A funny but not.

 

True

 

 

So true

 

REDD FLAG WARNING!

USPS whistleblower describes new plans for voting by mail hidden from the public

By Tierney Sneed

The US Postal Service effort to develop a sweeping new system for verifying mail ballots has invited a host of IT concerns among agency officials, with some describing the process internally as a “shit show,” according to a new whistleblower report released Tuesday by a Democratic senator.

The unnamed whistleblower is alleging that some of the procedures USPS is planning – under mandates put forward by President Donald Trump – have been hidden from the public. Those procedures will make an already complicated and risky plan even more vulnerable to potential mass disenfranchisement, the whistleblower says.

The new report – which was assembled by the whistleblowers’ lawyers and released by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal – comes as multiple courts are considering the legality of the proposal, which would require that states submit to USPS lists of their mail-in voters. The agency will not deliver ballots for states if there are any discrepancies between the voter information in the USPS system and what’s picked up by agency scanners on the envelopes of the ballots.

“USPS leadership, it appears, has discarded all best practices as they speed the project to be ready for a September 1 implementation - raising questions about whether catastrophic failure would be a feature rather than a bug,” said the report.

CNN has reached out to USPS for comment.

Trump signed an executive order in March that gave the USPS an unprecedented role in screening states’ mail ballot programs. Election officials have already expressed deep concerns about having to use a system that has not gone through extensive testing and training procedures

Internally, according to the whistleblower, USPS’ IT teams were going to be given less than a week to test the system once it was finished, due to the time crunch of the electoral calendar; North Carolina begins sending ballots this week and other states join it later this month.

It’s not clear whether the portal is ready to be launched on Tuesday, as was the goal, according to the whistleblower report. A judge last week froze the mandates that the states use the system if they want USPS to deliver their ballots, but said USPS could still offer the portal to states that voluntarily want to upload the mail voter information. The Justice Department is appealing that ruling.

Haphazard development and testing process

In the final week of testing, the phrase “shit show” was used by multiple people to describe the process, the whistleblower alleges in the report, which identifies other examples of USPS barreling through the process of creating the system. The plans the IT staff were shown for the system were “constantly changing” from the beginning, and systems’ requirements were not clearly put in writing for the development staff, the whistleblower says.

USPS leadership was dismissive of concerns, and, according to the report “insisted that it was easy to understand what was needed and also that there was no time to write down the requirements.”

The report describes a haphazard effort to test the parts of the system as they became ready. Under the timeline sketched out to meet the September 1 deadline, there would only be four days allotted for it to go through a stage in the development process in which potential users of the system can test it out.

“For a system that manages something as important as handling voting and ballots, 4 days of user testing is entirely unreasonable,” the whistleblower report said.

Verification procedures with no room for error

The concerns about the untested nature of the system are particularly acute because if there are any discrepancies between the voter lists that election officials have submitted and the ballots they’re seeking to send, USPS could reject the entire batches of ballots – meaning tens of thousands of ballots could go unsent at a time – until the discrepancy is fixed.

The whistleblower says that there will be a first round of verification – in a process not spelled out in the public regulations – comparing the voter information in the portal with “manifests” election officials must also submit for each batch of ballots they intend to drop off. The information on the manifests – including unique bar codes election officials are required, under the rules, to assign each voter – must match perfectly with the information in the portal before election officials are allowed drop off the ballots, the report says.

When election officials bring ballots to their USPS site for delivery, either the entire batch of ballot envelopes or a sampling will be physically scanned – depending on where the ballots are being dropped, according to the whistleblower. If just a single ballot envelope scan does not align with the information in the portal, USPS will refuse to deliver the entire batch of ballots while the discrepancy is being sorted out.

“As designed, the process is entirely unforgiving. It could delay ballots by the thousands in repeated verification cycles - and thus prevent states from mailing enormous numbers of ballots,” the report says.

What a fucking stupid fat brain-dead turd....

Communities That Oppose Data Centers Will Be “Backwards and Poor”

The president is still screaming into the void.

Alex Nguyen

On Monday, President Trump promoted continued data center construction and criticized opponents, despite growing bipartisan backlash ahead of the November midterms. 

