. When.

The state's grid operator told the Public Utility Commission it aims to hand in its report on the roughly 300 data center projects lined up to plug into the Texas grid by December 10. The commission signed off on that schedule.

Election Day in Texas is November 3.

So Texans will vote on whether to give Greg Abbott a fourth term 37 days before the state tells them what it learned about the industry he spent eleven years bringing here.

What He Said He Was Doing

On August 3, Abbott sent a letter to the two agencies that run the Texas grid and told them to stop approving new data center hookups until the state audited how much power and water these things use, what tax breaks they're getting, and who actually owns them.

We laid out his record the next day: he branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," stood next to Google's CEO to announce a $40 billion buildout, and presided over a sales tax break for data centers that started out costing the state an estimated $5.4 million in 2014 and, by this year, was letting $1.3 billion a year go uncollected.

Then, in August of an election year, he announced he was the one protecting us from all of it.

This week he described that as a virtue.

"Texans appreciate the level-headed approach that I've brought to the data center equation."

The Reason He Gave for the Pause Is the Reason to Doubt It

Abbott's own explanation for why the audit was necessary is that the data center companies won't tell the state anything.

"We got less than a 10% response, so that would be like giving you a 100-piece puzzle and saying solve it using only nine pieces of the puzzle," he said this week. "That's the situation ERCOT was in, and it was untenable for them to move forward with such lack of information."

He's describing something real. It also did not start this month, and he has known about it for a while.

Texas already has a law on the books requiring data centers to report their water use. The Texas Water Development Board found 341 data centers in the state and surveyed all of them last year. About 17% wrote back. Two years earlier the board had counted 22 data centers in Texas. By last year it was 341 — and five out of six of them ignored a survey they are legally required to answer.

Republican lawmakers found out in June and were furious about it. Rep. Brad Buckley, at a House hearing:

"So we're building a state water plan off of a 17% response rate. Is that an overstatement? I mean, that is a terrible response rate."

Rep. Trent Ashby, at the same hearing, called the state's reliance on those numbers a "broken system":

"When you're talking about massive water usage, especially groundwater, and the state can't calculate how much water is being [used], I think we can all understand why Texans are rightfully concerned about making sure that we have enough water ... to meet our future demand."

Rep. Cody Harris said the industry's habit of refusing to answer anybody is exactly why people are angry:

"When new developers like Diode Ventures enter a residential neighborhood intent on building a new data center and refuses to do any community town halls, refuses to discuss their water and electricity uses, and refuses to testify before this committee, then Texans rightfully get upset."

Harris's conclusion: "The transparency of utilization of resources shouldn't be optional."

Here's the part that shows how seriously Texas actually takes this. Blowing off that water survey is a crime — a Class C misdemeanor. But the Water Development Board doesn't enforce it. Enforcement would have to come from a local prosecutor or some other agency. So nobody does it.

A law nobody enforces isn't a law. It's a suggestion. The companies figured that out.

So His Fix Is to Ask Them Again

Knowing all of that, look at what the audit actually is.

The grid operator will send information requests to the big projects in late August and early September. Then, possibly, more rounds through October and November. Then it writes up what it got and files the report on December 10.

That's it. The same companies that ignored a legally required state survey are being asked more questions, on a longer timeline, by an agency with no more power to make them answer than the water board had.

The chairman of the Public Utility Commission, Thomas Gleeson, described the community-impact survey that goes with it in three words: "a fact-finding mission."

Nothing in that schedule creates a penalty. Nothing in it makes a single company hand over a number it doesn't want to hand over. And it reports back after the votes are counted.

The Calendar Keeps Doing Abbott Favors

Notice what the pause actually moved.

Before Abbott's letter, the grid operator expected to finish its study of that first group of projects — and start approving them — in April 2027. Abbott's order pushed the paperwork to December and the approvals to some unnamed date after that. The projects were already months away from getting the green light. Nothing was about to be built in October that isn't going to be built now.

Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature doesn't come back until January. Anything lawmakers pass on data centers — ending the tax break, setting water rules, deciding where these things can go — wouldn't take effect until well after that. Until then, the rules are the generous ones Abbott presided over.

Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, a Republican elected statewide the same year Abbott was, says that is the entire point. He accused Abbott of giving "a wink and a nod to his data center people saying 'Hey, you have plenty of time to get grandfathered in, then we'll put the screws on all your competition.'" Miller called the crackdown "smoke and mirrors and campaign fluff to gain votes." He says he asked Abbott for a one-year pause, for a special session, and for the return of campaign money from data center companies, and got nothing back.

That money is not hypothetical. Black Mountain Power, a Fort Worth firm building a 430-acre data center campus in southeast Fort Worth, gave Abbott's campaign $500,000 in November 2025 — and its founder and CEO gave another $500,000 in March 2026.

Why the Delay Costs You Either Way

While the state gathers facts, the line keeps growing. Roughly 90% of everything now waiting to connect to the Texas grid is a data center.

Somebody pays to build the power plants and the giant transmission lines that serve all that new demand. Across the country, that somebody has turned out to be regular customers — the people whose only role in the AI boom is the bill at the end of the month. In Texas it's the same grid that collapsed in 2021 and killed at least 210 people.

The water is worse, because you can't build more of it. The state's long-range water plan is being written off a 17% response rate, and the industry drawing from the aquifers still won't say how much it's taking.

Abbott's Own Voters Already Called It

Rural Texans didn't need the December 10 filing date to figure this out. They'd reached the verdict weeks ago — lifelong Republicans in Hood County and Tom Green County describing the pause as "smoke and mirrors" and "just covering his butt." One woman who says she can't remember ever voting for a Democrat put it plainly: "He sold Texans out to big business, and I just don't trust him anymore."

His Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, has spent the campaign trying to seize on that backlash.

An audit that reports after the election isn't information. It's a receipt handed to you on the way out.

Greg Abbott had eleven years to ask these questions. He asked them in August of an election year, and set the answers to arrive in December. We deserve better.

Source

Benjamin Wermund, Greg Abbott's data center audit won't be done before the election, The Dallas Morning News, August 20, 2026. Photo: Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman.

Tampa Electric's Rates Are Up 86%. Ohio's Bills Are Up 53%. These Five Republicans Took the Utilities' Money and Handed Data Centers the Grid.

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:58:01 +0000

An AI data center is, from the power grid's point of view, a small city that never sleeps and never leaves.

A typical new one runs 100 to 1,000 megawatts — a load equal to a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes, around the clock. Hundreds of them are being built. And the grid they're plugging into is the same one your house is on.

That leaves exactly one question, and it is not a technical one: who pays to build the extra power?

There are only two possible answers. Either the companies that want the electricity pay the full cost of the poles, wires, plants and substations needed to serve them — or the cost gets spread across everybody's bill, and your neighbor with a fixed income helps finance a server farm.

We've already written about the Republicans who accused their own constituents of working for China for objecting to a data center, and the eight who took the industry's money and then discovered concerns.

This one is about the money coming out of your account every month.

Greg Abbott gave away $3.2 billion and put the bill on the grid

Texas already knows what a fragile grid costs. In 2021 it collapsed and hundreds of people died.

Since then, Greg Abbott has branded Texas "the epicenter of AI development," personally announcing deals like a $40 billion Google build-out.

What he gave them:

A sales-tax exemption the comptroller's office says will cost $3.2 billion in forgone sales-tax revenue over two years — already one of the state's costliest incentive programs, and soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation.
A regulatory door held open. ERCOT expects Texas power demand to nearly double by 2030, with large-load projects wanting up to 56,458 more megawatts queued for its approval. Texas now has more data centers under construction than any other state — 142, against Virginia's 141.

What Texans got:

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that data-center demand could push wholesale electricity prices at ERCOT's North hub roughly 79% higher than otherwise expected by 2027.
A $33 billion transmission build-out — ERCOT's own estimate for its 765-kV expansion plan — that shifts long-term costs onto ratepayers.

And now, in an election year, with voters in both parties turning on Big Tech, Abbott has suddenly proposed new restrictions and started saying data centers "must operate in ways that reduce costs for residential electricity customers."

He invited the build-out. He's campaigning against the consequences.

Ashley Moody spent six years as Florida's top lawyer and never once fought a rate hike

Between December 2020 and January 2026, Florida households watched this happen:

Tampa Electric: up 86%
Duke Energy: up 49%
Florida Power & Light: up 45%

Ashley Moody was Florida's Attorney General for six years, until January 2025 — an office with standing to walk into a utility rate case and fight on behalf of customers.

She never did it. Not once.

That is not how the job used to work. As the Florida Phoenix documented, previous Florida attorneys general — Republicans Bill McCollum and Charlie Crist among them — intervened against rate increases and won multi-year rate freezes for customers.

A possible explanation sits in her own filings. Moody has taken $431,000 in career campaign money from Florida's investor-owned utilities. This cycle she has raised more from electric utilities than any other Senate candidate in the country.

Florida just passed a data-center law, SB 484, that is supposed to make big customers pay their own way. Her party's front-runner for governor promised it means rates "will not go up." PolitiFact checked that promise and found the law directs a process, not a result.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for the office that picks who pays

Ohio electricity bills have climbed 53% since 2021. In the year ending May 31, AEP's Ohio Power disconnected 15% of its customers — the worst rate of any utility in the state.

Here is what Ohio's governor actually does: appoints all five members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and designates its chair. That's the body that sets electricity rates and decides who pays for data centers.

Vivek Ramaswamy is running for that job, and the industry has noticed. Utility, gas, oil and solar PACs gave his campaign $97,468.91 during 2026. AEP's own political committee gave $17,000 of it.

His opponent, Amy Acton, received nothing from those PACs.

And when a watchdog exposed the utility money in May, it didn't stop — it doubled. Another $65,603 arrived over the following ten weeks, from a wider set of companies. The largest checks landed on July 31, the final day of the reporting period: $16,615.67 from the Utility Scale Solar Energy Coalition of Ohio — matching Ohio's per-election ceiling to the penny — plus $16,615 from Vistra's employee PAC and $10,000 from Diversified Gas & Oil.

The man who would appoint every rate regulator in Ohio is being funded by the companies those regulators oversee.

Rick Jackson owns a piece of one and wants them to pay no property tax

Rick Jackson, the billionaire running for governor of Georgia, has an unusually direct stake in this fight.

At the Georgia Chamber of Commerce's luncheon in August, he told more than a thousand business leaders that counties should be able to host data centers with no property tax bill at all.

He is personally invested in a data center in Texas.

Property tax is the money that pays for the county's schools, roads, fire department and water system — the local services a data center's construction and power demand put pressure on. Jackson's proposal is that the facility contributes nothing to any of it, and everyone else in the county covers the difference.

At the same luncheon, he ruled out expanding Medicaid in a state where 624,000 Georgians are projected to lose health coverage by 2034.

Gregg Hull's answer for a state running out of water is to cool them with fracking waste

New Mexico is drying up. At an Albuquerque Journal town hall on May 11, Gregg Hull, the Republican running for governor, faced a flurry of questions about whether he supports a moratorium on data centers. He said he is not opposed to them. What the state should explore instead, he said, is requiring developers to cool their servers with alternative water — brackish water, or produced water from oil and gas operations.

"I think there's some very creative ways we can work with these industries. Every time we tell an industry that we don't want them here or we push them out of the state without coming up with a way that we can actually work with those industries, we're sending a message out to the rest of the United States that we don't want those opportunities here."

Produced water is the wastewater that comes back up out of an oil and gas well. New Mexico's Water Quality Control Commission spent 18 months studying it and concluded it "contains hundreds of known and unknown chemicals, many of which are toxic to human health and the environment" — that no technology can treat it safely at scale, and that the state has no surface water quality standards for at least 180 of the potentially toxic chemicals in it. In May 2025 the commission banned discharging it into New Mexico's ground and surface water.

That ban is now under attack. In May 2026 — the same month Hull was answering the Journal's questions — the commission voted 7–4 to open a rulemaking on an industry petition that would let the wastewater back into surface and ground water and into agriculture.

Hull's own platform is on the industry's side of that fight: rules on produced water handling, he writes, are "overly complex and drive up costs without clear safety benefits. I support streamlining these rules so water can be safely treated and reused only within the industry while protecting our freshwater resources." And the next governor appoints the Environment Department that petitioned for the ban in the first place.

So: a state running out of water, a candidate for governor who won't back a pause on data centers, and an answer that points them at the fracking industry's leftovers — from a man who wants the rules on that waste streamlined.

The pattern

Five states, five Republicans, and the same arrangement underneath all of it.

The tech companies get the tax exemptions, the interconnection, the water and the political cover. The politicians get the ribbon-cuttings and the checks — $431,000 to Moody, $97,468 to Ramaswamy, a data center stake in Jackson's own portfolio, $3.2 billion in Abbott's giveaways.

And the cost of the extra generation, the extra transmission, the extra everything lands in the one place nobody negotiated on behalf of: the line at the bottom of your bill.

None of this is an argument against data centers. They will get built. Somebody will build them.

The argument is about who pays — and every one of these five had a chance to say "the companies that want the power," and said something else instead.

You will find out what they chose the same way most people do. When the bill comes.

Sources

The build-out. The scale of a single facility is EPRI's, from Powering Intelligence 2026, executive summary, updated Feb. 25, 2026: "A typical new data center of 100 to 1000 megawatts represents a load equal to that of a new neighborhood of 80,000 to 800,000 average homes."

