Authored by Jeremy Lott via The Epoch Times,
Former economic advisers from the Obama and Trump administrations have issued a roadmap for what they see as a way forward on future data center construction across America.
Democrat Robert Wolf and Republican Stephen Moore pitched a “bipartisan framework” to navigate the current controversies surrounding AI data centers in a report released last week.
They call for a middle ground approach based on federal guidelines that address five key areas, including ratepayer protection, energy security, environmental stewardship, transparency and community engagement, and local authority over land use.
“America should neither surrender data center development to a regulatory free-for-all nor freeze it through blanket moratoriums,” the advisers say.
Some aspects of their pitch are at odds with ideas that President Donald Trump has shared as he stumps for candidates around the country.
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote in an Aug. 31 Truth Social post that the report highlights.
“If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
Trump also wants to use the federal government’s public lands for future data centers, in response to successful efforts by many community activists to halt data center projects in other areas.
Wolf and Moore label the lack of a regulatory framework for data centers as the “Wild West” approach, which forms part of the title of the policy paper: “Beyond the ‘Wild West’ and Moratorium: A Bipartisan Framework for Smart and Responsible Data Center Investment.”
They offer some words in defense of the “Wild West” approach while ultimately disagreeing with it. It has worked well in the past, such as for the development of the internet, the report says.
Wolf and Moore point out that Congress and President Bill Clinton used a “relatively light-touch regulatory framework for the emerging digital economy,” giving some evidence of the benefits of that approach.
“Over the following decades, American companies – including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Meta, and Amazon – became global leaders in the digital economy,” they write.
Moore is a former economic adviser from Trump’s first administration who was nominated to serve on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in 2019, though he later withdrew his nomination. He co-founded the organization Unleash Prosperity Now, which published the report.
Wolf served on the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board in the Obama administration and in other advisory roles. He is the current chair of Archie Comics.
Mapping the Backlash
The report’s authors size up the American backlash to data centers that allow the American AI industry to function and grow, which the Trump administration has said is crucial to staying ahead of AI rivals in less free countries like communist China.
On July 18 there were 142 coordinated protests across 42 states against data centers. About 500 communities have adopted local moratoriums against building data centers. Thirteen governors – seven Republicans and six Democrats – have pushed for more stringent data center regulations and moratoriums.
At a time when Congress is seen as intensely polarized on party lines, that is not true of electricity demands and data centers.
The Ratepayer Protection Act is legislation that would pressure state-level regulators and utilities to consider new standards that would make sure “certain large-load customers” are not able to pass their energy costs on to other businesses and homeowners in the form of increased utility bills.
The legislation received bipartisan, nearly unanimous support in the House of Representatives in September, passing that chamber of Congress by a vote of 417-3.
The broader public appears to be in an anti-data-center frame of mind. Polls show a new and potentially growing majority of Americans against the building of more data centers.
For instance, the Pew Research Center found the percentage of Americans who thought data centers were “mostly bad” for the environment climbed from 39 percent in January to 54 percent in August.
About 60 percent of Americans also indicated that they do not want a data center opening up close to their neighborhoods.
Allowing Community Input
Wolf and Moore say that dismissing community activists for impeding progress in this new technological frontier is itself impeding progress.
“Not in my backyard ‘NIMBY’ concerns must be respected and addressed if we are to build the public support necessary to move forward,” they write.
At the state level, Virginia’s Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat, has been trying to do something similar to what Wolf and Moore advise. To thread the needle of continuing data center construction while giving more say to local residents, she signed an executive order in September that created a framework to give more power to those communities.
This will allow residents “to have a meaningful voice in data center development and the tools to protect local resources, quality of life, and long-term interests,” according to the order.
Whether or not that will be a workable solution allowing for the building of more data centers in the commonwealth remains to be seen. In the meantime, other Virginia Democrats are pressing for a broader stoppage of data center construction.
“A statewide data center moratorium now has support from both parties,” wrote state Sen. Glen Sturtevant on Oct. 14 in an X post.
“I’ve been pushing for it since July, and now Sen. [Russet] Perry has a bill too. So the question is whether Democratic leadership will let it move forward, and whether Governor Spanberger will sign it.“