“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 posted on Truth Social. “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”  

The president also posts an endless stream of AI videos on social media. On Sunday night, he shared a video depicting the bombing of Kharg Island, a vital port for exporting Iran’s oil products amid the US resuming major strikes on the country. And the night before, Trump posted an AI video of himself kicking over a “Welcome to Lake Ontario” sign and planting down a “Welcome to Lake America” sign in its place.

But boosting AI and the data centers that help power them is largely unpopular. As my colleague Sophie Hurwitz wrote in May, most Americans oppose a data center in their backyard. From Sophie: 

“Data centers need significant space, energy and water to operate, and they don’t provide many jobs relative to the investment they require. And they’re often unpleasant neighbors: their cooling systems can be noisy, and many include onsite gas turbines that belch black smoke into the air.

Opposition to data centers is truly bipartisan, even in solidly GOP states like Florida. 

Food-Borne Illness

Here’s Why We’ve Been Seeing So Much Food-Borne Illness

It’s not just Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Dylan Scott

Summer is supposed to be the best time for fresh produce. Corn on the cob at the cookout. Berries plucked right from the vine. Salads on the cafe patio while you take an extra long lunch break because the weather and the food is that good.

But this year, summer’s harvest brought something much different than the flavorful dishes we’ve come to expect. Since May, the United States has seen more than 17,000 lab-confirmed cyclosporiasis cases. Before this summer’s massive outbreak, the country had never recorded more than a few hundred infections in a single year from this parasite, which can cause watery and at times explosive diarrhea.

And that isn’t the only bug invading Americans’ digestive tracts.

One person died from a listeria infection traced to ricotta cheese. Close to 100 people came down with salmonella from recalled eggs, while more than 400 people have gotten sick in a separate salmonella outbreak involving jalapeños. Last week, the Food and Drug Administration issued its highest urgency warning for frozen blueberries believed to be contaminated with E coli.

And now several dozen people across 15 states have become ill after eating alfalfa sprouts in a new outbreak that involves salmonella and E coli. Four of them have been hospitalized.

It’s gotten so bad that one Washington Post columnist argued we should stop eating lettuce altogether. Experts have told me they were worried people might actually completely stop consuming vegetables—vital to any healthy diet—for fear of contracting cyclosporiasis and enduring a month of watery diarrhea. I personally avoided the bagged salad kits that provided me with many easy lunches on a workday.

While this spate of foodborne illness is especially bad, the worst may be yet to come.

It’s only natural to look for somebody to blame. Culpability has understandably fallen on the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who helms the US Department of Health and Human Services—especially after his deep staffing cuts at the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the two federal agencies most responsible for investigating and responding to disease outbreaks. Those cuts have slowed the response, and officials have struggled to communicate with the public clearly in a fast-moving crisis.

While our government officials are partly to blame, the problem is bigger than Trump and Kennedy, or even this one summer. While seasonal changes will always play a role—the warmer months, when people eat more fresh produce and consume more food that’s been sitting out at unsafe temperatures, typically have more foodborne illnesses—the underlying factors contributing to these outbreaks are becoming more potent. The food supply is more and more globalized. And the planet continues to warm, allowing these pathogens to spread to more and more farms all over the world, including in the US.

As the weather finally begins to cool down, I’ve been asking myself an uncomfortable question: What if diarrhea summer never really ends?

Our globalized food supply chain has a lot to do with our food safety—and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Americans expect access to any produce they want year-round, even produce that isn’t in-season locally, or that may not grow anywhere in the US at all. We source food from all over the world: Most cyclospora outbreaks originated with foods grown in other countries. This year’s crisis was eventually linked to iceberg lettuce from Mexico.

And as the New York Times recently documented, the sometimes international trip from the farm to the store for a bagged salad kit offers multiple moments for potential contamination, including tainted irrigation water, local wildlife excrement, and poor storage practices, making it possible for dangerous pathogens to take hold before a person even buys their groceries.

Warming temperatures around the world are also helping those bugs spread. Humidity is essential for salmonella and warmer summers will mean more humid-favorable conditions for the bacteria to grow. E coli likewise will thrive as temperatures rise. Cyclospora has historically been found in subtropical climates, so for a long time, infections from food grown inside the United States were unheard of. Not anymore.

