Johnson calls power-bill anger a Chinese psyop the week his own House votes 417-3 to fix it

…(cont) On September 24, the Energy Department announced $5 billion for grid and transmission upgrades, framed by the agency itself as a way to lower bills while the same data-center buildout keeps expanding.

The next day, September 25, Palm Beach County — home to Mar-a-Lago — voted to pause new data centers of 50 megawatts or larger for a year, over the same power costs the House bill was built to address.

This week the chief looked at that whole run of receipts and called the alarm behind them a Chinese psyop.

Then, on Tuesday, the actual mechanism came out from under the hood. The Hill's own reading of Husted's bill found that it does not require states to do anything. It requires them to consider a standard under which data centers would cover their own cost increases. Consider, not adopt. The planner admires the assembly anyway: no new federal mandate, no new agency, just the rate-setting authority states already have, pointed at one specific bill sitting on their desks. The tinkerer built it that way on purpose — a tool a state can pick up, not one it is ordered to use.

The muscle's job here is not subtle: wreck the word "consider" and bolt in the word "shall." That gap — between a bill that clears the House 417-3 and one that actually moves a dollar off a household's bill and onto a data center's — is the whole story. Until it closes, the tool sits assembled and unused on fifty state desks, while the chief calls the smoke a foreign psyop and the buildings keep going up in the towns paying for them.