Texas. The 2021 blackout death toll is from Andrew Weber and Mose Buchele, "Texas has an official death count from the 2021 blackout. The true toll may never be known," KUT via Texas Standard, Aug. 5, 2022 — the state's official count is 246, which researchers call a severe undercount. Paul Cobler and Apurva Mahajan, "Texas losing a billion dollars a year on data center tax break," Texas Tribune, April 8, 2026 — the comptroller's $3.2 billion two-year estimate, the tax break as "soon to be the most expensive of its kind in the nation," and the 142-to-141 count of data centers under construction against Virginia's. The interconnection queue and ERCOT's demand forecast are from Kayla Guo, "Data centers are booming in Texas. What does that mean for the grid?" Texas Tribune, Jan. 24, 2025. The price forecast is Robert Walton, "Data center demand spike could drive 79% ERCOT price hike in 2027: EIA," Utility Dive, March 16, 2026 — EIA's 78.9% is for the ERCOT North hub under a high-demand scenario. ERCOT's $32.99 billion estimate for its 765-kV Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan is reported in Paige Feild, "Permian Basin Power Fix Becomes $33 Billion Statewide Project," Texas Scorecard, Oct. 28, 2025. Abbott's directive to the PUC and ERCOT: Sarah Davis, "Abbott seeks new limits on Texas data centers," The Hill, June 11, 2026. The "epicenter of AI development" quote and the $40 billion Google announcement are from the governor's own press release.

Florida. Mitch Perry, "Florida's GOP AGs used to intervene in utility rate cases, but no longer," Florida Phoenix, June 17, 2026 — the Tampa Electric, Duke and FPL increases from December 2020 to January 2026 (Food & Water Watch), Moody's $431,000 in career money from the investor-owned utilities (CLEO Institute), her lead among Senate candidates in electric-utility fundraising (OpenSecrets), and the McCollum and Crist rate-case interventions. On SB 484: Samantha Putterman, "Donalds says FL law will prevent electric bill hikes from data centers. That's not guaranteed," PolitiFact, Aug. 7, 2026.

Ohio. Bonnie Lucas, "Ramaswamy takes nearly $100K from energy PACs as bills soar," TiffinOhio.net, Aug. 6, 2026 — the $97,468.91 total, the $65,603.24 that arrived after the Energy and Policy Institute flagged the giving, the July 31 checks, the governor's five PUCO appointments, Ohio's 53% rise in electricity bills since 2021, and AEP Ohio Power's 15% disconnection rate, first reported by Canary Media.

Georgia. Ross Williams, "Bottoms, Jackson offer competing visions on data centers, Medicaid expansion at business luncheon," Georgia Recorder, Aug. 5, 2026 — the luncheon, the property-tax proposal, the Medicaid answer and Jackson's stake in a Texas data center. His net worth is from Forbes. The 566,000 projection is the Joint Economic Committee's fact sheet on district-level impacts of health care cuts.

New Mexico. Joshua Bowling, "NM GOP governor candidate Gregg Hull touts experience leading, growing Rio Rancho," Source New Mexico, May 12, 2026, reporting the Albuquerque Journal town hall of May 11. On produced water, the Western Environmental Law Center's releases of May 14, 2025 and May 12, 2026. Hull's regulatory position is from his own campaign site.

A Republican Pollster Says Greg Abbott's Data Center Pause 'Found the Sweet Spot.' The Rural Texans It Was Aimed At Call It 'Smoke and Mirrors.'

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:45:44 +0000

Rural voters probably can't stop data centers from spreading across Texas. But they might be able to stop Greg Abbott.

That's the finding of POLITICO's reporting on the Texas governor's race, published August 19, 2026, and it should worry him more than any Democratic attack ad. Abbott is seeking a fourth term. He is bleeding support in the small towns that have carried him for eleven years. And the reason is data centers — an industry he courted, on a tax break that ballooned under him for all eleven of those years.

The same week, yellow was all around the Texas Capitol grounds — bandanas, pins, shirts, the signal of a grassroots movement against the 765-kV buildout. They rallied on the steps, then sat through a nine-hour hearing on data centers and the giant power lines being built to feed them.

These are not activists Abbott can dismiss. They are his voters.

He Courted Them, and the Tax Break Ballooned Under Him

There is no version of this story where Abbott is a bystander.

He branded Texas the "epicenter" of AI development. He stood next to Google's CEO to announce a $40 billion buildout. He presided over a data center sales tax break that has ballooned so far past its original estimate that the Comptroller's office now puts the state's forgone revenue at $1.3 billion in a single year, against an estimated $5.4 million in the break's first year in 2014. We laid out that whole record two weeks ago.

The result is a queue. About 90% of everything waiting to plug into the Texas power grid is a data center.

Then, in an Election Year, He Announced a Pause

In June, Abbott proposed guardrails — make data centers use water-efficient cooling, repeal their sales tax break, make them pay their own power infrastructure costs. In early August he went further and directed state electricity regulators to pause approvals for new data centers to connect to the grid until the state audits the hundreds of projects lined up.

His campaign press secretary, Eduardo Leal, says this proves the Governor "has taken decisive action to ensure data centers pay their own way, bring their own power, reuse their own water, be good neighbors, and never force Texas families to subsidize their infrastructure."

Read that sentence again and notice what it concedes. Every problem it promises to fix is a problem that already exists — because of the eleven years that came before it.

And note the calendar. The grid operator's CEO told lawmakers the audit should be finished around December. The Legislature doesn't return until 2027. The election is in November.

The Pollster and the Voters

Here is the part that gives the game away.

A memo from Cygnal, a Republican pollster, said Abbott's pause "found the sweet spot to make data centers deliver for Texas."

The sweet spot. That is a Republican consultant assessing a governor's policy decision the way you'd assess an ad buy — not as a fix, as a position.

Abbott's own voters reached the same conclusion, and they didn't need a memo.

Shawn Nanny, a Republican county commissioner in Tom Green County, told POLITICO his neighbors were briefly encouraged by the pause and then soured on it. They decided it was a ploy to get rural voters to drop their guard. "They think it was all smoke and mirrors," Nanny said.

Mary Jo Bloomquist, a Republican in Hood County: "Personally, I think it's just covering his butt. It makes him look like he's doing something, but he's really not." She says she can't recall ever voting for a Democrat. She won't vote for Abbott: "He sold Texans out to big business, and I just don't trust him anymore."

Greg Torres, the McCulloch County attorney and a Republican, is still voting for Abbott — and still said this: "There will be no enthusiasm for Governor Abbott this time in rural areas."

Nanny says some neighbors are talking about doing the unthinkable. In his words, what he hears is: "Yeah, we'll have a Democrat in there and grit our teeth and bear it, but hopefully we'll come out of it the following election."

The Numbers Behind the Anger

This isn't a handful of cranks. POLITICO reports that Texas Politics Project polling shows Abbott's approval among rural voters fell from 63% in 2018 to 48% this year — a 15-point collapse in his own base.

Recent Texas A&M and Fox News polls put Abbott just one point ahead of Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa. No Democrat has won the Texas governorship in more than 35 years. Abbott cannot lose much of rural Texas and survive that math.

The POLITICO Poll also found that 51% of rural U.S. adults oppose data centers, against 32% of urban residents. Rural Americans are more skeptical of big infrastructure generally — power plants, warehouses, airports — but their dislike of data centers runs higher than any of those.

Hinojosa is running straight at it, with an ad in rural markets targeting what she calls "Abbott Intelligence." Her line: "I'll fight to put the people of Texas first, not the billionaire class."

The Money Kept Coming

While rural Texans were being told the Governor was on their side, the checks kept clearing.

POLITICO reports that groups supporting Abbott have taken campaign contributions from data center developers and from a transmission company building some of the new 765-kilovolt power lines. C-suite officials at Oncor Electric — a co-applicant on one of those 765-kV segments — have given a pro-Abbott political action committee $265,000. Elon Musk gave the same PAC $500,000.

Abbott's pause covers data center hookups. It does not cover the $33 billion power line build-out that rural landowners are fighting just as hard — three first-of-their-kind lines that would cut across tens of thousands of acres of private property.

On that, Abbott has stayed publicly quiet, telling people to send their feedback to the Public Utility Commission. The commission is run by five commissioners, all appointed by the Governor. Abbott appointed every one of them.

His own Lieutenant Governor didn't stay quiet. After a July Senate hearing, Dan Patrick and Sen. Charles Schwertner, the Republican who chairs the Business and Commerce Committee, called on the commission to deny the pending 765-kV applications until the companies address what landowners have raised.

So Abbott moved on the half of the story that polls, and said nothing about the half his donors are building. That is what "the sweet spot" looks like from underneath.

It also isn't new. Earlier this summer he moved to break up San Antonio's city-owned utility — the one that says it has the lowest combined residential rates in Texas — in favor of retail providers, while utility PACs gave his campaign at least $230,000.

And Locally, There's Nothing They Can Do

The cruelest part is that rural Texans can't fix this at home either, because Abbott's party spent years making sure they couldn't.

In most unincorporated areas — where the majority of the state's planned data centers are going — counties can regulate drainage plans, floodway construction, septic tanks and driveway permits. That's the list. Then in 2025 the Legislature passed HB 2559, limiting how long a city can pause development. Counties weren't in the bill, and Republican state Sen. Paul Bettencourt took that to the Attorney General's office as proof they never had the power at all.

The threat worked without anyone winning a case. Hood County voted a moratorium down. Hill County passed one and rescinded it after a developer sued for $100 million. Tom Green County dropped the idea too.

"Right now it's just the Wild West," Navarro County Commissioner Jason Grant told POLITICO. Officials say they routinely learn about a data center only after the land is bought.

Rural Texas had legislators who might have fought this. Abbott removed a lot of them. When a bloc of 21 House Republicans, mostly from rural districts, blocked his school voucher plan in 2023, he spent more than $8 million of his own campaign funds backing primary challengers against his own party. Fifteen Republican incumbents lost across the 2024 primaries, a record. Suzanne Bellsnyder — a field director on Abbott's 2014 campaign, now running the Texas Rural Reporter — told POLITICO that when those members went, so did the Legislature's expertise on water rights and agriculture.

He Could Fix the Timing Tomorrow

Activists, landowners and state Rep. Rafael Anchía have all asked Abbott for one thing: call a special session so the Legislature can write data center rules now instead of in 2027. At the August rally, protesters shouted it as their group-photo caption — "one, two, three: special session!"

He hasn't called one. He calls them when he wants something. He called four in a single year — more than in any year with a regular session in the Legislature's 176-year history — with the last two of them aimed at forcing through vouchers, and another in 2025 to redraw the congressional map for Donald Trump.

Even the Republican who created the data center tax break is further along than Abbott. Rep. Charlie Geren of Fort Worth told the August hearing he expects to carry the repeal himself: "I passed the bill to get it done. I'm going to probably carry the one to repeal it."

And Abbott isn't the only Texas Republican who sees the wreck coming. Two weeks ago, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller said Republicans will lose elections over data centers, that Abbott has never returned his call in twelve years, and that other statewide Republicans stay quiet because they fear Abbott's $105 million war chest.

What It Costs

Strip out the politics and what's left is the water, the land and the electric bill.

Texans already know what it looks like when the people in charge treat the grid as somebody else's problem. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri knocked out the power and 246 Texans died. Four years later a state audit found the winterization inspections meant to prevent a repeat produced two violations out of 8,732 inspections.

Now the largest new industrial power demand in state history is being bolted onto that same grid, on a tax break the Legislature is scrambling to repeal, with an audit that reports back after the election.

Rural Texans asked their Governor for a pause with teeth. What they got was a pause a Republican pollster graded as good positioning. They noticed.

We deserve better.

Source

'We are not a bunch of woke Marxist liberals here': Rural voters scramble Texas election — Shelby Webb, POLITICO, August 19, 2026. Photo: Justin Sullivan/AFP via Getty Images.

Three Out of Four Americans Oppose Data Centers Near Their Homes. These Eight Republicans Spent the Year Helping the Build-Out. Five Have Since Discovered Concerns.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:59:56 +0000

Data centers are giant warehouses full of computers that run AI. They use enormous amounts of electricity and enormous amounts of water, and somebody has to pay to build the power plants and power lines that feed them.

That somebody is usually you, on your electric bill.

A year ago the country was split on them — 42% of Americans opposed one in their area and 43% supported it. A poll released on August 20 by Embold Research and published by Heatmap Pro found that 75% now oppose one, with 61% strongly opposed.

That is one of the fastest collapses in public support for anything in recent memory. And it has left a lot of Republicans holding a position they took when it was popular and profitable.

Here are eight of them. Every one has spent the past year or two helping the build-out along, taking money from the companies and utilities that profit from it, or both. Five have spent the past few weeks sounding a lot more worried about it. Three are still arguing the industry's side.

Jon Husted took $69,750 from the companies on the other side of the fight

The Ohio senator introduced something called the Ratepayer Protection Act in July and put out a press release about protecting your electric bill.

What wasn't in the press release: his campaign has taken about $69,750 from the very industry that bill is supposed to rein in — $16,000 from the corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, $28,750 from employees and executives of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle, and $25,000 from the PACs of American Electric Power, Duke Energy and Vistra. AEP's Ohio utility serves the central Ohio corridor where much of the state's data center construction has concentrated.

His own party has noticed. A leaked National Republican Senatorial Committee memo this month called data centers an "anchor" around his campaign, and asked the AI industry to please fix its image.

Mike Rogers (MI) called for a moratorium days after a reporter listed what he owns

Michigan's Republican Senate nominee endorsed Trump's national AI plan in March and told reporters he wanted to make permitting easier for AI companies.

Then The Lever went through his financial disclosure and found he holds $1.7 million to $2.6 million in companies positioned to profit from the AI build-out — including a Blackstone real estate trust that has been rapidly buying into data centers. Blackstone is helping build a $16 billion data center near Ann Arbor.

