Money

Senate Democrats kill data center bill as too weak, their candidate cashes its industry's checks.

By LouOne More Question · the matinee edition, 30 September 2026

I've got it right here, in my coat pocket — the renewal notice from the electric company. Comes every year about this time, same manila envelope, same red print along the top: RATE ADJUSTMENT NOTICE. I keep them. My wife says I keep too much. Sometimes you need last year's number next to this year's number.

I'm sitting on the porch with this year's notice in one hand, and I've got some other paper spread out next to it — clippings, mostly, the kind I collect and then can't find when I need them. Found these, though.

On September 5th, the Hill reported that House Democrats were treating a rising issue — the cost of electricity tied to data centers — as what the story itself called a "political gift," something that might help flip the House their way in November. Gift. That's the word in the piece. I wrote it down.

One week later, September 12th, the House was scheduled to take up a bipartisan bill — the Ratepayer Protection Act, they called it — aimed at making tech companies cover their own data centers' power costs. The clipping I've got says scheduled, for that coming Tuesday. It doesn't say passed, not on that date, and I'm not going to tell you it does. I just don't have that page.

Five days later, September 17th, a Senate Democrat — Senator Heinrich, of New Mexico — stopped that same bill from moving by unanimous consent, a process where it only takes one senator standing up to stop it cold. How many senators did it take, that day, to keep the Ratepayer Protection Act from passing?

Then Thursday, September 24th, Palm Beach County, Florida — the president's own county — voted six to nothing to pause new large-scale data center construction there for a year. Is that the same industry the Senate bill was written to rein in?

Which brings us to this Wednesday, September 30th. The Ratepayer Protection Act came up for a real vote in the Senate, a cloture vote, and it fell three short of the sixty it needed. Senate Democrats did the blocking. By then, the bill had already passed the House, with bipartisan support on both sides, the record says. And the reason the Democrats gave for stopping it in the Senate — I found the page — was that it was too weak. Not strong enough to actually make the tech companies pay.

I'm not arguing with that. I'm asking you to hold it next to the next thing I found.

Because that same week, the Lever reported that Deb Haaland — the Senate Democrats' own candidate for governor of New Mexico, a drought state, Senator Heinrich's home state — had taken campaign money from the data center industry. The industry the bill they'd just called too soft was written to rein in. "I can walk and chew gum at the same time," she said, asked about it. That's on the page too.

Same industry. Same week. That's what the pages said, side by side.

I was going to leave it there. But before I go back inside — one more thing, and I promise it's the last one — there's a second envelope on the porch railing, from the toll authority, renewing my transponder at a higher rate too. Same season, different company. And I keep turning back to the one question underneath it all: whose checks, the record says, paid into the Senate Democrats' own candidate for governor, the same week Senate Democrats called the data center bill too weak to pass?

This story on its own page →

The renovation Trump used to oust Powell clears him, no referral; his own war chest gets one.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the matinee edition, 30 September 2026

Ten days ago this desk left an account open: a war in Iran the Congressional Budget Office priced at nearly $40 billion, a figure its own report called conservative. That line has not moved since. In the same stretch, a senator who voted to confirm the defense secretary called for his firing twice, and a Republican congressman filed articles of impeachment against him. No dollar figure attaches to either of those two, so they sit in the ledger as columns without totals, which is its own kind of entry.

Then two watchdog reports came in, five days apart, on two different funds.

On September 25, the Campaign Legal Center closed its review of the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC. Its finding: Trump's stated control over that fund's spending decisions is, in the group's words, a "clear-cut violation of campaign finance law." Citing decades of legal precedent, the CLC argued federal officeholders may not direct a super PAC's spending. The finding went out as an accusation with somewhere to land.