“Climate change has allowed pathogens like cyclospora…to expand from the tropic, subtropic lines into areas more north and south of that tropic line,” said Joseph Eisenberg, a professor of epidemiology and global public health at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.

“With respect to the US, we’re starting to see new infectious diseases in southern Louisiana, Texas; that also increases the presence of cyclospora in food systems in other countries,” he said. “It suggests that, through climate change, we might potentially start seeing it be endemic in the United States at some point.”

And indeed, cyclospora was found in farms in Florida in 2020. This is a problem that is going to become worse, not better, given the expected trends in global warming in the decades to come.

“It wasn’t until about within the last 10 years we started to see cases from domestic origin,” Francisco Diez-Gonzalez, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, told me. “Before, there were predominantly cases due to international travel or importation of products because it used to be endemic in some tropical or warmer climates.”

“It’s clear that now,” he said, “it’s become established in the domestic environment.”

To make matters worse, at the same time conditions for foodborne illness are ripening, the US government has been sharply cutting its ability to monitor for and respond to these outbreaks.

At the beginning of the second Trump administration, as part of the widespread government staffing cuts, the FDA laid off 3,500 workers. Between the FDA and the US Department of Agriculture, which also oversees food safety, and several related agencies, more than 11,000 workers have been lost, a 22 percent cut, according to the Partnership for Public Service. And the CDC, which helps respond to outbreaks once they start, has lost about a quarter of its workforce from January 2025 to October 2025, according to Reuters; by this summer, CBS reported, the number of scientists tracking food parasites at the agency dropped from 11 to three. Meanwhile, the administration has been rushing to hire 2,200 people in the middle of the crisis.

“There have been a lot of federal cuts. There have been cuts around CDC surveillance, around state and local public health. You’ve lost people,” Dr. Anurag Malani, vice chief of staff at Trinity Health’s Ann Arbor, Michigan, campus, told me. “The ability to do what you need to do to keep citizens safe and to keep the public safe, we don’t have as many people doing that as we used to.

The federal government also shut down several national monitoring programs for foodborne illness in 2025—including for the cyclospora parasite specifically. The state and local agencies that surveil for and respond to food outbreaks have also faced staff cuts because they depend on the federal government for their funding.

“It’s hard when there is one larger entity kind of controlling all of that,” Dr. Kathleen Linder, the hospital epidemiologist at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Ann Arbor, told me in July. “Local health departments are having to do more on their own than they would have had to do in the past just because of decentralization at that level. It has been very hard to get updated information. The information has been lagging a little bit behind.”

Food safety is hard enough to tackle on its own. Part of the reason we experience regular outbreaks of cyclospora is that it can successfully infect people even when only very little of it is present, and because we can’t grow it in a lab to study it.

But the US has made things harder by cutting these important programs. Rebuilding the staff and capacity to do this work is not likely to happen under the Trump administration, and former FDA officials have described a “brain drain” for the food safety programs that won’t be easy to reverse in the next administration.

But something will have to be done if we’re ever to escape the food recall cycle. Despite the name, food has historically been neglected by the “Food and Drug” Administration, and better food safety could require serious restructuring and investment in these capabilities. And foodborne illnesses aren’t the only kind of infection that climate change will make more likely: The United States is also seeing the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like dengue. Responding to those new threats is going to require a rebuilt and potentially reimagined federal public health apparatus.

If there is any good news in the short term, it’s that there are a lot of great recipes for grilling your vegetables to eliminate any pathogens hiding in our side dishes at next summer’s cookouts. It sure seems like we’re going to need them.

Flailing like a fat drowning man in a sewage treatment plant...

Trump Is Growing Desperate on Iran

After threats of “financial violence” failed, the White House is back to regular violence.

Alex Nguyen

The Trump administration is back on the warpath. Over the weekend, the government resumed military attacks on Iran for the first time in a month, which in turn prompted retaliatory Iranian strikes against the United Arab Emirates and American bases in Jordan. On Monday, Fox News correspondent Trey Yingst said the president told him that “there will be a US response” to the Iranian attack on US forces in Jordan.

