The group, called Humans First, advocates for better guardrails on data center construction and AI in general.
Page F2From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 6 October 2026
Same industry that calls resisting towns backwards and poor quietly lobbies to shield them from the water bill.
As it ran on the front
On August 31st the President told the country, in writing, that any town that said no to a data center was choosing to be backwards and poor. Three days later, on September 3rd, Microsoft's own lobbyists went to work on a different problem: making sure no one's water bill went up because of a data center. The Water Cost Accountability Act, which Microsoft backs, would bar public water systems from passing data centers' connection costs on to the people next door. If the water bill were nothing to worry about, the company building the data center would not need a law to keep it off the water bill.
Twenty-six days after Microsoft filed in support of that bill, on September 29th, the Washington Examiner ran a column explaining what a data center actually gives a town worried about costs: a football field. Salena Zito called the developers "great job creators" and "good neighbors," citing community centers and new high school football fields as the trade for the water and the power the facility draws. Two days after that, on October 1st, the same paper's newsroom reported that House Republicans were in a near-panic: data centers had become a midterm liability, because higher power bills tied to the facilities were turning into, in the paper's own words, a pocketbook issue for voters. In the four weeks between the bill and the panic, the industry worked through the entire menu: a bill to shield the water rate, a column to supply the football field, and a warning to the party that the voters were doing the math anyway.…
…(cont) Five weeks after the President's post, on October 6th, a group called Humans First picketed Big Tech's headquarters in San Francisco over the water and electricity costs of the AI data centers going up around them. Nobody at Microsoft has said that about them in writing. Nobody at Microsoft has had to. The lobbyists made the point for free the day they decided the water bill was worth a federal bill — just not worth a protest.
The gap, reconciled: the industry tells the town the bill is nothing worth fighting over. The industry's own lobbyists tell the legislature the bill is something worth writing a law over, hon. Somebody is wrong about that water bill, and it is never the side asking Congress for the law.
“They call you backwards and poor for standing outside a data center with a sign, then that same company's lawyers run to the statehouse asking for a law so nobody's water bill ever shows the real number. That's not two different stories, that's one company covering both sides of its own mouth. The bill was never too small to notice — it was just never supposed to be yours to see.”
“Look, the Water Cost Accountability Act isn't an admission the water bill is a problem, it's proactive corporate citizenship, the kind of thing a job creator does for a community. It's not that Microsoft thinks the water bill is scary, it's that — did I say scary? I meant generous. The point is the bill is fine, it's just also apparently worth writing federal legislation to avoid, which happens.”
The receipts
· Out-of-Touch Trump Says Communities That Reject AI Data Centers Will Be 'Backwards and Poor' from the morgue, 31 Aug 2026
· Microsoft backing measure protecting consumers over data center water usage costs from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Salena Zito explains how data centers are benefiting communities from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
· Republicans hit crunch time on data centers from the morgue, 1 Oct 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.