AUSTIN — Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa vowed to issue a moratorium on any new data centers and slammed Gov. Greg Abbott’s handling of Big Tech companies coming into the state. Hinojosa fielded questions from reporters near the Texas governor’s mansion in Austin on Thursday morning.
Page F119From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 15 October 2026
Trump threatens towns with 'backward and poor'; his own party's senator moves to leave data centers broke instead.
As it ran on the front
THE WRECKING CREW kept the blueprints from August open on the workbench. The warning did not test well close to home. Twenty-five days later, on September 25, the chief's own county, Palm Beach, took a 6-0 vote: facilities over 50 megawatts, a one-year moratorium, no new construction. The permitting authority had been sitting in the county code the whole time; the commissioners only had to use it. Memphis had already used a different tool, a zoning fight and a primary ballot, to beat Elon Musk's xAI. Washington State had wiring older than that, a utility and siting law already on the shelf.
On Thursday the crew found two more tools, both government issue, neither built for the occasion.…
…(cont) The tinkerer went to Washington first. Senator Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, introduced a bill titled the Recapturing Excessive Corporate Largesse through Accountability and Incentive Measures; the wire's own copy cuts off before it reaches the short name the title is plainly built to spell. The mechanism inside it is plain enough without the name: any local or state tax break handed to a data center gets taxed back by the federal government at 100 percent. The discount a town offers to lure the servers in, the discount a county offers to keep them, comes back out whole. It is the same federal tax code that has always had a line for an excess benefit, aimed now at an industry Moreno's own party was told, six and a half weeks earlier on August 31, to welcome or go broke.
The pilot flew to Austin. Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running against Governor Greg Abbott, stood near the governor's mansion Thursday morning and vowed a moratorium on new data centers in Texas, the same tool Palm Beach County had already pulled off its own shelf.
The muscle checked the inventory: a county's zoning code, a state's utility law, a city's ballot, and now a federal tax statute and a governor's-race pledge. Five tools, five drawers, none of them built for this fight and none of them new. Somebody just had to open the drawer.
“You warn a town it'll go broke for saying no, then your own senator writes a bill that claws the subsidy back by force — that's not ideology, that's a turf fight over who hands out the tax break. The bill sits in committee, the moratorium sits on a campaign trail, neither one is law yet, so the drawer stays open for whoever opens it next.”
“Senator Moreno is just restoring fairness — no government should hand sweetheart tax breaks to politically connected industries, full stop. That's also the exact argument the data-center lobby used to get the breaks in the first place, so maybe skip that one. What I mean is the market works best when the federal government decides which local tax break doesn't count — no, that's not landing right either.”
Earlier in this story
- Trump warns data-center holdouts go 'backwards and poor,' watches his own county vote 6-0 to join them. By The Wrecking Crew · the morning edition, 15 October 2026
The receipts
Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) introduced a bill on Thursday that would cancel out any local or state tax incentives to data centers by imposing a 100% federal tax on any local tax break or incentive given to the AI infrastructure. Moreno’s bill is called the Recapturing Excessive Corporate Largesse through Accountability and Incentive…
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.