Which is all to say that Iran, thanks in part to economic support from China, isn’t backing down.

The Trump administration also signaled that it may ramp up economic sanctions on Iran this week, seeking to make good on promises of an “economic D-Day” against the country: “This is going to be financial violence if we have to,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told the Associated Press on Sunday.

On Monday, Iranian leadership joined an economic summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose largest members are China and Russia, in a meeting that many American outlets have characterized as adverse to US interests China has been Iran’s economic bulwark during the current war, defying US sanctions by remaining the main importer of Iranian oil. 

While struggling to fight Iran on multiple fronts—through Bessent’s “financial violence” in the form of severe economic sanctions—and the conventional violence of deadly military action against both the country’s civilian infrastructure and combat forces, the US has achieved little in terms of forcing Iran’s leadership to budge on negotiations.

We’ve seen this play out again, and again, and again in the months since Trump dragged the U.S. into war with Iran.

In response to an exclusive from the Washington Post citing classified documents in which top US military officials state the current war in Iran is depleting their ability to defend the country from other threats, Sean Parnell, a Pentagon spokesperson, claimed that publishing the report was “a crime”—it is not—and evidence of “TDS and PDS”—Trump and Pete Derangement Syndrome, respectively.

Even as it scrabbles for new tactics—and publicly appears at a loss—the Trump administration continues to deny that its war isn’t working. 

But as Bessent himself said Monday of Canada’s claim that it was weathering Washington’s trade war: “What else are they gonna say?”

"Likely unlawful" BUT YOU ARE LETTING HIM DO IT ANYWAY YOU FUCKER!

Supreme Court allows Trump’s ballroom construction, but Roberts says project is ‘likely unlawful’

Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in dissent as the high court let the president’s passion project proceed.

By Josh Gerstein

The Supreme Court is allowing President Donald Trump to press on with his White House ballroom project — over a strident objection from Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s liberal wing.

The justices’ 5-4 ruling maintains the high court’s hold on a federal appeals court ruling that called for a halt to the project after concluding it lacked approval from Congress.

In an unsigned order Monday, the Supreme Court’s majority said a historic preservation group that sued over the project appeared to lack legal standing, while national security concerns favored allowing the construction to continue. The majority did not opine on whether the project is legal.

Writing for the dissenters, Roberts said the project is “likely unlawful.”

“The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote, adding that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”

The court’s majority insisted it was not resolving the legal arguments over the president’s power to unilaterally make major changes to the White House. But the decision Monday means it is likely that the ballroom will be fully built before that question is definitively resolved.

Trump said on Truth Social that he was “pleased” with the court’s ruling, adding that it would allow the project to be completed “without any further contingency, doubt, or threat.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche also saluted the ruling. “This is a no-brainer for national security, and future administrations will look back and be thankful,” he wrote on X.

The president initially touted the ballroom project primarily as an effort to create a larger, permanent space at the White House for ceremonial events like state dinners. In recent weeks, though, he increasingly billed the construction as a national security imperative due to features to be included in the redesigned East Wing.

On Trump’s orders, construction crews abruptly demolished the White House’s East Wing last October. He later sought approval from review panels to build a ballroom on the site, although Congress never appropriated funds for the project or signed off on it. Trump has said the ballroom and related facilities will cost $400 million, with private donors footing that bill.

In response to a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a district court judge blocked above-ground construction at the site, but that ruling never went into effect. A D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled, 2-1, earlier this month that Trump embarked on the project in violation of laws that require Congressional approval for construction in Washington.

The appeals court paused its order to allow the Trump administration time to seek relief from the Supreme Court. As that reprieve was set to expire on Aug. 21, Roberts stepped in with an emergency order allowing the project to continue while the full court weighed the administration’s request.

The ruling Monday was in keeping with a general trend at the conservative high court to more strictly enforce standing requirements, which are aimed at ensuring that the parties to a case have a concrete stake in its outcome and to prevent judges from ruling on abstract legal issues.

“Perhaps nearly any government action or project offends someone’s sensibilities,” the majority said as it snubbed the National Trust’s claim that it had standing due to the interests of Alison Hoagland, a historian who is one of its members.