Days later, he announced he supports a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan. His campaign would not say whether he intends to sell any of it.

Tom Barrett is running on a vote from 2015

Barrett's new ad has him at a bar warning about politicians "cozying up with Big Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities."

The vote he cites as proof he stood up to his own party is from 2015, on a statewide sales tax break for data center equipment — eleven years before any of this. Since arriving in Congress he voted for the budget bill that handed six AI-linked companies $83 billion in tax breaks, voted for a version containing a ten-year ban on states regulating AI at all, and backed a bill weakening environmental reviews.

Elon Musk's super PAC spent more than $869,000 in his district. Peter Thiel and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman have both given him the maximum.

Stacy Garrity accused someone else of a "massive flip-flop"

Pennsylvania's Republican candidate for governor says Josh Shapiro "was the biggest cheerleader of data center development in Pennsylvania until he wasn't." She called it "a huge, massive flip-flop, and nobody should be fooled."

Her own record, in order: she called Amazon's $20 billion Pennsylvania investment "great news," told a Pittsburgh radio show "we need to deregulate," complained that "Ohio is kicking our butt. They have over 192" data centers to Pennsylvania's 88 — and now wants a pause she struggles to define.

She isn't alone in her delegation. All ten of Pennsylvania's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for the ten-year ban on states writing their own AI rules.

Marsha Blackburn said data centers were "good and important." Then $100,000 arrived.

On June 13, Tennessee's Republican candidate for governor posted a video: "Let me be direct, data centers are going to be a good and important part of Tennessee's economic growth, but we've got to be thoughtful about their placement."

Weeks later her campaign reported more than $100,000 from employees of AI and data-center companies — including about $53,000 from Anthropic employees in a matter of days and more than $50,000 from Oracle employees, one of them a top executive. Many of the donors don't live in Tennessee. Neither of her two Republican primary opponents got a dollar of the Oracle or Anthropic money.

Her campaign's answer, when asked about the money, was that Blackburn "has led the fight to hold Big Tech accountable."

Tom Tiffany wants to end data center subsidies. The coalition's lobbyist gave him $5,000.

Wisconsin voters do not like data centers — 76% said in July that the costs outweigh the benefits, up from 55% last October.

So Tiffany, running for governor, has spent weeks clipping his opponent's data center comments. Meanwhile his campaign took $5,000 from Robert Marchant, the only registered lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition. Tiffany says he wants to ban data center non-disclosure agreements and end their sales tax break. The coalition his donor lobbies for fought both.

Mike Lawler's district blocked one. Nine days later he went on TV to blame the rules.

On July 8, the planning board in Orangetown — in Lawler's own Hudson Valley district — voted unanimously to require a full environmental impact study of a data center expansion sitting near Lake Tappan, a drinking water reservoir — which halts the project indefinitely. More than 100 residents turned out. At a rally outside the same town hall in May, their chant had been "we can't drink data."

Nine days later, Lawler went on Fox Business to argue that New York's new limits on data center permits hurt innovation and push the industry toward China. He had already voted for a bill that would have barred states from writing AI rules in the first place.

Cindy Hyde-Smith told federal regulators Mississippi is "at the forefront of safeguarding ratepayers"

She said it at a July oversight hearing on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Two months earlier, energy economists had reported the opposite: Mississippi's 2024 law curtailed its Public Service Commission's oversight, hid Entergy's contract with Amazon from the public, and let the utility start recovering data center costs through everyone's rates before the facilities even opened. Residential customers had already paid $38 million toward Amazon's data centers.

The phrase she used for what data centers pay — "their fair share" — is her utility donor's own branding. Entergy launched a "Fair Share Plus" pledge in March 2026.

The pattern

Not one of these eight was warning anybody about data centers a year ago. For five of them — Husted, Rogers, Barrett, Garrity and Tiffany — the concern arrived on the same schedule the polling did.

That timing is the whole story. A politician who opposed something before it was popular has a record. A politician who opposed it three weeks after 75% of the country did has a press release.

The other three did not reposition at all. Blackburn was still calling data centers "good and important" in June. Lawler went on national television to attack New York's new limits on them, nine days after a board in his own district stopped one. And Hyde-Smith told federal regulators her state was at the forefront of protecting ratepayers, two years after that state's own law curtailed the commission whose job that is.

And the alternative to repositioning is worse. When constituents organized against data centers, seven Republicans decided China might be behind it — and four of them asked the FBI and the Justice Department to investigate who was funding the opposition.

The people showing up at township meetings are not confused about who they are. They are the ones who read the electric bill.

In November, they're also the ones who fill out the ballot.

Tom Barrett's New Ad Says He 'Stood Up to My Own Party' Against Data Centers. The Vote Was From 2015, and It Had Nothing to Do With AI.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:48:12 +0000

There is a new ad running in Michigan's 7th District. A man sits at a bar and talks about how "Michigan water, Michigan land, and Michigan's future belong to Michiganders."

"So while politicians are cozying up with Big Tech billionaires to force data centers on our communities," he says, "I stood up to my own party and voted against giving your tax dollars to data centers."

That is Tom Barrett, the Republican congressman who represents the district. If you didn't know the race, you couldn't tell from the ad which party he's in.

There's a line of small print on screen citing the vote. It's from 2015.

What the 2015 Vote Actually Was

Barrett was a state legislator then, and the bill he voted against was Senate Bill 616 — a sales tax exemption on data center equipment, anywhere in Michigan, running through 2035. The American Prospect describes it as incentives for one internet data center in Grand Rapids, which is the project that drove it. The Senate's own fiscal analysts expected at least 43 Michigan firms to qualify.

It had nothing to do with the AI build-out that is currently upsetting people in Michigan and across the country. In 2015 "AI" was mostly the title of a Steven Spielberg movie.

Eleven years later, Barrett is running that vote as his qualification on the issue dominating his district.

What He's Done Since

Here is Barrett's record on data centers in Congress — the part the ad doesn't mention.

He voted for the tax breaks. He voted for Trump's budget bill, like nearly every Republican did. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy estimates that six companies tied to the AI build-out — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia among them — collected $83 billion in tax breaks last year from the corporate tax provisions that bill extended. That's money those companies then had available to build data centers.

He voted for that same bill knowing what else it did to Michigan. Barrett was one of the members who voted for it, and 130,000 fewer Michiganders were enrolled in Obamacare coverage a year later.

He voted to stop states from regulating AI at all. An early version of the budget bill contained a ten-year ban on any state-level AI rules. Barrett voted for that version. A bipartisan group stripped the ban out before final passage. Had it survived, it would likely have wiped out state restrictions on data centers — the exact local control Barrett's ad now says he believes in.

He backed a bill to weaken environmental reviews. Barrett supported the SPEED Act, a permitting bill the House passed mostly along party lines last December. It shrinks federal environmental review, including for data centers.

He voted against limiting Flock cameras. In May, a bipartisan amendment would have barred anyone taking federal highway money from using automated license plate readers — the Flock cameras his Democratic opponent says are being rolled out across the district — for anything except toll collection. It failed 20–44 in the committee Barrett sits on. Barrett voted no.

Who Pays for His Campaigns

The ad warns about "politicians cozying up with Big Tech billionaires."

Elon Musk's super PAC spent more than $869,000 in Michigan's 7th District to get Barrett elected two years ago.
Peter Thiel gave Barrett the legal maximum this cycle.
Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone — which holds $150 billion in data center investments worldwide — gave Barrett the maximum in 2024 and again in 2026.
The corporate PACs of Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle have all given to Barrett. Oracle is the company behind the contested data center project in Saline, Michigan.

"Tom Barrett wants to reinvent himself as a data center fighter, but his record says the opposite," said Ravi Mangla of the Working Families Party. "He voted to give data center developers billions in tax breaks and left Michiganders holding the bag."

Barrett's campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

This Is Becoming a Habit

Barrett's ads have a pattern of saying things his own record doesn't support.

His campaign store sold "Made in USA" T-shirts whose tags said Haiti. His campaign ran a full-page ad in a Black-owned newspaper telling readers to vote the day after Election Day. And he described the 2020 election as "an unknowable thing" fifteen months after his own party's investigation found nothing wrong with it.

Now an eleven-year-old vote, cast before anyone was building for AI, is doing the work of a data center platform.

The Bigger Picture

Barrett isn't alone, and that's the point.

The same week this ad went up, Axios reported that Republicans' Senate campaign arm privately warned AI companies that their data center push was costing Republicans votes and could become "a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle." In Ohio, that memo named Senator Jon Husted's data center record as the "anchor" around his campaign. In Michigan's Senate race, Mike Rogers called for a one-year moratorium days after a reporter published what he personally owns.

Barrett's answer is to talk about "nationalization" — the idea that Washington will force data centers on unwilling towns. As the Prospect notes, the only person in Washington trying to do that is Donald Trump, who has moved to exclude data centers from environmental review and to put them on public land. Trump has endorsed Barrett and held a rally in the district a few weeks ago. Data center protesters interrupted it.

His opponent, Will Lawrence, won the Democratic primary by double digits running against data centers, and has spent the campaign at town halls opposing specific projects in the district. A House Majority PAC poll released Thursday put Lawrence ahead 49–47, with Barrett at 35 percent favorable and 47 percent unfavorable.

Barrett is not leading this argument. He's chasing it.

Michiganders in the 7th District are worried about their water, their power bills and who gets to decide what goes up down the road. Barrett voted for the tax breaks, voted to take away their state's ability to write rules, backed weaker environmental reviews, and took the industry's money.

Then he made an ad about 2015.

Source

David Dayen, "MI-07: Tom Barrett Scrambles to Bury His Data Center Past", The American Prospect, August 20, 2026.

Mike Rogers Holds Up to $2.6 Million in Companies That Stand to Gain From the AI Build-Out. Days After That Came Out, He Called for a Moratorium.

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 06:46:59 +0000

For most of this year, Mike Rogers (MI) was for data centers.

In March, he endorsed Trump's national AI plan, which speeds up federal permitting for data centers. He told Michigan reporters he wanted to make permitting easier for AI companies. In July, he told Detroit's WXYZ that communities willing "to put up with one of these things" should get something out of it.

Then, on Thursday, August 20, he stood at a news conference and was asked about his policy on data centers.

"I think we need to take a pause, probably," he said.

He told the Detroit News he wants a one-year moratorium on new data centers in Michigan. Michigan, he said, "needs stronger guardrails to protect community control, prevent utility price hikes, protect our water and stop pay-to-play schemes."

That is a complete reversal. Politico called it "a massive shift" that "separates him from most of the Republican Party and even many Democrats."

Here is what happened in between.

Days Earlier, a Reporter Went Through His Financial Disclosure

The Lever, a reader-funded outlet that follows money in politics, published an investigation into what Rogers personally owns. What reporter Freddy Brewster found:

Between $1.7 million and $2.6 million in companies that stand to gain from tech-friendly policy and faster permitting for AI construction.
Between $100,001 and $250,000 in the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust. Data centers are now 29 percent of that trust's holdings, up from 1 percent in 2020.
Blackstone is helping build a 1.6 million square-foot data center near Ann Arbor worth $16 billion.
Stock, held with his wife, in cybersecurity firms Qualys, NowSecure and Constella Intelligence, and in the quantum computing firm D-Wave — all companies building their businesses on AI.
Stock in the venture capital firm Forgepoint Capital, where Rogers is a board adviser and his wife sits on the advisory council. Forgepoint is invested in at least 49 companies that use AI. Rogers is invested in two Forgepoint funds.

Days after that story ran, Rogers wanted a pause.

His campaign would not say whether the new position means he is going to sell any of it.

The Donors, Too

Rogers has raised roughly $148,000 from people invested in AI and data centers.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss gave $14,000 between them. Seven Blackstone executives gave $34,500. Paul Singer, who runs the private equity firm Elliott Investment Management — an investor in the data center company Equinix — gave $7,000. Executives at the venture firm Paradigm gave $17,615. Forgepoint's cofounder gave $6,950.

This is a familiar shape for Rogers. He has already been on this site for taking $95,000 from phone companies and then writing the bill that would have let them hand your data to the government, for voting against a gas price-gouging bill after nearly $700,000 from oil and gas, and for promising to root out "every waste, every fraud" while taking $234,000 from donors with fraud cases of their own.

The pattern is not that Rogers takes money. Everyone takes money. The pattern is that the policy keeps arriving after it.

Why Michiganders Care About This

Data centers are giant warehouses of computers that run AI. They need enormous amounts of electricity and enormous amounts of water, and somebody pays to build the power plants that feed them.

There are 79 data centers operating in Michigan right now, and 26 more proposed. Polling in May found 55 percent of Michiganders opposed building one within 25 miles of their home, though that opposition softened when the question added electricity-cost limits and other safeguards.

Water is the part that is specific to Michigan. Nearly half the state's residents rely on groundwater, and a lot of them draw it from private wells. A March report from the Alliance for the Great Lakes warned that if water-hungry industries pull out more groundwater than nature puts back, aquifers can be drained — and only 1 percent of the Great Lakes' water is naturally replaced each year.

A separate report in April found that data centers and their suppliers could push more forever chemicals — PFAS — into drinking water. The EPA has linked PFAS to cancer risk and pregnancy complications. Federal scientists found that up to 95 million Americans were already drinking groundwater with PFAS in it. Trump then cut 25 U.S. Geological Survey science centers in 2025 — the agency that did that measuring.

And communities often can't even find out what's coming. Andrea Densham of the Alliance for the Great Lakes told The Lever that developers show up "with an NDA in hand," requiring the county, the city and the water system to sign a silence agreement before work even begins.

The Politics Caught Up First

Rogers didn't discover any of this in August. The voters did, and they got there first.