On September 30, the Federal Reserve's own inspector general closed its review of the $2.5 billion headquarters renovation — the project Trump spent the summer citing as grounds to try to remove Jerome Powell. The finding: poorly managed, cost overruns, no misconduct, no illegal conduct. The New York Times reported the inspector general made no referral to the attorney general. The Washington Post reported the Justice Department had already dropped its own inquiry into the project earlier this year. Powell no longer holds the chair; Kevin Warsh does, and on September 16, under Warsh, the Fed raised rates a quarter point anyway, over Trump's objections.

Between those two dates sits a third. On September 18, Senate Republicans, per The Hill, rebuffed Trump's attacks on that rate decision. His own party would not follow him into the renovation complaint either — not into a firing, and, this week, not into a referral.

Run the two files side by side and the totals match the headlines, not the politics. $2.5 billion in public money produced cost overruns, a finding of poor management, and zero referrals. $400 million in political money produced a finding of clear-cut violation and one live complaint. Same week, same species of watchdog report, one line item that goes nowhere and one that goes somewhere next. The gap isn't in the math, hon. It's in what each column is attached to.

This story on its own page →

Bill titled "Stop Insider Trading Act" dies over a voter ID amendment, not insider trading.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the matinee edition, 30 September 2026

Ruth here. I want to close one ledger before I open another, because they're the same ledger, it turns out.

Start with the timeline you already have on file. On August 27th, fiscal hawks in Treasury Secretary Bessent's own party called his claim that the country could grow past $40 trillion in debt skeptical math. By September 4th the bond market was setting mortgage rates faster than Congress could set policy, and on the 9th his own fix for rising yields backfired: yields rose anyway, stocks fell. On the 15th he was answering to Congress about it, and by the 20th Treasury was checking whether it could send $5,000 checks to voters without asking Congress for the money at all. I ran that column. I stand by it. I told you to watch the word "dividend." Today, watch the word "stop."

The bill on the floor Wednesday was named the Stop Insider Trading Act. The New York Post filed it as prohibiting members of Congress, spouses and dependent children from buying stock in publicly traded companies. The New York Times, filing on the same vote, called it a measure to limit, but not bar, that trading. Those two descriptions of one bill do not reconcile, hon. Nobody amended the text between editions; two newsrooms just read the same page differently, and the bill died at 53 to 47 before anybody had to settle which reading was right.

It died because Republicans attached a voter ID requirement, borrowed from the SAVE Act, to the trading ban. Fox News quoted Senator Schumer calling the pairing "trickery" and "skullduggery." The Washington Examiner and the Hill both file the mechanics the same way: the rider went on, the filibuster went up, and the trading language never got a vote of its own.

It accuses Representative Tom Suozzi of voting against a congressional trading ban after making, the ad says, over ten million dollars trading stocks in Washington. That ledger predates Wednesday's bill entirely.

Two days before that, on September 15th, Common Dreams reported Senate Democrats were within seven votes of advancing the Clarity Act, a crypto bill it says could enrich the president personally, after a hundred and ninety million dollars in industry lobbying.

So here is where the books stand. Congress cannot agree what "stop" means when the trading is its own, and it moved faster, in the same month, on a bill that touches the president's own portfolio. The name on the bill said stop. The vote said not yet.

This story on its own page →

Billionaires clear $3 billion, then $130 million, faster than a tax clears a ballot.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the matinee edition, 30 September 2026

That ran August 17. Eight days later, on August 25, the same name turned up again. Two campaign committees — Building a Better California, and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes — opened an advertising campaign against Proposition 40, California's one-time, five percent wealth tax on the state's richest residents, backed in reporting by Thiel and Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Proposition 40 needs a majority of California's voters in November to become law. Defeating it needs only enough advertising to keep that majority from forming.

That is where the ledger stood this morning, before this edition carried a name from a different part of the same balance sheet: Ken Griffin, the hedge fund founder, who volunteered three billion dollars of his own fortune to build a university campus for Carnegie Mellon in Miami. No vote required. No means test. Decided, and spent, in the same week that a ballot measure asking the state's richest residents for a one-time five percent of fortunes like his was still working toward the majority it needs by November.

