An unusual study aims to estimate the pollution and health costs from a cluster of proposed data centers, instead of considering each one separately.
Page F7From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 1 October 2026
House requires states to consider a fix; Senate blocks even that; one county tries doing the math itself
As it ran on the front
Start where the money starts. September 2, on CNBC, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked about data centers' water and power draw and called the concern "propaganda" — the same official who had once said plainly that data centers "suck water."
Fourteen days later, September 16, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act. Read the bill at the level it was actually written. It requires states to consider taking up standards that would force tech companies to shoulder the electricity cost increases data centers bring to the ratepayer's bill. Requires: consideration. Does not require: regulation. That gap is the whole bill.…
…(cont) Nine days after that, September 25, commissioners in Palm Beach County — the county that holds Mar-a-Lago — voted 6 to 0 for a one-year moratorium on any data center drawing fifty megawatts or more. That vote did not wait for Washington's bill to tell it to consider the question; it answered the question.
Today the companion bill reached the Senate. The Hill's own copy calls the House version "the bipartisan Ratepayer Protection Act"; the Washington Examiner, writing about the companion, says it "enjoyed sweeping support." Built by Senator Jon Husted, carrying that support, it still failed. Senate Democrats blocked it. The Hill frames the fallout as a Republican midterm liability; the Examiner frames it as a Democratic split. Both can be filed in the same drawer.
And today, one county government tried something nobody above it had bothered to require. Instead of pricing each proposed data center alone, it is adding up what a cluster of them does to pollution and public health together — the exact arithmetic the House bill never made mandatory, run for the first time with no federal order telling anyone to run it.
Reconcile the filing against the table, hon. The one government body that opened the books to check the math is the county zoned around the president's own front lawn.
“"Consider" is the whole con — it's the word a bill uses when it wants credit for fixing something without fixing it. Duke's CEO says data centers won't touch your bill the same day Congress admits it might need a law to stop them from touching your bill, and the only outfit that ran the actual math was a county commission, not Congress. You already know whose bill goes up either way.”
“The bill requires states to consider the standards — that's responsible federalism, not Washington dictating terms, and the Commerce Secretary's right that some of this water talk gets overblown, it's basically — did I just call people's own power bills propaganda? That's not — let me circle back on that one.”
Earlier in this story
- Senate comes seven votes short of opening debate on whether to stop trading companies it regulates By Sterling · the sunrise edition, 1 October 2026
The receipts
Republicans are growing increasingly worried that data centers are a liability in the midterms, as concerns over higher power bills tied to the facilities turn into a pocketbook issue for voters. The debate over the issue was on full display Wednesday, after Senate Democrats blocked legislation championed by Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) …
Senate Democrats may have denied Republicans a midterm win by blocking a GOP senator’s bipartisan data center bill, but in the process, they revealed an out-of-sync party strategy over how to handle the increasingly contentious campaign issue. The Ratepayer Protection Act, meant to prevent data centers from raising electricity prices…
President Donald Trump has said every American should want a data center in their town. But his home county in Florida just voted to block them. In a 6-0 vote, commissioners in Palm Beach County—home to the president's luxurious private club and second residence, Mar-a-Lago— voted to enact a one-year moratorium on the construction of new…
· House approves bill aimed at putting data center electricity costs on tech companies from the morgue, 16 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
· Duke Energy CEO says data centers will have ‘no impact’ on electricity bills from the morgue, 16 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.