Congressman who campaigns against data center sprawl discloses investment in the industry

As it ran on the front

The chief slides three folders across the table and says the job today is a beam count. In Washington, a Pennsylvania congressman built his campaign on stopping data center sprawl and then filed a disclosure showing he holds investments in companies positioned to benefit from that same industry's growth — a fact CBS News reported this week straight off the paperwork. The planner doesn't call that a scandal. The planner calls it an inventory: a public disclosure form, filled out and filed, that anybody can read and cross-check against a floor speech. That's the tool working exactly as designed.

Upstairs, the bigger blueprint is moving faster. The Interior Department, under Secretary Doug Burgum, told every state Bureau of Land Management office to find public land ripe for data centers and gave them three days to turn in the list, a directive the department itself called a top priority. The EPA is drafting a rule to scrap the public pollution review that would normally have to sign off before those centers start running generators. In August, a joint investigation had shown what that review is supposed to catch: a Microsoft-backed facility in Vineland, New Jersey, running 45 gas generators with no permits, caught on a thermal drone because nobody was required to look until then.…