On August 4, at least 14 Michigan candidates who campaigned against data centers won their primaries — including Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat Rogers faces in November, and William Lawrence, who won the Democratic primary in Michigan's 7th District.

The same week Rogers flipped, his own party's Senate campaign arm sent a memo to the tech industry warning that data centers are turning toxic in the midterms — a memo that named Ohio Senator Jon Husted's data center record as the "anchor" around his campaign.

El-Sayed's response to Rogers' conversion was a raised-eyebrow emoji.

What He Still Hasn't Answered

A moratorium is a good idea. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that Rogers is asking to be trusted to write the rules for an industry he is personally invested in — after spending the year helping it, and after changing his mind within days of that investment becoming public.

Three questions his campaign has not answered:

Will he sell the holdings? He hasn't said. Politico asked. The Lever asked. No response.
What changed his mind? In July he wanted communities to be able to say yes. In August he wants the state to say no for a year. Nothing about the water, the power bills or the NDAs was new in between. The Lever story was.
Does the moratorium apply to the $16 billion Ann Arbor project that Blackstone — whose real estate trust he holds a stake in — is helping build?

He also asked for guardrails to "stop pay-to-play schemes." He is the one holding $1.7 million to $2.6 million in the industry and $148,000 from its investors.

Michigan gets the electric bills, the groundwater risk and the NDAs. Rogers gets the portfolio. In November, Michiganders get one vote about which of those matters more.

Source

Freddy Brewster, "After data center investments revealed, Rogers backs statewide moratorium", The Lever / Michigan Advance, August 20, 2026. Photo by Ben Solis / Michigan Advance.

Timothy Cama, "Republican Mike Rogers backs Michigan data center moratorium", Politico, August 20, 2026.

Your Town Fought a Data Center. Seven Republicans Decided You Might Be Working for China.

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:10:18 +0000

Data centers are enormous warehouses full of computers that run AI. They drink electricity and water, and somebody has to build the power plants and power lines that feed them. That somebody is everyone else on the grid.

So people have started showing up at county meetings to say no. Not activists — county commissioners, farmers, retirees, parents worried about a well.

They are not a fringe. Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose building a data center in their area — far more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant nearby. Seven in ten of your neighbors.

Seven Republicans have landed on the same answer to those seven in ten. Not "here's why you're wrong." Not "here's how we'll protect your bill."

They have decided you might be on a foreign payroll — and several of them have asked federal law enforcement to find out.

Tom Cotton asked the Justice Department to investigate the objectors

On June 10, 2026, Tom Cotton sent a two-page letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche asking DOJ to "investigate foreign influence efforts targeting the buildout of American AI infrastructure."

Not the companies building them. The people objecting to them. The specific ask was an investigation under the Foreign Agents Registration Act — the law for people secretly working for foreign governments.

The remarkable part is what's in the middle of his own letter:

"Americans certainly have valid concerns about potential rising energy costs and strains on natural resources related to data centers, and we should implement common sense regulations and legislation to protect communities from adverse effects."

He agrees with them in writing, then asks the federal government's top law enforcement agency to open a file on them anyway.

His evidence names one person and reaches for a professor who appeared on a panel. That's the case.

Bob Latta, Brett Guthrie and John Joyce wrote to the FBI

Six days earlier, on June 4, three House Republicans signed a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel asking what the administration was doing about "foreign influence campaigns" behind the data center backlash.

Bob Latta chairs the Energy Subcommittee. Brett Guthrie chairs the full Energy and Commerce Committee. John Joyce chairs its Oversight Subcommittee. These are the three men in the House with the most direct power to actually do something about an electric bill.

Their press release quotes Guthrie: "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments."

The letter leans on two reports — one from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, one from a group called Power the Future. Neither establishes any link between a foreign government and a township meeting in Ohio or Kentucky.

Latta's problem is the calendar. Thirty-six days before he signed it, he gaveled in his own subcommittee hearing and said this in his opening statement:

"Many question whether AI, and the data centers that power it, will ultimately do more harm than good, particularly when it comes to individual energy costs. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

In April the concerns deserved to be taken seriously. In June they were an FBI matter. Nothing changed in between except that the backlash got louder — because the bills got bigger. We laid out the whole timeline on Latta.

Guthrie's problem is his own district. Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium. Daviess County passed one too. Meade County killed a project outright after 3,000 people signed a petition. Three county governments in a deep-red Kentucky district, hitting the brakes — and the woman who started the Daviess petition said she'd never engaged with Guthrie's office at all. The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and his constituents took their grid fight to the county courthouse instead.

Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett skipped the paperwork

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. Asked about opposition, he said a lot of the information against the project comes "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

Tim Burchett of Tennessee put it at one remove. There is "a lot of misinformation out there," he said, and "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

No letter, no FBI request. Just the theory, aired in public about their own constituents.

Tommy Tuberville called his neighbors' concerns "bull crap"

At least ten Alabama communities — Cullman, Birmingham, Leeds, Homewood, Fort Payne, Bessemer, Pinson, Wilsonville, Fairfield, Mobile — have pushed back on data centers. Cullman's city council voted unanimously for a one-year moratorium.

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican nominee for governor, told the Alabama Sheriffs Association:

"It's going to ruin the climate — bull crap. They are listening to all this nonsense they see on social media that's coming from China because China does not want us to grow."

Then he told them it wouldn't matter what they decided: "You can forget about doing away with it because it's coming."

The things Alabama city councils have actually been debating are water use, noise, electrical demand and landscaping. That's zoning, not a foreign influence campaign.

Somebody actually checked

This is the part that should end the argument.

NPR went looking for the Chinese campaign. Darren Linvill co-leads the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, which tracks foreign influence operations online. His finding:

"We haven't found much."

His larger point was that the premise doesn't hold together. China runs enormous bot networks, but they're not interested in your county zoning board. As he put it, China "tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard."

He told NPR he can't rule out that China is quietly paying influencers to oppose data centers. His point is that there would be no need to.

And on the people organizing:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

There is one real case. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts generating anti-data-center content — probably a private Chinese firm working for provincial government clients. Read what OpenAI's own threat investigations lead, Ben Nimmo, said about it:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What this actually is

Strip the national-security language off and look at the structure.

Seven in ten Americans object to something. The politicians who want it built anyway cannot answer the objection on the merits — because the merits are a water table and an electric bill, and those are measurable. So the objection itself gets reclassified as a hostile act.

That move has a cost beyond this one fight. Cotton chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, whose job is to keep the surveillance apparatus pointed outward and inside the law. Latta, Guthrie and Joyce run the committee that decides what your utility can charge you. Every one of them chose to aim the government at the people asking questions rather than at the problem.

The neighbors in Cullman and Meade County and Wisconsin Rapids did not get a foreign wire transfer. They got a bill.

Sources

Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026 — Linvill, Nimmo and the OpenAI takedown. Van Orden's and Burchett's quotes are from "The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026. Cotton's request is in his June 10, 2026 letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, reported by Fox News; the Guthrie, Joyce and Latta letter to FBI Director Kash Patel is in their own June 4, 2026 press release. Tuberville's remarks to the Alabama Sheriffs Association were reported by WBRC, July 14, 2026, and by Yellowhammer News, July 14, 2026, which has the "forget about doing away with it" line. The list of Alabama communities is Brian Lyman's in the Alabama Reflector, July 27, 2026. Polling: Gallup, "Americans Oppose Data Centers in Their Area". Photo: protesters at the Utah state Capitol in Salt Lake City on May 23, 2026, opposing the Stratos data center in Box Elder County, by Natalie Behring / Getty Images, via NPR.

Jon Husted Told Ohioans Their Electric Bills Are Their Own Fault. His Own Party's Memo Calls His Data Center Record an 'Anchor.'

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 07:01:39 +0000

Ohio's electric bills are going up. A report this summer projected the average Ohio household could pay close to $800 just for the summer months.

Here is how Jon Husted explained it in a July interview:

"We, the people, have created the demand for these data centers because we use all of these digital products that it processes. So, understand, like, when we look in the mirror, we are the problem."

We are the problem. Not the six years he spent as lieutenant governor recruiting the industry to Ohio. Not the tax break the state handed it. You, for having a phone.

Now his own party has put in writing what it actually thinks of that record.

The memo

Axios obtained an internal memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee — the group whose entire job is electing Republican senators. It calls data centers an "anchor" around Husted's campaign.

The memo says Democrat Sherrod Brown has made data centers his "de facto opponent," and it is blunt about why:

"Brown has made his opposition to them the centerpiece of his campaign against Husted. Brown is using it because it works."

It goes further. The NRSC's own polling found the attack lands harder than normal campaign messaging, calling it "a sleeper issue for the entire election cycle." And it warns the tech industry what a loss would mean:

"If he loses and data centers get the blame, politicians across the country will take notice."

Read that again. This is not an attack ad. This is Husted's own side, in private, telling Big Tech that his record is a liability — and asking those companies to fix how Ohioans see them so he can survive November.

An Ohio Republican strategist, Terry Casey, called the memo "a surprisingly frank and honest analysis."

What the tax break actually cost

The reason Ohioans are angry isn't a messaging problem. It's a bill.

Ohio gives data center operators an exemption from sales tax. Husted didn't create it — it predates him. But as lieutenant governor from 2019 to 2025, he became one of the administration's most visible salesmen for bringing those projects in. At a 2019 groundbreaking for a Google data center, he said he could see Ohio becoming the "tech hub of the Midwest."

Then the bill came due. According to Ohio Department of Taxation figures reported by TiffinOhio.net, that exemption cost the state nearly $1.57 billion in 2025. The earlier projection was $136 million.

That is more than eleven times what the state thought it was giving away.

State records show Ohio has now committed at least $2.3 billion in long-term sales tax exemptions to data center operators, including Google, Meta and Amazon. Governor Mike DeWine paused consideration of new exemptions in May while the state figures out what it has done.

What it looks like from the sidewalk

The day before the memo leaked, about a dozen people stood in downtown Lima with signs calling Husted the "face of data centers" in Ohio.

Lima City Councilwoman Jeannine Jordan spoke at the rally:

"Jon Husted is blaming you and I for using the tools modern life requires, while ignoring the fact that he helped flood the state with massive, power-hungry data centers without a coherent plan, without including citizens in the planning, without considering the costs that the people and the environment would pay."

Chris Gibbs, a Shelby County farmer and chairman of the county Democratic Party, talked about his own operation. He said his rates from AES have gone up 26% in twelve months, and 37% over two years.

Data centers are not the only reason bills are climbing — the regional grid is straining under aging power plants and transmission limits too. But they are a big and growing part of the demand, and PJM, the operator that runs the grid for Ohio and twelve other states plus Washington, D.C., has been writing new rules specifically to keep giant electricity users from shoving their costs onto everybody else's bill.

His answer is a bill that can't make anyone do anything

Husted's response to all of this was the Ratepayer Protection Act, which he introduced in July. He said it would make big power users cover the infrastructure their facilities need "without passing the costs on to working families and small businesses."

We've already gone through that bill line by line. It works through a 1978 law that only requires state regulators to consider federal standards — it can't compel a single state to do anything. When we looked, it had no cosponsors at all, and it sat in a committee whose chairman had said data center legislation wasn't a priority. The same post laid out the roughly $69,750 his campaign had taken from the tech and utility companies on the other side of that fight.

So the record is: six years selling the industry, a tax break that blew past its own estimate by $1.4 billion, a "we are the problem" explanation aimed at voters, and a bill with no teeth and no cosponsors.

The part that should bother Ohioans most

Husted's campaign says Brown "did nothing" on this for three decades and is "suddenly pretending to care."

Maybe. But Brown isn't the one whose own party wrote a private memo calling his record an anchor. Brown isn't the one whose strategists are asking AI companies to clean up the issue before voters get a say.

Ohio is not alone in this fight — Republicans in Pennsylvania and Tennessee are having the same argument with their own constituents. What makes Ohio different is that the people running the Republican Senate campaign have now admitted, in writing, that the voters are right and the politics are bad.

They just don't think Husted should have to change. They think the advertising should.

Sources

Anna Staver, "GOP memo calls data centers a political liability for Ohio Sen. Jon Husted", cleveland.com, August 19, 2026.

Dave Miller, "Northwest Ohio rally targets Jon Husted over Ohio data center boom, rising electric costs", TiffinOhio.net, August 19, 2026. Rally photo provided via TiffinOhio.net.

Tom Tiffany Says He'd End Data Center Subsidies. The Only Lobbyist for Wisconsin's Data Center Coalition Gave Him $5,000.

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:40:58 +0000

Wisconsin voters do not like data centers. In July polling, 76% said the costs outweigh the benefits — up from 55% last October.

So it makes sense that Tom Tiffany, the Republican running for governor, has spent the days since Crowley won the August 11 primary cutting up clips of the Democrat talking about data centers and posting them online. It's the popular position, and Tiffany found a way to be on it.

There is a problem with the pose. It's in his campaign finance report.

The $5,000

On June 3, Tiffany for Wisconsin received $5,000 from Robert Marchant, the Milwaukee Courier reported.

Marchant is the only registered lobbyist for the Wisconsin Data Center Coalition, according to the group's own registration form.

The coalition says its advocacy goal is championing "Wisconsin's role in the data center economy" and "advocating for smart growth." In February, it circulated a study claiming data centers don't raise electricity rates.

That's the group. Now here's what its lobbyist's client actually lobbied for.

The two things Tiffany says he wants — and the coalition fought both

Tiffany has said he wants to ban non-disclosure agreements for data centers, and to end the sales tax exemption they get in Wisconsin. He has put it flatly: "I would end all subsidies for data centers in Wisconsin," and "I would ban nondisclosure agreements that keep communities in the dark about proposed projects."

