Sovereignty for Every Nation, Except Your Town

At the New Delhi summit in February, the White House's science chief put the administration's case for AI in a single sentence ^[1].

We totally reject global governance of AI. — Michael Kratsios

The principle is clean: no global body tells a nation what its AI may or may not do. Each country decides for itself. The administration has spent the year selling that idea, and this week it took it to the G20, urging members to adopt hands-off AI rules and warning that opposing data-center construction would leave the United States backwards and poor ^[2]. Now look at what the same administration is doing to the towns where those data centers get built. The EPA exempted islanded power plants from the Clean Air Act's Acid Rain Program and proposed removing the public notice and comment requirements that let a community be heard before a plant goes up next door ^[3]. West Virginia's legislature stripped municipal zoning and noise-ordinance authority, replacing it with a single "uniform regulatory standard" ^[4]. And Republicans pushed a bill to ban all state AI regulation for a decade, with a $500 million broadband-grant lever attached ^[5]. Abroad, "hands off" means respect national sovereignty. At home it means the federal government decides for your town. It would be simpler if this were just deregulation all the way down — the administration doesn't want AI regulated anywhere. But the international case isn't "no rules"; it's "your rules, not ours." That is a sovereignty argument, and it is what makes the domestic half a contradiction rather than a consistent position. The towns have noticed, and the resistance is not fading. Maryland Governor Wes Moore put the counter-frame plainly.

You cannot just big foot a local jurisdiction. — Wes Moore

Across the aisle, Republican Congressman Rob Bresnahan introduced a bill to shield local governments from developer lawsuits, and he put the principle in plain terms.

We should never let billion-dollar corporations supersede the voices of those who live in the community. — Rob Bresnahan

The Senate rejected the 10-year state ban 99 to 1, and the administration shelved a draft order that would have sued states and withheld $42 billion in broadband money ^[6]. In Independence, Missouri, voters recalled a city councilman over $6 billion in tax breaks for a $150 billion data center ^[7]. This is not one party's fight; it is a local one, and it is being settled at the ballot box. The word is doing a second job abroad, too. The "sovereignty" the administration champions comes with an American tech stack attached — the American AI Exports Program, the National Champions Initiative, and the US Tech Corps, which pull foreign firms into American export stacks ^[1][8]. A nation is sovereign, in this telling, when it adopts American models and calls them its own. Meanwhile the actual sovereignty American communities hold over their land, their power, and their water is being taken away. That is the problem for the pitch. Every foreign minister who reads the news can see the same administration that lectures the G20 about self-determination overriding a town's zoning board and a state's legislature. The word "sovereignty" is doing two jobs, and the second one is visible from abroad.