Then came the receipt that closes the loop. The New York Post identified the buyer of Casa Encantada, the Bel-Air estate that set the record for the most expensive home sale in Los Angeles history: Peter Thiel, for $130 million.

None of it required a vote. The mansion needed no ballot measure. The ad campaign needed no supermajority, only enough money to keep one from forming on the other side. Proposition 40 asks millions of Californians to do, together, in November, what Thiel and Griffin each did alone, on their own schedule, with a signature: decide where a fortune this size goes. The difference is that one of these decisions is on a ballot. The other one just closed escrow.

This story on its own page →

Daily Caller calls economy resilient to gas headwinds that priced above $4 on all 31 August days.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the early bird edition, 30 September 2026

The ledger says one thing this week, hon, and the pump says another, and the desk's job is just to lay the two side by side and read out the gap.

On September 23, the Washington Examiner ran a column arguing that beneath the complaints about gas prices, the economy was doing fine, pointing to a preliminary second-quarter growth figure of 1.5 percent. Seven days later, on September 30, the government revised that same quarter to 2.2 percent, the kind of upward correction that happens when fuller data comes in, not evidence of anything hidden.

Also on September 30, the Daily Caller filed its own reading of that revision: growth, spending, and business activity showing resilience despite headwinds from the Iran war, even as polling finds Americans still pessimistic about the economy. The headwinds get a noun in that sentence and nothing else. They do not get a number.

The number is filed elsewhere, dated a month earlier. Common Dreams, writing up that data the same day, tied the run to the price of oil climbing since the war began; that is the reporter's read of the numbers, not a line from AAA's own release, and the ledger keeps that distinction on the page.

So the sequence runs in order: a war drives the price of a gallon of gas past four dollars for a full month, a fact dated and sourced. A growth number gets revised up seven-tenths of a point the following month. And an outlet sympathetic to the administration files the second fact as proof the first fact is being managed — resilience against headwinds it never once prices.

Nobody in this file disputes that GDP was revised up. Nobody disputes what a gallon of gas cost in August either. The two numbers just never turn up in the same sentence unless this desk puts them there. That is the reconciliation: the growth column and the pump receipt, run against each other, filed under the same season, gap unexplained by either side.

This story on its own page →

IN ITS OWN WORDS

Amazon's own paperwork confirms the leak that had already confirmed the leak, sixteen days on.

By MitchInvestigations · the early bird edition, 30 September 2026

I read filings for a living, and this one arrived already photocopied.

On 14 September, Jacobin published "How Amazon Busts Unions, in Its Own Words," built on internal documents disclosed in a British Columbia labor case. On 23 September, The Bullet published nearly the same headline, off the same case, the same documents.

On 30 September, Truthout filed the third: internal company documents, obtained by a Canadian labor board, showing Amazon deploying artificial intelligence to track workers' every move and get ahead of a union before it forms. Same board. Same case.

All together now — the documents lay out a surveillance program built to watch organizing happen before the workers doing it would call it organizing, with a response written down in enough detail that two outlets could summarize it independently and a third could confirm the summary without contradicting either one. That is not a leak that got corroborated later. That is a filing that agreed with itself three times running.

I have read a great deal of corporate language built to survive a courtroom by saying nothing a courtroom could use. This is not that kind of document. This is operational: the company's own paperwork, sitting in a labor board's file, describing what the company built and what the company built it to do. Nobody had to leak a secret twice. The record sat in a British Columbia case file, and whichever outlet got there first wrote it up, and then the next one did, and then the one after that.

Amazon's surveillance program is not alleged and it is not theoretical. It is filed. The company wrote it down, a Canadian labor board is holding the pages, and for sixteen days running, every outlet that opened the file described the same machine doing the same job on the same workers. All together now.

This story on its own page →

ONE REFERRAL

Fed clears $2.5 billion renovation; watchdog calls Trump's $400 million war chest a 'clear-cut violation.' Neither gets referred.

