The Override Works Only Where It Doesn't Have To

The two data center deals the Army just signed are the cleanest picture of how the federal override actually works. Carlyle gets Fort Bliss in Texas, CyrusOne gets Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, roughly $2 billion each ^[1]. The condition attached to both is the whole story: the projects must generate their own power and use net-zero water, drawing nothing from the local grid or the local water table. Even on federal land, where no city council can say no, the project is not allowed to touch community infrastructure. And even there the channel is not fully clean — state regulators keep a veto over the power agreement, as the $100 billion Paducah project in Kentucky shows, where the state's Public Service Commission must still approve the service deal ^[2]. The reason that condition exists is a number. Residential electricity rates rose 18% between January 2025 and April 2026, and rates near data centers climbed as much as 267% over five years ^[3]. That is the physical constraint underneath every political fight that follows. A data center that plugs into the public grid raises the bill of everyone already on it; a data center that brings its own power does not. The override works only in the second case. The administration's answer to that constraint was to declare it away. In July 2025 the president designated data centers critical national security infrastructure ^[4] — the political premise that the build-out is too important to leave to local consent. But the two mechanisms built on top of that premise quietly concede the ratepayer argument in their own language. FERC's June order to six grid operators demands faster connections for AI loads while insisting the point is to safeguard consumers and keep power affordable ^[5]. Tom Cotton's DATA Act would let data centers build their own generators and power lines, exempting them from federal utility rules — an admission that the public grid cannot or will not carry them ^[6]. Each is the override conceding the point it was meant to defeat: the power has to come from somewhere, and the somewhere cannot be the ratepayer. Every layer the override was designed to skip has instead become a brake. Fresno's Republican mayor is co-sponsoring a proposed ten-year ban on new data centers ^[7]. Nashville's mayor filed eminent domain legislation to seize land from a data center developer — the same government power, pointed the other way ^[8]. New York froze the build-out statewide, and Texas, under Greg Abbott, is seeking expanded authority to regulate it, with the state's grid chairman saying Texas must put affordability and the interests of residents who depend on the grid first ^[9]. The grid operators themselves have turned from conduits into brakes: PJM's stakeholders rejected all twelve data center energy proposals in November 2025 ^[10], and by August 2026 PJM was proposing to cut power to unsupported data centers first in any shortage ^[11]. The brake has now reached the administration's own party. Ohio Senate candidate Jon Husted says the companies earned the backlash ^[12], and he made the break explicit.

The state government has a little bigger role in that, but local governments and local residents are the ones that should make those choices. — Jon Husted

Tom Tiffany is running for governor of Wisconsin on repealing data center tax subsidies ^[13]. Republicans have discovered local control. The president's own language tracks the retreat. He began with national security, warning that China was pleased by the anti-data-center movement ^[14]. By this week he had dropped the frame entirely and reached for a threat.

The only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor. — Donald Trump

The threat is the tell. When the argument was national security, the audience was the country; when it becomes a threat of poverty, the audience is the town — and the town is not persuaded. Opposition to a data center in one's own neighborhood went from 28% in February to 41% in July to 71% by late summer ^[15]. The override functions only where the project brings its own power and guarantees the community pays nothing. Everywhere else, the ratepayer math is a wall that does not negotiate, and the cascade up through the system — city councils, statehouses, grid operators, the president's own party — is what that wall looks like when politics runs into it.