Both of those were live bills in the state legislature. The coalition took a position on each:

SB 969, which would prohibit NDAs meant to conceal information about a data center from the public — the coalition was against it, in February.
AB 245 and SB 244, modifying the sales and use tax exemption for qualified data centers — the coalition supported them, in November, according to the same registration.

So the sole lobbyist for a group that fought the NDA ban and pushed the tax break wrote Tiffany a $5,000 check in June. And Tiffany's public position is that he wants the NDA ban and wants the tax break gone.

One of those two things is not being said in earnest. The check does not appear to have been written by someone worried about it.

The votes he already cast

Tiffany doesn't have to speculate about where he stands on AI infrastructure. He was in Congress. He voted.

He voted for the SPEED Act, written to speed up the build-out of the infrastructure that artificial intelligence runs on. The bill was backed by tech giants including OpenAI, Micron and Microsoft.

And on May 22, 2025 he was one of the 215 votes that pushed Trump's budget bill through the House — a bill that, as the House wrote it, included a 10-year ban on state and local governments enforcing any AI regulation. That's the opposite of "communities should decide." It's a decade-long federal gag order on exactly the local rules Wisconsin towns are now asking for.

The Senate stripped that provision 99 to 1 on July 1, 2025. Ninety-nine senators, of both parties, looked at a ten-year ban on state AI rules and voted it down. Tiffany had already voted for it — and he voted for the finished bill again on July 3.

Crowley's campaign summarized the record this way:

"He has never introduced legislation regulating data centers in Congress, has never backed a moratorium, and is pushing to keep aging coal plants online to help power the very data centers he claims to be tough on."

Crowley has a data center platform on his campaign website. Tiffany's issues page does not mention data centers at all.

"Toxic Tom" is not a new nickname

Tiffany's response, through his campaign, is that he doesn't share Crowley's vision of "turning Wisconsin into a data center hub for the 'entire globe,'" and that "no new data centers should move forward without standards that protect Wisconsin's land, water, and environment."

That is a striking sentence from this particular politician.

Tiffany earned the nickname "Toxic Tom" as a state legislator for an anti-DNR, pro-mining record — at one point admitting the legislation he authored was harmful to the environment. The Bad River Chippewa Tribe spoke out against it, because its reservation and its wild rice beds sit a few miles downstream from the proposed mine.

He has since told a tavern crowd he is open to splitting up the Department of Natural Resources — the agency that would enforce the water and land standards he now says data centers must meet. A former DNR secretary said in 2016 that splitting the agency gives Republicans "one agency they can feed and one they can starve."

And over his congressional career he has taken $135,765 from the energy and natural resources sector, according to OpenSecrets.

We have seen this exact move before

The pattern here is not unique to Wisconsin. It is, at this point, the standard Republican play on data centers: run against them in public while the industry funds you.

Pennsylvania's Stacy Garrity spent two years saying the state should deregulate to attract data centers, then demanded a "pause" once the polling turned.
Marsha Blackburn promised to "hold Big Tech accountable" right after Big Tech gave her $100,000.
Ohio's Jon Husted says he'll protect your electric bill while the companies raising it fund his campaign.

Three states, three Republicans, the same script. Tiffany's version is just unusually well documented, because the coalition's entire Wisconsin lobbying operation is one man and that man's name is on the report.

What to ask him

Tiffany says he'd end all data center subsidies in Wisconsin. Two questions follow naturally:

Will he return the $5,000 from the lobbyist whose client fought the NDA ban and pushed the tax exemption he says he opposes?
If a ten-year federal ban on state AI regulation was worth voting for in May 2025, what changed by August 2026 besides the polling?

Neither question requires new reporting to answer. They require Tiffany to answer them.

Source

Drake Bentley, The Milwaukee Courier: "'Toxic Tom' Tiffany accepted campaign contribution from data center lobbyist, voted for more AI infrastructure." Photo: Mario Tama / Getty Images.

71% of Americans Don't Want a Data Center Next Door. Derrick Van Orden and Tim Burchett Blame China.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 11:09:09 +0000

A Gallup poll found that 71% of Americans somewhat or strongly oppose building data centers in their communities.

That is not a fringe. That is roughly seven out of every ten of your neighbors.

Two Republicans in Congress have landed on an explanation for it: China.

What they actually said

Derrick Van Orden represents Wisconsin's 3rd District, a sprawling seat where a data center is planned in Wisconsin Rapids. He told Roll Call that a lot of the information opposing the project is "from the Chinese companies" who are "paying people to say this stuff."

He is in a toss-up race this fall against Democrat Rebecca Cooke, who has released an ad accusing him of "selling out" to AI companies and who has separately backed a data center moratorium. Van Orden called the ad a lie.

Tim Burchett of Tennessee reached for a version of the same idea. The data center companies are "totally off their game," he told Roll Call, pointing to "a lot of misinformation out there" — and adding that "there's talk that the Chinese are putting it out because they're the ones that want to be in the business of it."

So: the constituents showing up at county meetings, signing petitions and asking about their electric bills are, in Van Orden's telling, on a foreign payroll.

Somebody actually checked

This theory did not start in Congress. It started with people who own data centers.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told an audience at an event called "Harnessing American Power" that local opposition "is not organic and local, some of this is foreign-sourced dark money." On the tech podcast All-In, fund manager Gavin Baker said "it is starting to feel or seem like there might be a CCP-funded campaign."

NPR went looking for the evidence. Here is what it found.

Darren Linvill, co-lead of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson University, which tracks foreign influence campaigns online:

"We haven't found much."

Linvill's point is not just that the evidence is thin — it's that the premise doesn't make sense. China runs armies of social media bots, but they aren't talking much about this. Chinese state media is far more interested in promoting Chinese data centers. As he put it:

"China tends to care a lot more about what you think about China and China's economy than they tend to do about what you think about your neighbor and what's happening in your own backyard here in the United States."

And on the people actually organizing against these projects:

"I think in this case, the people talking about data centers are real people with real passions and real perspectives and real opinions."

What the one real case actually showed

There is a grain of something. OpenAI banned a cluster of likely Chinese accounts that used ChatGPT to generate anti-data-center content over the winter — probably a private Chinese tech firm working for "provincial-level government clients," posing as Americans on social media.

But read what OpenAI itself said about the effect. Ben Nimmo, who leads threat investigations there:

"This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate existed already. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. We didn't see any signs that they succeeded."

The debate existed already. Seventy-one percent.

What happens when someone names names

The clearest look at where this theory leads comes from Utah, where Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary is behind a data center called Stratos — originally about twice the size of Manhattan.

After local opposition slowed the project, O'Leary said on Fox News that he'd had "my guys" dig into IP addresses and found "two cells inside of Utah." He named a nonprofit, Alliance for a Better Utah, and a consultancy, Elevate Strategies, as operating on behalf of the Chinese government — and named individual current and former employees.

Those are real people, publicly accused of working for a foreign government by a man on national television.

Gabi Finlayson of Elevate Strategies told NPR: "We are certainly not a Chinese cell. Nobody pays us to make any content, let alone any foreign government."

Elizabeth Hutchings of Alliance for a Better Utah said O'Leary named people who don't even work there anymore, and claimed millions were being funneled from the Chinese Communist Party. NPR checked the group's tax filings: revenue of about $200,000 in 2024, in line with its last decade.

"You know, it was such an outrageous claim we laughed."

O'Leary did not respond to NPR's requests for comment. He has since agreed to shrink the project to a quarter of its original size, after the president of the Utah Senate raised concerns.

The Bitcoin Policy Institute published a report claiming "three vectors of influence" behind the anti-AI campaign, offering little direct evidence; groups named in it denied any Chinese involvement to the Washington Post.

Why this particular smear is useful

Notice what the China explanation accomplishes for a member of Congress.

If your constituents oppose a project and you agree with them, you have to fight the developer. If you oppose them, you have to explain to voters why their electric bill and their farmland matter less than a data center.

But if their opposition isn't real — if it's a foreign operation wearing their neighbors' faces — you don't have to answer any of it. You get to be tough on China instead of accountable to Wisconsin.

That's the trade. Van Orden made it in the middle of a competitive race.

It's spreading in Washington, too. Brett Guthrie, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote to FBI Director Kash Patel asking for a briefing on whether the government sees any evidence of Chinese influence in the data center debate — while three counties in his own district were voting to slow projects down, one of them after 3,000 people signed a petition.

The people they're talking about

The residents of Box Elder County, Utah who sued saying they weren't adequately consulted. The 3,000 Kentuckians who signed that petition. The Wisconsinites asking what a data center does to their power bill and their farmland.

Van Orden has said he won't back data centers without local community input and protections for agricultural land. That's a reasonable position. It is also flatly incompatible with telling voters that the local community input is a Chinese operation.

You cannot promise to listen to people and simultaneously insist they're being paid to talk.

Source

"The data centers are coming. Is Congress ready?" Roll Call, Aug. 12, 2026; and Geoff Brumfiel, "The theory taking the rich by storm: China funds data center haters," NPR, June 10, 2026. Photo: Ulysse Bellier/AFP via Getty Images.

Trump's EPA Approved Two Chemicals It Admits It Can't Assess. You're Not Allowed to Know Their Names.

Sat, 15 Aug 2026 10:43:53 +0000

The Environmental Protection Agency looked at two new chemicals headed for semiconductor factories and wrote down what they might do to people. Its own consent orders list acute toxicity, genetic toxicity, eye corrosion, skin and respiratory irritation, neurological and systemic effects, and reproductive and developmental toxicity — and record that for this class of chemical, "acute lethality is the primary concern." Acute lethality means a single short exposure can kill you.

Then it acknowledged it didn't have enough information to know how bad the risks actually were.

Then it approved them.

On Friday, the Sierra Club and CHIPS Communities United — represented by Earthjustice — sued in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to undo those approvals.

You are not allowed to know what the chemicals are

Here is the part that should stop you.

Neither chemical has a public name. In the complaint, they appear only as EPA premanufacture notice numbers P-26-0029 and P-26-0045. Their actual identities are withheld as confidential business information.

So a federal agency has written down that two substances may damage genes and harm reproduction and development, that the main concern with their chemical class is that a short exposure can be fatal, has admitted it doesn't fully understand the danger, has cleared them for manufacture — and the people who will live near the plants making them are not permitted to know what they are.

You cannot test your water for a chemical whose name is a trade secret. You cannot ask your doctor about an exposure you can't name. You cannot warn your neighbors.

This is what the data center boom actually looks like

Semiconductors are the physical hardware artificial intelligence runs on. Every AI data center announcement — every "we're investing $50 billion in compute" press release — resolves, eventually, into chips, and chips get made in factories, and those factories use chemicals.

The point the petitioners press is that the harm doesn't stay inside the data center's fence line. "The rush to build more and more data centers is causing harm far beyond the data centers themselves," said Jane Williams, who chairs the Sierra Club's Grassroots Network National Clean Air Team — from the plants where the chemicals are used, to the roads they travel on, to the incinerators where they are burned.

And the chemistry problem isn't confined to fabrication. The chemicals tied to data center cooling, fire suppression and electronics manufacturing include refrigerants like Freon and Opteon, Teflon for cable insulation, Krytox for pumps and robotics, and Viton for sealing. Cooling systems can consume vast quantities of water, and the Natural Resources Defense Council notes that some immersion cooling techniques rely on PFAS — the "forever chemicals" that don't break down in a human body or in groundwater.

None of that shows up in the ribbon-cutting.

The EPA's own finding was that these may be dangerous

Under federal law, before a new chemical enters commerce, the EPA has to make a determination about it. That is the entire function. It is a gate.

The agency made one, and it is not reassuring. Under the heading "EPA's Determination," each order records that "in the absence of sufficient information to permit the Agency to make a reasoned evaluation of the health and environmental effects" of the substance, its manufacture, processing, distribution, use or disposal "may present an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment."

That is the statutory finding for a chemical the government cannot vouch for. Having made it, the EPA did not hold the approval back and go get the data. It authorized manufacture subject to conditions — gloves, chemical goggles, exposure controls, hazard labelling — and told the company to run the tests afterward, on a schedule that starts only once the EPA has approved the test protocols.

"We don't know" is not a finding of safety. It is the absence of one.

A pattern of an agency that doesn't want to regulate

This is the same EPA that, when a federal judge ruled its climate grant cancellations were illegal, decided the ruling meant it had to do nothing.

The through-line is an agency that treats its own obligations as optional — court orders, risk determinations, the statutory gate on new chemicals. What stays mandatory is the approval.

Who carries the cost

Chip fabs don't get built in wealthy neighborhoods. They get built where land is cheap, water is available, and a state government has offered a tax package. The people living downwind and downstream are the ones who absorb whatever P-26-0029 and P-26-0045 turn out to be.

They didn't get a vote on the approval. They aren't allowed to know the chemical's name. And the federal agency that exists to answer "is this safe?" wrote down that there are "currently insufficient data to assess these compounds," and signed off.

Meanwhile Republicans across the country are competing to bring data centers to their states — often, as we've documented, while taking money from the utilities and tech firms building them and telling constituents their electric bills won't go up.

The chemicals are the part of the deal nobody puts in the press release.

Source

Brett Wilkins, "Green Groups Sue Trump EPA for Approving Toxic Semiconductor Chemicals Amid AI Data Center Boom," Common Dreams, Aug. 14, 2026. Photo via Common Dreams.