Trump has repeatedly ridiculed Hoagland’s claimed offense at the project as the sole basis for the suit, but precedent is clear that standing can rest on the claims of a single individual.

The majority said the Trust was unlikely to be able to press the suit based solely on Hoagland’s “offense, disagreement, or distaste,” but Roberts said his conservative colleagues were twisting prior precedents in which environmental challenges were allowed to proceed over largely or entirely aesthetic claims.

“The distinction … does not hold up,” the chief justice said.

Brent Leggs, President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, expressed disappointment but took comfort in the chief justice’s dissent.

“We are pleased with Chief Justice Roberts’ strong dissent, " Leggs said, “which reiterated what we have maintained from the start of our case — that construction of the White House ballroom is unlawful.”

Latest whiplash

‘Eisenhower would be spinning in his grave’: Many Republicans are over Trump’s Iran bluster

Just days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a new “economic D-Day” to choke Iran, the U.S. carried out its first known attack on Iran since July.

By Megan Messerly and Alex Gangitano

President Donald Trump threatens in one moment to slowly asphyxiate Iran’s economy and, in the next, to quickly bomb them into submission.

Republicans who disagree which option is correct are still united on one thing: They’re over Trump’s seeming indecision.

The latest whiplash came this weekend, when the U.S. carried out its first known attack on Iran since late July, hitting rocket launchers the U.S. military said were prepared to drop sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. The president then threatened on Truth Social to blow Kharg Island, the energy stronghold, to “smithereens.”

The threat came just days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced an “economic D-Day” to slowly strangle Iran’s economy. The value of the new, intensified sanctions, Bessent said, was to obviate the need for military escalation.

The seemingly contradictory efforts underscore the morass the administration finds itself in six months after the president launched a war he said would last only six weeks, and which he and members of his Cabinet have repeatedly described as over and successful.

“This was launched with no plan, has been executed with no plan, and has been largely driven by the politics of the moment,” said a former security official who served in President George W. Bush’s administration, who like others in this story was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamics of the war. “That’s why you see this insane — we’re in, we’re out, we’re back, we’re out, we’re bombing, we’re not bombing. I mean negotiating by tweet — Eisenhower would be spinning in his grave.”

The president’s approach to Iran has left some of the GOP’s war-weary voices — who have at times included Vice President JD Vance and a slew of political operatives anxious over the conflict’s effects on gas prices and the midterms — disappointed that the war drags on. Meanwhile, his repeated unfulfilled threats to bomb Iran have disappointed the more hawkish camp, represented by the likes of Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

“A lot of Republicans who are supportive overall of holding Iran accountable or neutralizing the threat are frustrated,” said a former Trump campaign official. “He’s not pleasing anybody.”

One GOP strategist likened Trump’s Iran predicament to being stuck in the “friend zone.”

“You have two camps that are equally pissed — shows it’s not going great,” the GOP strategist said.

The handwringing comes at a precarious moment for Republicans who in just two months face an electorate that was demoralized over high prices even before the war began. The Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil once flowed, remains a chokepoint. The average price for a gallon of gas is $4.08, according to AAA, and diesel, which powers much of the American economy, is nearing a record high.

Still, some administration allies remain sanguine about the latest round of strikes and the president’s fresh threats to escalate the war. They believe Trump is astutely keeping the pressure on Iran, ensuring the Strait of Hormuz remains open to at least some commercial traffic while he bides time for Bessent’s economic noose to run its course.

“It’s just part of a tit-for-tat,” said James Jeffrey, a former ambassador who served in the Middle East during three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term. “Neither side appears interested in a return to full scale strikes.”

Trump insists that Iran is a leaderless state that has only limited ability to wreak havoc in the region, telling reporters in the Oval Office Monday that “they’re a failed nation.”

“That doesn’t mean we won’t smack ‘em,” he said. “We will see what happens.”

The White House referred to Trump’s statement on Monday when asked for a request for comment.

But even his allies recoil at the wavering between threats to bomb Iran “back to the stone ages” or economically pressure it into compliance — and offers to negotiate a truce.

“He can’t stay on message or stick to a coherent, disciplined strategy, because he feels trapped now,” said one person close to the White House. “Trump realizes the political peril but can’t figure out a face-saving way to end the conflict. The Iranians clearly know this reality, too.”