By RuthThe Money Desk · the supper edition, 30 September 2026

On September 18, Senate Republicans told The Hill they were uncomfortable with the president's attacks on the Federal Reserve over interest rates. The discomfort produced no vote and no referral; it registered and stayed there.

Seven days later, on September 25, the Campaign Legal Center closed its own review of a different number: the $400 million MAGA Inc. super PAC, which Trump has described directing the spending of. The watchdog did not soften it. Citing decades of precedent that a sitting officeholder cannot direct a super PAC's spending, it called his control of that money "a clear-cut violation of campaign finance law." The file carries a federal officeholder's name and the words "clear-cut violation."

On Wednesday, two more numbers moved. The Federal Reserve's inspector general finished its review of the $2.5 billion renovation of the central bank's headquarters, the same project Trump cited earlier this year when he moved to oust Jerome Powell. The Justice Department had already dropped its own investigation into that renovation. The inspector general's report went past where the Justice Department stopped: cost overruns, poor project management, no criminal violation, no referral to the attorney general. The New York Times had the number cold — nearly $2.5 billion, poorly managed, no referral attached.

Asked that same Wednesday about a different set of dollars, Trump gave his own accounting. His administration's government-funded ad campaigns, he told reporters, are not political. "I'm not running for office," he said. "That's a countrywide ad. That's an ad for the spirit of our country." His FCC chair, Brendan Carr, backed the read: the ads are "normal-course public service announcements," nothing that would "merit any sort of" review by his own agency.

What differs is the paperwork each one carries on the way there. The renovation carries a Justice Department inquiry and an inspector general's report behind its zero. The war chest carries a watchdog's finding of "clear-cut violation" behind its zero. The ad campaign carries a press conference and a chairman's opinion behind its zero. All three files end in the same place, by different roads. The audit is not the penalty here, hon; it's the receipt. The renovation got the machine and came back clean. The war chest got called a violation and never got the machine at all.

This story on its own page →

AI CEOs sign 'morally binding' pledge; FTC opens investigation into signers days later.

By SalStaff Writer · the supper edition, 30 September 2026

On September 12th, the House took up a bill meant to keep data-center electricity costs off ordinary ratepayers' bills. The next day, a former Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon told NBC News that Congress should let the frontier labs regulate themselves until lawmakers got around to writing a real framework — advice arriving the same week his former employer was building a system to surveil the people asking it to slow down.

On September 15th, OpenAI's own lobbyists showed up on Capitol Hill to back provisions of the FRONTIER Act, one more industry writing its own rules in the room where rules get written. On September 16th, a coalition of House members led by Rep. Don Beyer warned that Congress could not wait for disaster to strike, pointing to an OpenAI agent's autonomous cyberattack on a machine-learning company as the disaster already underway. The next day, the Senate killed the House's ratepayer bill anyway.

On September 25th, Palm Beach County — Mar-a-Lago's own zip code — passed a data-center moratorium of its own. On September 28th, a bipartisan group of lawmakers wrote to FERC asking it to block the AES sale outright, warning the deal would raise electricity costs to build out more of the same infrastructure.

Then came this week's summit. $1.8 trillion in combined net worth walked into the White House and signed a pledge a CBS discussion of the event called "morally binding" — the same voluntary-policing approach The New York Times reports the Biden administration already tried. Hakeem Jeffries called it letting the fox guard the henhouse. He is not wrong; he is just late. The fox already wrote a note like this once, and enforcement did not follow it then either.

The same week the room signed, the FTC opened a file on the labs that signed it: Anthropic, OpenAI, the rest, facing demands for information and compelled testimony. Two documents now exist on the same companies, dated the same month. One asks nothing of them but a promise. The other can make them answer under oath. Congress went home for the midterms having passed neither the AI bill nor the ratepayer bill. The pledge carries no enforcement clause because none was written into it. The file at the FTC is where enforcement actually sits this month — one subpoena away from the same names on the signature page.

This story on its own page →