The hazard findings and the determination quoted above are taken from the EPA's own TSCA Section 5 consent orders for P-26-0029 and P-26-0045 — signed by the EPA on June 3, 2026 — filed as appendices to the petitions for review. Earthjustice's press release describes those findings as "cancer... and even sudden death"; the orders themselves say "genetic toxicity" and "acute lethality," and do not identify either substance as a potential carcinogen.

Tommy Tuberville Asks ChatGPT About Medicare While He Drives Across Alabama. "You Don't Know Whether or Not They're 100 Percent Correct."

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 07:54:43 +0000

A United States senator has a staff. He has committee hearings, nonpartisan analysts at the Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, and the actual text of every bill he votes on.

Tommy Tuberville has a different method for the drive home.

A Washington Post investigation published August 13, 2026 found that members of Congress and their staff are handing large parts of their jobs to AI chatbots — with almost no rules anyone can name and no real enforcement. Tuberville is one of the members who told the Post about it on the record.

He asks ChatGPT questions about Medicare and Medicaid while driving across Alabama.

"It's kind of like you can sit there and talk to an expert," Tuberville told the Post. "You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct. But they put you on the right path."

Read that second sentence again. He is describing a source he knows may be wrong, on the two programs that pay for his constituents' health care.

Alabama is not an abstraction here

Medicare and Medicaid are not hypothetical topics for a senator from Alabama. They are the topics.

Alabama is one of the ten states that still has not expanded Medicaid, which means the coverage gap there is already about as wide as it gets in America. When a senator from that state says he is asking a chatbot about Medicaid to get "on the right path," the path in question runs through hospitals deciding whether to keep a labor and delivery unit open.

This is also not the first time Tuberville has talked about a program he clearly hasn't studied. In July, he stood on the Senate floor and called Social Security a government-approved "Ponzi scheme" — a program he has personally drawn about $93,000 from in three years, on top of his Senate salary.

He is now running for governor of Alabama, on the strength of that judgment.

The staffer who fed his phone into a chatbot

The Post's findings go well past one senator's commute.

The House and Senate have cleared staffers to use ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini; the House also approved Claude. The House bought 6,000 Copilot licenses last year to push staff toward using them.

What staff are actually doing with them:

Drafting speeches, press releases and questions for congressional hearings
Managing constituent mail
Drafting bill amendments
One staffer fed years of his phone contacts and text messages into Claude and had it build a database of reporters — what he pitched, what they took, what went badly
That same office has Claude running its communications budget, overseeing taxpayer-funded mailers and every ad sent to constituents

Congress does have rules. AI can't be used to make deepfakes, make personnel decisions, handle sensitive information like constituent data, or finalize legislation. A bot may help draft a bill, but a human has to do the final review. A bot may help draft a constituent reply, but it isn't supposed to be told who the constituent is.

Most staffers who talked to the Post didn't know those rules existed. Enforcement is left to staff policing themselves or turning in a colleague.

"You're still not supposed to put constituent data into AI," one staffer said. "There are weird things around where the rules are. I don't know all of them."

"Claude responded:"

We already know what happens when nobody checks, because it happened in public this summer.

Anna Paulina Luna filed an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act — the annual bill that sets Pentagon policy and spending levels — directing Defense Department resources to the southwest border. Her office posted a summary of it.

The summary began: "increasing example specific factors. Identical to H.R. 100 (118th Congress).11:25 AM???? Claude responded:"

Washington Post reporter John Hudson posted the screenshot. The site was quietly edited to remove the line. Luna defended the practice, saying her staff had used AI to spell- and grammar-check the summary rather than the amendment text, and that "most staff use it."

That defense is worth taking seriously, because of what it concedes. The chatbot output went out under a member of Congress's name, with the chatbot's own words still in it, and nobody in the office read it before it published. If that is the level of review a summary gets, the question of what review the amendment got answers itself.

The one who admitted he hadn't read the bill

Mike Flood also turned up in the Post's reporting. He asked a chatbot where private equity firms were buying single-family homes while he worked on a bipartisan housing bill last year.

On its own that's the most defensible use on this list — a factual lookup, in an area where the answer is checkable.

But Flood is a specific case. In May 2025 he voted for Trump's budget bill, and five days later stood in front of constituents in Seward, Nebraska, and admitted that a provision stripping federal courts of the power to enforce their own orders "was unknown to me when I voted for that bill."

That's the worry in one sentence. The problem in Congress was never a shortage of information. It's that members vote on 1,100-page bills they haven't read. A tool that produces a confident-sounding paragraph in four seconds doesn't fix that. It makes not reading feel like reading.

Why this matters more than it sounds

It is easy to make this a joke about an old senator and a chatbot. It isn't one.

A chatbot will answer a question about Medicaid eligibility rules with total confidence whether or not it is right. It does not know which version of a bill passed. It cannot tell you that the CBO revised a number last month. It has no idea how many people in Alabama's 3rd District are on SNAP.

Tuberville knows that — he said so. "You don't know whether or not they're 100 percent correct."

He said it anyway, out loud, to a national newspaper, as a description of how he learns about the programs he votes on. The only account any of these three has given of checking the output is Luna's, after the fact: she said she had told her staff to double-check and be more thorough.

There is a version of this story where AI helps a small congressional office do more with less. There is also the version the Post actually found: no training, rules nobody has read, no enforcement, and a member of Congress deciding what he thinks about Medicare somewhere on I-65.

Source

The Wild—and Unregulated—Ways Lawmakers Are Using AI Chatbots — Hafiz Rashid, The New Republic, August 13, 2026, reporting on The Washington Post's investigation, also summarized by Raw Story. Photo: Finn Gomez / Getty Images via The New Republic.

A Data Center Wanted to Expand Next to a Drinking Water Reservoir in His District. Nine Days Later, Mike Lawler Went on TV to Say the Rules Are the Problem.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:32:47 +0000

Data centers are giant buildings full of computers that run artificial intelligence. They use enormous amounts of electricity and enormous amounts of water, and somebody has to pay to build the power lines and substations that feed them. In the Hudson Valley, that somebody is you.

Mike Lawler represents New York's 17th District — Rockland, Putnam, and parts of Westchester and Dutchess. Several data centers have been proposed there. And over the past year, his constituents have been showing up at town halls and planning board meetings, more than a hundred at a time, to fight them.

On July 17, 2026, Lawler went on Fox Business to talk about data centers. He did not talk about his constituents. He went on "Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street" to attack New York's new limits on data center permits, arguing they hurt innovation and investment and push the industry toward rivals like China. The segment's title says it plainly: banning data centers will only hurt New York's economy.

Nine days earlier, the planning board in his own district had voted unanimously to stop one.

What happened in Orangeburg

Orangeburg, in Rockland County, has quietly become a regional data center hub — with facilities operated for or associated with Bloomberg, JPMorganChase, DataBank and 1547 Critical Systems Realty, according to Rockland News. DataBank runs a 20-megawatt facility at 2000 Corporate Drive. That address sits near Lake Tappan — a reservoir that supplies drinking water to communities across the New Jersey line.

DataBank wanted to build a second phase. Residents organized against it.

In May, residents rallied outside Orangetown Town Hall, chanting "We can't drink data" and calling for a moratorium on further growth. They raised the electricity demand, the water, the jobs AI might replace, and the possibility that their power bills would go up to pay for it all.

The company scaled the project back — cutting the proposed building roughly in half, from 146,000 square feet to about 77,862, and dropping a planned electrical substation. It didn't help. On July 8, 2026, the Orangetown Planning Board voted unanimously that the expansion could have significant environmental effects and ordered a full environmental impact statement — which stops the project until that study is done. More than 100 residents gathered outside town hall before the meeting, alongside Food & Water Watch, Indivisible Rockland, the Data Center Crisis Coalition and the Sierra Club.

The reasons its consultants and residents gave were not abstract: electricity use, air quality, noise, diesel exhaust, and the site's proximity to the Lake Tappan reservoir. Peggy Kurtz of the Rockland Sierra Club put it directly:

"The possibility of contamination of Lake Tappan, which serves northern NJ communities, from leaking tanks or from an electrical fire is very real."

It is not just Rockland. In Dutchess County, residents have been fighting a proposed 1-gigawatt data center in East Fishkill — one of the largest data center proposals in New York State. More than 1,000 people signed a petition against it, citing noise, water use, electricity costs, grid instability and environmental damage. One resident's summary: "Our energy bills are already off the charts, and this new facility would likely only further burden area residents."

Then the state acted, and he objected

On July 14, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62, the first statewide moratorium of its kind in the country.

It is worth being precise about what it does, because a lot of the noise around it was not precise. It is not a ban on building data centers. It directs the state Department of Environmental Conservation to pause discretionary permit applications for data centers that would draw at least 50 megawatts, and only where those applications had not already been declared complete. Local zoning, planning and building approvals aren't touched. Facilities used mainly for manufacturing, research, education and medical care are exempt. The pause lasts while the state finishes an environmental review — up to a year.

The reason for it is a number: nearly 12,000 megawatts of proposed data center demand had entered New York's electric grid queue as of May 2026, more than 8,000 megawatts of that added during 2025 alone. Hochul said the surge raises the risk that residential and business customers get stuck helping pay for the transmission lines and grid upgrades large tech companies need. The order also tells regulators to consider requiring developers to pay into a grid-acceleration fund or finance new generation and battery storage themselves, and Hochul said she will seek legislation ending statewide sales-tax exemptions for the largest data centers.

Three days later, Lawler was on Fox Business calling it a mistake.

Note what he did not do. He did not say Lake Tappan should be protected. He did not say the 12,000 megawatts should be paid for by the companies asking for it. Food & Water Action, endorsing his opponent, pointed out that Lawler has not spoken out against any of the data center projects proposed in his district — in Orangeburg, in East Fishkill, or at Indian Point in Buchanan — while he has criticized the state's attempt to slow them down.

He already voted to take this power away from New York entirely

Here is the part that ties it together.

On May 22, 2025, the House passed Trump's budget bill by a single vote, 215 to 214. Lawler voted yes. The version he voted for contained a provision that would have imposed a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules — a sweeping preemption that would have stopped more than 1,000 state AI bills in their tracks.

The Senate stripped it out on July 1, 2025, by a near-unanimous vote of 99 to 1 — after criticism from state attorneys general, governors, consumer advocates and Republican senators, and after Marsha Blackburn withdrew from a compromise saying the provision was "not acceptable to those who need these protections the most."

Had the provision Lawler voted for survived, Albany's ability to write AI rules would have been frozen until 2035 — and Hochul's order would likely not have been possible, because it targets hyperscale data centers, which are generally AI data centers. We wrote about the same vote in Pennsylvania, where all ten Republicans in the House delegation backed it while their constituents' power bills climbed.

So the sequence is: vote to strip states of the power to regulate AI, watch the Senate kill that 99–1, then go on national television to complain when your state uses the power it barely kept.

"Energy affordability" — when it's a press release

Three months before the Fox Business appearance, Lawler introduced the Energy Affordability and Reliability Act of 2026, which would create an Office of Energy Affordability inside the U.S. Department of Energy to study how federal energy policy affects household bills. He described it as a response to an "energy affordability crisis":

"Energy affordability and reliability are fundamental to the strength of our economy and the well-being of Hudson Valley families."

That is a real sentence about a real problem. The trouble is what he does when the affordability crisis has a name and an address.

A new office that writes reports about energy costs is safe. Saying no to a 1-gigawatt facility in East Fishkill is not. Asking data centers to pay for their own transmission upgrades instead of putting them on the residential bill is not. When the choice was between an abstraction and the specific thing driving demand on the Hudson Valley's grid, he picked the abstraction and went on TV against the specific thing.

And the economic case he's defending doesn't hold up well up close. Rockland County's Industrial Development Agency approved nearly $77 million in sales-tax exemptions for a roughly $1 billion JPMorganChase data center expansion in Orangeburg. The project pledged to create one additional permanent job, according to documents reviewed by New York Focus and reported by Rockland News. Seventy-seven million dollars of foregone sales tax. One permanent job.

This isn't a fringe position he's standing up to

Lawler's framing on Fox Business was that restricting data centers is an anti-growth, anti-innovation idea that helps China. The public does not see it that way, and neither do his neighbors.

A June 2026 Reuters/Ipsos survey found that 57% of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their community, against 14% who said they were okay with one near them. 77% said they were worried that AI would make electricity more expensive.

In his district, that concern has a face: the retiree in Orangeburg watching a Con Edison bill, the East Fishkill parent who signed one of a thousand names on a petition, the Sierra Club volunteer worried about a reservoir. They organized, they showed up, and they got their planning board to listen.

Their congressman's contribution to that fight was a television appearance on the other side of it.

Byron Donalds ran the same play in Florida, promising data centers wouldn't raise electric bills while their developers wrote him $894,000 in checks — we covered that too. The pattern is consistent across states: the buildings go up, the bills go up, and the Republicans who represent the people paying those bills spend their airtime defending the buildings.

Mike Lawler is up for reelection in November in one of the closest House races in the country. His constituents have already told him where they stand on this. He answered them on Fox Business.

Source

Fox Business, "Banning data centers will only hurt New York's economy, says Rep Mike Lawler," Maria Bartiromo's Wall Street, July 17, 2026. Image: Fox Business.

Three Counties in Brett Guthrie's District Voted to Slow Down Data Centers. He Chairs the Committee That Could Actually Help Them.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:47:00 +0000

People in Kentucky's 2nd Congressional District have been showing up at county meetings with signs that say "listen to the people."

They are not there about Washington. They are there about data centers — the enormous warehouses of computers that run artificial intelligence, that drink electricity and water, and that require somebody to build new power plants to feed them. Somebody, meaning everyone else on the grid.

Their congressman is Brett Guthrie, and he is not a backbencher on this. He is the Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the committee in Congress with jurisdiction over the electric grid. If there is one member of the House who could do something about what data centers do to a power bill, it is him.

