One Senate Democrat scuttled a Republican-led effort to pass legislation aimed at shielding Americans from energy costs attributed to data centers, saying it didn't go far enough.
Page F2From§Eachthe early bird edition — 17 September 2026
Senate Democrat kills bill shielding ratepayers from data-center bills, calling it too weak to matter
As it ran on the front
The paperwork on your electric bill this fall traces back to August 31, when the President told American towns that refusing an AI data center makes them "backwards and poor." Four days later a Gallup survey found Americans would rather live next to a nuclear plant than a data center, by more than twenty points. The Commerce Secretary was asked about that on CNBC and, on September 2, called the public's water-usage concerns "propaganda." The gap here is not rhetorical. It is between what the administration says the public wants and what the public says it wants, and it runs about twenty points wide.
On September 3, Microsoft — which builds the data centers — endorsed a bill to stop utilities from passing data-center water costs onto residential customers. Microsoft's name on that bill is itself a receipt: when the company building the thing agrees the public should not pay for it, the public was, until that point, paying for it. The House took up its own version, the Ratepayer Protection Act, on September 12, with bipartisan sponsorship, aimed at making tech companies cover the electricity costs their data centers push onto the local grid.…
…(cont) On September 17, Sen. Jon Husted, a Republican, tried to move that bill through on unanimous consent — the Senate's fast lane, the one that requires nobody object. Sen. Martin Heinrich, a Democrat, objected. His stated reason was that the bill did not go far enough. The practical effect of that objection is that the bill does not exist. A gap that was partially closed is now the same size it was on August 30, before any of this started, except now it is closed by nobody, defended by no one, and paid by whoever is on the other end of the meter.
The instructive detail is which columns each of these lands in. The data centers get built either way — the President has made clear that towns which decline them get called poor, which is one way to describe leverage. The water bill has an industry-backed fix moving through statehouses. The electricity bill, the one the House already passed with votes from both parties, died on a technicality of ambition. Ratepayers were offered a partial accounting of what they're owed and, on procedural grounds, told to wait for a fuller one. The fuller one is not scheduled. The bill they'll receive next month is.
“So the guy who built the thing that jacks up your water bill is asking Congress to stop him from billing you for it, and Congress still can't get out of its own way — one senator kills the fix because it's not big enough, which is a hell of a thing to say right before doing nothing at all. Meanwhile the President's telling towns that don't want these buildings they're gonna end up "backwards and poor," like refusing a fifty-foot server farm on your water table is the backwards part. You already lost the argument about whether you get a say — now you're losing the argument about whether you get a receipt.”
“Look, this is an infrastructure investment story, not a utility bill story — America builds the future or America falls behind, those are the two options, I don't make the rules. The water thing is propaganda, our own Secretary said so on television, and if towns want to stay backwards and poor that's frankly a choice available to them in a free country. Now why a Republican bill to make these companies pay their own way got killed by the other side for being too soft on the industry — I'll be honest, that one I have not been given talking points on yet.”
The receipts
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) blocked Sen. Jon Husted’s (R-Ohio) Thursday effort to unanimously pass a bill that seeks to force states to consider making tech companies cover their data centers’ electricity price impacts.
· House to take up bill shielding consumers from energy costs tied to data centers from the morgue, 12 Sep 2026
· Microsoft backing measure protecting consumers over data center water usage costs from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Trump Commerce Secretary Once Said Data Centers ‘Suck Water,’ Now Scoffs That Such Concerns Are Just ‘Propaganda’ from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
· Out-of-Touch Trump Says Communities That Reject AI Data Centers Will Be 'Backwards and Poor' from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Panic! At the Data Center: Americans would rather live next to a nuke than an AI facility from the morgue, 4 Sep 2026
· Democrats see midterm gift in Trump embrace of data centers from the morgue, 5 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.