Here is what his own district has done, and what he has done back.

The revolt in KY-02

E&E News laid out the count in June. In Guthrie's district:

Breckinridge County passed a one-year moratorium in November 2025.
Daviess County passed a one-year moratorium on construction.
Meade County voted a data center proposal down after 3,000 people signed a petition against it.

That's three counties. Not activists bused in from somewhere — county governments in a deep-red district, hitting the brakes.

Maranda McDaniel, a Guthrie constituent who started the Daviess County petition, told E&E she was "really surprised" by how fast it took off. She also said something worth noting: she and the other organizers have been working county and city officials, and had not engaged with Guthrie's office at all.

The chairman of the committee that governs the grid, and the people in his district fighting a grid fight went to the county courthouse instead.

Meanwhile, in Hancock County, the Bitcoin mining company TeraWulf is planning to build on the site of a former aluminum smelter — a project that could draw as much as $14 billion and rank among the largest private investments in Kentucky history.

A Change.org petition against that one, quoted by E&E, gets at why people are uneasy:

"[The smelter plant] was a source of real, family-supporting jobs for Hancock County... More than 600 workers were left waiting and hoping production would one day return. Now, those hopes have been replaced with a very different proposal."

Six hundred jobs became a computer warehouse. That's the trade people are being asked to accept.

What Guthrie said

Asked about the pushback, Guthrie was careful:

"I hear from people, I do. I think it's fair to be concerned. Now, to say, 'don't do anything,' I think that can take our communities out of what could be the industry of the future. But anytime there's anything developing, it makes people anxious, and it's fair to have concerns."

And later in the same story:

"I do not minimize the concerns people have about data centers or just AI. You should be anxious about it."

That is a man who has heard his constituents and does not intend to do what they're asking.

What he did

Two things, and they point in different directions.

First, he asked the federal government to investigate the opposition. In June, Guthrie signed a letter asking the FBI and the White House science advisers to look into whether China is behind some of the campaign against data centers. "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments," he said.

We've written about that letter and the two advocacy-group reports it leans on — Bob Latta of Ohio signed it too, five weeks after telling a hearing that constituents' concerns "deserve to be taken seriously". Neither report establishes any link between a foreign government and a county meeting in Kentucky.

The head of the industry's own trade group, the Data Center Coalition, was more honest about it than the chairmen were. Asked about the China claims, Josh Levi told E&E: "I have no reason to disbelieve that there is some of that happening, but I also indicated we know that there's also organic opposition in communities."

Three thousand signatures in Meade County is organic opposition in a community.

Second, he moved a bill. On July 21, 2026, Guthrie's committee approved H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act by 52-0. It was introduced by Gabe Evans of Colorado, with Kathy Castor of Florida as its lead Democratic cosponsor — not by Guthrie, who is not on it at all — but he has made it a priority and predicted a floor vote.

Guthrie's pitch for it: "As we continue to build the infrastructure needed to win the AI race with China to AI dominance, it's critical that the companies building data centers are the ones paying for their own electric bills."

That sounds like exactly what the people at those county meetings want. Read the bill and it is considerably less than that.

What the Ratepayer Protection Act actually does

It amends a 1978 law called the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act, and the mechanism it uses is the one that law is known for: it creates a federal standard and then tells states to think about it.

From the bill text: within one year of enactment, each state regulatory authority "shall commence consideration... or set a hearing date for consideration" of the standard. Within two years, each "shall complete the consideration and make the determination."

Consider. Determine. Nowhere does the bill require a state to adopt the standard. A state utility commission can hold the hearing, decide against it, and be in full compliance with the law.

The bill goes further in the other direction, too. A whole subsection says the requirement doesn't apply at all if, before enactment, the state already "conducted a proceeding to consider implementation of the standard (or a comparable standard)" — or if the state legislature merely "has voted on" it. A proceeding that considered it and said no still counts.

So: a bill that requires states to hold a meeting, with an exemption for states that already held a meeting.

There is a reason it passed 52-0. The earlier, broader version of it carried endorsements from Microsoft and Google — the companies building the data centers. Before the markup, committee leaders narrowed it to cover data centers alone rather than every customer drawing 100 megawatts or more, and the industry's trade group objected to that change. Microsoft and Google have not publicly changed their positions.

Alphabet, Google's parent company, is the largest single organization on Guthrie's 2026 contributor list at $54,500 — all of it from people who work there, none from the company's PAC. Amazon accounts for $33,500, $10,000 of it straight from its PAC. Both are named on his own report card.

The bills are already going up

None of this is hypothetical for Kentuckians.

In February 2026, the Kentucky Public Service Commission approved rate increases for the state's largest electric utility: 4.73% for the average residential LG&E electric customer — about $5.14 a month — and 6.54% for Kentucky Utilities customers, about $8.73 a month. The utility had asked for more, and the commission cut it back.

Buried in the same order, per the Kentucky Lantern's account, were new regulations for handling the electricity load from power-hungry data centers. The state commission was already writing data center rules while Guthrie's bill was still asking states to consider writing them.

That's the shape of this whole story. The states, counties and utility commissions are the ones actually deciding what data centers pay. The one federal official with the most direct power over the grid asked the FBI about the people complaining, and moved a bill that tells the states to think it over.

The chairman's job

Guthrie has been in Congress since 2009 — 17 years — and he runs one of the most powerful committees in the House. He is the person who decides which bills his committee takes up and which ones it doesn't. He gets to set the agenda.

He used that agenda to hold a hearing, advance a bill that requires nothing, and go after "who is bankrolling" the opposition.

Three counties in his own district have already voted. They did not need a briefing from the FBI to figure out what they think.

Source

Amelia Davidson and Nico Portuondo, "Powerful House Republican getting pressure on data centers back home", E&E News by POLITICO, June 16, 2026. Photo: Francis Chung/POLITICO.

Julia Letlow Signed a Secrecy Deal With Meta. Then She Started Buying Meta Stock.

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 07:28:42 +0000

On June 29, 2024, Louisiana Congresswoman Julia Letlow signed a nondisclosure agreement with a company called Laidley LLC.

Laidley LLC is not really a company. It is a shell — the data center subsidiary of Meta, the corporation that owns Facebook and Instagram. Signing that paper gave Letlow access to confidential details about Meta's plans to build a $50 billion data center in Richland Parish, right in her own district.

Within months, she started buying stock in Meta. She also started buying stock in Nvidia — the company whose chips make Meta's data centers run.

Then she didn't tell anybody for more than a year.

That is the finding of a Gulf States Newsroom investigation by reporter Drew Hawkins, built on the NDA itself, which Louisiana Economic Development released in response to a public records request.

What the law says she was supposed to do

There is a federal law for exactly this situation. It is called the STOCK Act, and it does two simple things. It bars members of Congress from trading on nonpublic information they get through their job. And it gives them 45 days to report any trade they make.

Forty-five days. That's it. Tell the public what you bought and what you sold.

Letlow blew past that deadline by more than a year on the Meta and Nvidia trades.

Here is the timeline the records show:

June 29, 2024 — Letlow signs the NDA with Meta's shell company.
Six months later — she speaks at the public announcement of the data center, celebrating it.
Jan. 31, 2025 — she sells part of her Nvidia holdings and buys between $1,001 and $15,000 more Meta stock.
A week later — she sells part of her Meta holdings.
July 2, 2025 — she sells the rest of her Meta shares.
Aug. 11, 2025 — her broker notifies her. That is the notification date sitting beside all six Meta and Nvidia lines.
Jan. 13, 2026 — she finally discloses them, in a periodic transaction report she signed that day. More than six months after the last sale, and more than a year after the first purchase.

At that public launch event, Letlow was delighted. "What a day for Richland Parish. I'm so honored to be here with all of you today," she said. "I was so excited about it, I even skipped a vote in Washington. Don't tell anybody, please."

She skipped a vote she was elected to cast, to appear at an event for a company whose stock she was buying. And she joked about it.

Her office says she didn't know

Letlow would not do an interview. Her spokesperson, Matt Smith, sent a written statement saying she had no role in directing any of her trades, including the Meta ones, and that the NDA had nothing to do with them because she was unaware the trades were even happening.

That is a familiar defense. Robert Hogan, a political science professor at Louisiana State University who studies elections, said members of Congress use it constantly — and that it's almost impossible to check.

"A lot of members make this argument," Hogan said. "Maybe that's the case. It's hard to tell."

There is a problem with the "it was limited in scope" part of the explanation, though. Smith said the NDA was narrow — just about "protecting preliminary business information."

The actual document is broader than that. Its definition of confidential information covers financial information, pricing, discounts and proposed terms. And it explicitly includes "the existence of this Agreement and the fact or nature of the discussions between the parties."

Read that again. The agreement barred Letlow from even admitting the agreement existed. A sitting member of Congress signed a contract with a private corporation that legally gagged her from telling her own constituents that she was talking to that corporation about a $50 billion project on their land.

Watchdogs say the whole thing is strange

The first thing that struck experts was not the stock. It was the NDA itself.

Kedric Payne is general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and used to be deputy chief counsel at the House Office of Congressional Ethics. Meta's data center is a state economic development project, he pointed out — not a federal one. So why is a member of Congress involved deeply enough to need a secrecy agreement?

"That doesn't completely add up," Payne said.

Then there's the trading. Payne said this is a different and rarer category of problem than the usual congressional stock complaints.

"What we see here is that you have a lawmaker who appears to have access to non-public information and trades stock in a company related to that non-public information."

Nvidia wasn't a party to the NDA. Payne said that doesn't make those trades irrelevant. "You do not know what all was discussed with the NDA," he said, "but you can reasonably conclude that it would involve the business partners of Meta."

Hogan was careful not to overstate what a timeline alone can prove. "It's very hard to tell — did this motivate her purchase and sale? There are a lot of unknowns. But at the very least, it raises serious questions," he said.

The Meta trades were not a one-time slip

This is the part that should end any "honest mistake" reading.

In a report filed this January, Letlow disclosed 210 individual stock trades from the previous two years that she had failed to report on time. One hundred of them — including the Meta and Nvidia stock — were more than a year late.

Added up, those trades were worth somewhere between $225,000 and $3,185,000.

And the timing problem goes past Meta. On July 23, 2025, the House Appropriations Committee — which Letlow sits on — debated and approved budgets covering national security, the State Department and international lending institutions. Within two days, Letlow traded 16 stocks, including Boeing, Goldman Sachs, Taiwan Semiconductor and Visa. Combined value: between $16,000 and $240,000.

Letlow is not alone in ignoring this law. We found that 45 of the Republicans on this site broke the STOCK Act's disclosure rule — Letlow among them. The penalty is $200, and it is often waived. That is the entire consequence.

Payne's answer to anyone who wants to argue the sums are small:

"All trades are worth paying attention to. It's not about the value of the trade. It's about improper use of your official position, and about complying with the law."

Hogan put it in Louisiana terms. "Even on the low end of the range, $6,000 is a lot to the average Louisiana voter that she represents," he said. "It doesn't necessarily have to be a large sum in order for there to be nefarious possibilities there."

And she voted to ban the thing she was doing

Last month, the House passed the Stop Insider Trading Act, which would bar members of Congress from buying stocks and require them to give public notice before selling.

Letlow supported it.

She supported it while sitting on a pile of 210 late-disclosed trades, including stock in a company she had signed a secrecy agreement with.

Hogan named it plainly: "Perhaps there's some degree of irony here that she's busy trading stocks, not disclosing appropriately as she was required to by law and then voting for a law that clamps down on this behavior even more."

Payne was blunter about why that's not the contradiction it looks like. "There are many members of Congress who currently trade stocks and support banning the trade of such stocks," he said.

Voting for a rule is free. Following one is the hard part.

Who is actually going to look into this?

Here is the honest answer: probably nobody.

The House Ethics Committee has jurisdiction. It is controlled by Letlow's own party.

"If the potential investigators were Democrats, I think that things might look very different for her," Hogan said. "I think they may be less curious than Democrats would be."

That is the whole system in one sentence. The referee is on her team.

Why this matters for Louisiana

Letlow is not a backbencher. Since signing that NDA she got Trump's endorsement, beat incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy and state Treasurer John Fleming in the Republican primary, and is now her party's nominee for the U.S. Senate. She faces Democrat James Davis in November.

We've written before about how she got there — she backed censuring Cassidy in 2021 for voting to convict Trump, and five years later she took his seat. And we've traced the $9.2 million super PAC that helped put her there, funded by LNG money, Occidental Petroleum, a stack of Louisiana LLCs and four corporations that don't disclose their donors.

Now add this: a secrecy contract with a corporation that spent more than $26 million lobbying the federal government in 2025.

Letlow's NDA wasn't unique in Louisiana. At least 54 elected officials in the state have signed similar agreements tied to big industrial projects since Gov. Jeff Landry took office, and Landry personally signed the same Meta agreement in April 2024 — two months before Letlow did. More than 100 Louisiana state employees have signed NDAs with Landry's office.

That's the culture. Deals about Louisiana's land, water and power get made behind a legal gag, and the people who live there find out when somebody decides to tell them.

Hogan's point is the one worth sitting with:

"Citizens should expect members of Congress to be able to tell them the truth straight up about what they know, and these kinds of agreements hamper that free flow of information."

You are supposed to be able to ask your representative what's happening in your parish. Letlow signed a contract that made answering that question a breach of agreement — and then traded the stock of the company she signed it with.

Source

Rep. Julia Letlow bought Meta stock after signing an NDA with the company, records show — Drew Hawkins, WWNO / Gulf States Newsroom, August 10, 2026. Photo: AP Photo/Jack Brook.

A Group Sells AI Startups "Meaningful Access to Policymakers" for $3,500 a Month. Jay Obernolte Helped Launch It — and He's the Policymaker.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:29:05 +0000

Jay Obernolte is the most powerful voice on artificial intelligence in the House of Representatives.

He chairs the Science Committee's Subcommittee on Research and Technology. He chaired the House's bipartisan AI Task Force. He sits on Energy and Commerce, including its Communications and Technology subcommittee. In April 2026 his colleagues elected him chair of the House Republican Policy Committee, a leadership job. He is, by his own office's description, "the only serving member of Congress with a graduate-level degree in AI."

He is also the author of the bill that would decide how — and whether — America regulates the most powerful AI systems ever built.

And in October 2025, an AI conference company and a venture capital fund launched a nonprofit that sells AI startups access to people exactly like him. Obernolte helped launch it.

What the AI Coalition Sells

The group is called the AI Coalition. HumanX, which runs a large AI industry conference, and the venture fund Humanrace Capital tapped Obernolte to launch it, Axios reported.

Here is how the coalition describes itself, in its own words:

"the first nonprofit specifically designed to provide early-stage AI companies, from pre-seed through Series B, with meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations that will define the next decade of innovation"

Read that phrase again — not "a voice," not "education." Meaningful access to policymakers and influence over the regulations.

It is to be registered as both a 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(6), HumanX CEO Stefan Weitz told Axios, so it can do education and lobbying. Membership runs $1,750 to $3,500 a month. The plan includes Washington fly-ins, collective advocacy, and business development events, according to an AI policy newsletter's account of the launch.

That's up to $42,000 a year, from a pre-seed startup, for access.

Obernolte's stated reason is sympathetic on its face: at AI hearings on Capitol Hill, he said, the voices of smaller companies and entrepreneurs were missing. That's a real problem. Big AI firms have armies of lobbyists and small ones don't.

But look at what the fix actually is. The problem is that access to Congress is bought. The solution on offer is a cheaper subscription to the same thing — sold with the endorsement of the congressman writing the rules.

If access to your own government has a monthly price, the answer isn't a discount tier. It's that access shouldn't have a price.

The Regulations He's Selling Influence Over

This isn't abstract. Nine months after the coalition launched, Obernolte introduced the bill.

On July 23, 2026, he introduced the FRONTIER Act (H.R. 9925) with five original cosponsors, among them Rep. Lori Trahan — the first serious attempt at a federal framework for frontier AI. It requires the biggest developers to publish risk frameworks, hire outside auditors, and report safety incidents to the Commerce Department.

Then there's Section 9. In the bill's own text:

"Except as provided in subsection (c), no State or political subdivision of a State may adopt or enforce any law, regulation, order, or other requirement that imposes new substantive obligations on artificial intelligence developers with respect to any Covered Subject Area."

The "Covered Subject Areas" are frontier AI risk transparency, third-party auditing and independent verification, and incident reporting. Those are precisely the three things states have started regulating.

Subsection (c) leaves states four lanes: generally applicable laws that don't target developers, rules on how AI is used or deployed, rules protecting minors, and rules on what state governments themselves buy. What it does not leave them is any power to put a safety obligation on the companies building the models.

There is no sunset date in Section 9, or anywhere else in the bill. As written, that preemption is permanent.

It Would Override His Own State

Obernolte represents California's 23rd District. California passed the country's first frontier AI safety law.

Governor Newsom signed SB 53 on September 29, 2025. It requires large frontier developers to publish a safety framework, sets up a channel for companies and the public to report critical safety incidents to the state's Office of Emergency Services, and protects whistleblowers who disclose significant health and safety risks. Noncompliance carries a civil penalty enforceable by California's attorney general.

Transparency. Incident reporting. Those are two of the three Covered Subject Areas his bill takes away from states.

So the congressman from California wrote a bill that would preempt the core of the AI safety law California just passed — and helped launch a group that charges AI companies a monthly fee for "influence over the regulations."

Who Already Funds Him

Obernolte doesn't need the coalition to hear from AI money. It's already in his campaign account.

At the top of his contributor list sits Anthropic PBC — not the company, whose PAC has given him nothing, but its employees and their households, at $71,862 on OpenSecrets' current count — alongside the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. The PACs of Google, SpaceX, Comcast, AT&T, and Charter are writing him checks too — companies regulated by the committees he sits on.

Only 4% of his money comes from small grassroots donors. Sixty-nine percent comes from PACs, super PACs and large donors, and he ranks #361 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding.

He is not a congressman who has to go looking for the tech industry's opinion. It arrives.

The Rest of Us Don't Get a Subscription

Here's what the $3,500-a-month tier buys that Obernolte's actual constituents don't get.

In February 2025, about 200 people packed the Yucca Valley Community Center to ask him about DOGE firing staff at Joshua Tree National Park. He defended the cuts, said of Elon Musk that "I'm very glad there is someone looking at all of the waste," and the room shouted him down. His office's response afterward was to tell the paper that many in the crowd "were from outside the district and attended with the intent to disrupt rather than engage in a productive conversation," and to call the event an "anomaly."

That's the difference. A pre-seed AI startup in another state pays a monthly fee and gets a fly-in. A grandmother in Twentynine Palms gets a night in a community center and a press statement calling her an outside agitator.

We've seen what the AI industry's money buys when it's spent directly: in Texas, the AI and crypto industries spent $2.1 million electing Carlos De La Cruz — twice what his own campaign raised. And we've seen what preemption does downstream: in Pennsylvania, all ten of the state's Republicans in the U.S. House voted for a ten-year ban on states writing AI rules while their constituents absorbed the electricity costs of the data centers.

Obernolte is further upstream than any of them. He's the one drafting the language.

What We Deserve

None of this requires believing Obernolte is corrupt in a criminal sense. There's no allegation that he broke a law.

The problem is the arrangement itself, and it's simple enough to state in one sentence: the member of Congress writing the country's AI rules lent his name to a business that sells companies influence over those rules, by the month.

He is also, by his own office's description, "a video game developer and business owner" — still in the industry he regulates.

When a lawmaker's name becomes part of a product other people sell, the public is entitled to ask who he works for. AI is going to reshape jobs, elections, schools, and safety in the High Desert the same as everywhere else. The people who live there are not pre-seed through Series B. They can't buy a tier.

They just get to vote.

Sources

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society summarizing Axios, "AI startups find a D.C. advocate in Rep. Obernolte" (October 2025), and the text of the FRONTIER Act, H.R. 9925 (introduced July 23, 2026).

Bob Latta Asked the FBI to Investigate Whether Ohioans Are Mad About Their Electric Bills Because of China

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 10:49:55 +0000

On June 4, 2026, Bob Latta signed a letter to the director of the FBI.

He wasn't reporting a crime. He was asking the federal government to look into why people in his own state are angry about their electric bills.

Latta is the Republican congressman for Ohio's 5th District and the chairman of the Energy Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. That subcommittee is the one in the House with jurisdiction over the electric grid. If your power bill goes up, his committee is where the federal end of that story is written.

Ohio has a data center problem. Data centers are giant warehouses of computers that run AI. They use staggering amounts of electricity and water, and somebody has to build the power plants that feed them. Ohio now ranks fifth in the country for the number of data centers it hosts, and dozens more are on the way. Township trustees, city councils, and ordinary residents across the state have been showing up to meetings to fight them.

Latta's response to that was to co-sign a letter to FBI Director Kash Patel and the co-chairs of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, asking what the administration is doing about "foreign influence campaigns" that might be stirring the whole thing up.

What the letter actually says

The letter was signed by Latta, Energy and Commerce Chairman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman John Joyce of Pennsylvania. It leans on two reports — one from the Bitcoin Policy Institute, one from a group called Power the Future — claiming that Chinese state media, foreign-funded nonprofits, and billionaire donors are working to turn Americans against data centers.

As the Cleveland.com report on the letter notes, those reports do not establish any direct coordination between foreign governments and the specific campaigns opposing data centers in the United States. They describe networks and funding flows. They don't connect them to the township meeting in your county.

The letter's own language is grand:

"The U.S. is in a global race for technological superiority that has significantly raised the stakes for economic and national security if our nation falls behind."

Guthrie put it more bluntly in the committee's press release: "Americans deserve to know who is bankrolling the disinformation campaign that seeks to block critical infrastructure investments."

The chairmen gave the administration two weeks to brief them.

Five weeks earlier, Latta said the opposite

Here is the part that doesn't fit.

On April 29, 2026 — thirty-six days before he signed that letter — Latta gaveled in a hearing of his own subcommittee titled "Meeting Growing Power Demand While Protecting Ratepayers." In his prepared opening statement, he said this:

"At the same time, the American people are understandably uneasy. Many question whether AI, and the data centers that power it, will ultimately do more harm than good, particularly when it comes to individual energy costs. These concerns deserve to be taken seriously."

In April the concerns were understandable and deserved to be taken seriously. In June they were something the FBI should look into.

Nothing changed in between except that the backlash got louder. And it got louder because the bills got bigger.

The bills really are going up, and data centers really are why

You don't need a foreign agent to explain an Ohio electric bill. You need PJM, the 13-state grid operator that serves Ohio.

PJM runs a "capacity auction" — power plants get paid to promise they'll deliver electricity when demand peaks, and that cost gets baked into everyone's bill. It is a small share of the bill, and it has been climbing fast. A few years ago, capacity cleared at about $29. Ohio Capital Journal reported that the 2024 auction shot to $270, and the next one hit the court-imposed cap of $329. The cause is not mysterious: rapid demand growth from users like data centers, running into a supply of power plants that is shrinking as old ones retire.

The same report cites a Natural Resources Defense Council study projecting that the average family will pay about $70 more a month on their electric bill by 2028.

The most recent auction, in July 2026, cleared at the maximum price again — and still came up short of PJM's own reliability target. WOUB Public Media reported the Ohio Consumers' Counsel's reaction:

"Today's auction sends the wrong message. Consumers should not have to pay record high prices and still face growing reliability concerns."

That's the state office Ohio created to represent residential utility customers. Not a nonprofit funded from overseas.

Meanwhile, in that same April opening statement, Latta told the hearing that "the Lawrence Berkely National Lab and others have found that data center load growth lessens retail electricity costs." Ohioans opening their bills are not finding that.

The evidence Latta didn't have

Six days after the letter went out, OpenAI published its own report on exactly this. And it did find something: a cluster of banned ChatGPT accounts, likely operating from China, generating English-language posts and cartoons claiming data centers were raising electricity prices for ordinary families. OpenAI named it the "Data Center Bandwagon" campaign.

So a Chinese operation did exist. Read what OpenAI said about it:

"The targeting of OpenAI and US data center buildouts is significant not because the operation appears to have shifted public opinion... The operation sought to exploit and amplify existing public concerns about energy prices and local impacts of data center development, but we found no evidence of meaningful breakout beyond its own activity."

In plain English: some people in China posted things, almost nobody saw them, and the concerns they were trying to exploit were already there. That is the opposite of a foreign influence campaign creating a backlash. It's a foreign influence campaign failing to catch a ride on one.

Even an analyst who studies Chinese influence operations warned the framing would backfire. Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on X — in a post Newsmax quoted — that telling Americans their concerns over electric bills and water use were "paid for by the CCP" is "not a winning political message." He said the Chinese-backed propaganda itself is real. He just didn't think blaming Americans' bills on it was smart.

What it sounds like to the people paying the bill

The Cleveland.com podcast Today in Ohio put it about as directly as it can be put. Host Chris Quinn:

"He's basically saying that Ohioans are too stupid to come up with their own independent thought, so it has to be China."

Host Leila Atassi made the point that actually matters:

"If China posted a million tweets today saying Ohio electric bills are going up because of data centers, it still is true that Ohio electric bills are going up because of data centers," she said. "The facts don't change based on who's talking about them."

And Ohioans have been saying it themselves, in person, on the record. At a hearing of the Ohio General Assembly's Select Committee on Data Centers, Brown County attorney Austin Baurichter — one of the people trying to put a data center limit before Ohio voters — answered the foreign-money charge before Latta's letter had even landed:

"We are not radicals backed by foreign interests."

This is a pattern, not a one-off

Ohio isn't alone, and Latta isn't the only Republican whose answer to the data center backlash is to change the subject. In Florida, Byron Donalds promised the state's new data center law guarantees your rates won't go up — PolitiFact rated that Half True, and the developers behind four Florida projects have given him $894,000. In Pennsylvania, every Republican in the state's U.S. House delegation voted for a ten-year ban on states enforcing their own AI rules while their constituents' bills climbed. Latta's own Ohio colleague Troy Balderson wrote a bill that would legally redefine burning gas as "clean" energy.

The common thread is who gets protected. Not the household.

What a chairman could have done instead

Latta holds one of the few gavels in Congress that could actually do something here. He can subpoena. He can write the bill. He can haul PJM in and make it answer for a demand forecast that lands on residential customers.

He held the hearing. He introduced bills. And then, when his constituents kept complaining anyway, he asked the FBI to find out who put them up to it.

Ohioans in the 5th District will get to weigh in this November. Latta faces Democrat Brian Shaver, the Fostoria city council president, who has been touring all nine counties in the district holding informal town halls and running on three words: affordability, accountability, availability.

Latta has held this seat since 2007. Somewhere in those 19 years, the job stopped being about the people getting the bill.

Source

"Ohio data center opposition: is China involved? Congress wants answers" by Sabrina Eaton, cleveland.com, June 8, 2026. Photo: data center protestors at the Hillsboro Civic Center in Hillsboro, Oregon, before a June 2, 2026 city council work session, by Mike Rogoway/The Oregonian.