And while Trump insists politics do not play into his calculus, there is a growing “time to move on” sentiment inside the White House, according to an oil industry executive familiar with internal discussions.

“The motivation to end hostilities is immense,” the executive said. “But there remains a solid coalition of advisers — at the State Department and the White House — who maintain, as they have since the military campaign began, that the Iran regime will only come to the table to agree to an acceptable deal if they are pushed to near extinction and have no other choice. The president had remained confident that he can get the Iranians to do a deal — some would say over confident or naively confident.”

The latest escalation, however, highlights how for all the economic and military damage that the U.S. has inflicted, Tehran still has the ability to drive the narrative, fire missiles that endanger U.S. personnel and force Trump to respond. It’s the situation Bessent hoped to avoid when he announced new sanctions last week, a move designed to force Iran back to the negotiating table without renewed military conflict that spiked oil prices.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Vance tried to paper over the daylight between the economic pressure campaign and the president’s renewed threats of military action.

“He’s sending a message to the Iranians,” Vance said. “What the president is saying is, ‘look, you guys are shooting at commercial shipping, you guys are behaving like a terrorist country. You’ve got to stop, or there’s going to be some consequences.’”

Tehran, meanwhile, has shown little sign that it is eager to reach a deal, pushing back on assertions from Bessent and others that the economic pressure campaign would constrict the Iranian economy to the point where its leaders would have no choice but to make a deal.

“Liar liar pants on fire,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, wrote in a post on X on Saturday.

And China, which purchases most of Iran’s oil, has balked at the threat of U.S. sanctions, with Lin Jian, the spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry, saying that the country “will do everything necessary to firmly safeguard its rights and interests.”

“China has made clear on many occasions its firm opposition to illicit unilateral sanctions that have no basis in international law or the authorization of the UN Security Council,” Lin said last week. “Economic warfare and maximum pressure provide no solution.”

So is the resistance

Power-hungry data centers are expanding in Europe. So is the resistance.

Activists are battling a vast Google data center in the Austrian countryside.

By Zia Weise

One sleepy village nestled in the foothills of the Alps may soon devour more electricity than all the households of Vienna.

It is all thanks to Google.

The American tech giant is building Austria’s first hyperscale data center on the outskirts of tiny Kronstorf, a two-hour drive from the capital. The site could eventually consume the equivalent of 7 percent of the country’s current power demand.

Growing resistance, however, may throw a wrench in the company’s ambitions. A band of local rebels — worried about the data center’s voracious appetite for energy and skeptical about a power grab by a U.S. tech behemoth — is battling to prevent expansion.

“We really want to give them a hard time,” said Harald Müllner, an IT specialist from nearby Linz, who co-founded a local alliance of scientists, artists and activists campaigning against the data center. “They need to see that the people are not happy with this.” 

Their protests and petitions against Google’s plans mirror trends across the Atlantic, where Democrats are seizing on a growing backlash against data centers ahead of this year’s U.S. midterm elections. President Donald Trump, meanwhile, has taken the side of Big Tech, posting on Monday that communities opposing data centers will "end up being backwards and poor."

In Europe, activists are targeting projects in France and locals are protesting plans in Italy. In Ireland, where data centers already consume a fifth of all electricity, opponents have tried — and failed — to block construction in the courts.

But so far, European concerns about data centers have run up against governments anxious the continent is falling behind the U.S. and China in the artificial intelligence race. 

“We cannot call for greater European AI sovereignty while at the same time putting up ever-new obstacles that hinder the very infrastructure on which it is based,” said Elisabeth Zehetner, Austria’s energy state secretary, about demands for greater regulation of massive data centers like the one in Kronstorf. 

The European Union plans to triple its data center capacity by 2035. Brussels and national governments have vowed to tear down regulatory barriers to the AI boom, even while insisting it can be sustainable. 

The Austrian activists are skeptical. “A hyperscale data center isn’t sustainable by its very nature. It’s just so huge,” said Christina Gruber, a freshwater ecologist campaigning against the Kronstorf data center. 

“There are so many factors — the conversion of arable land, this extreme thirst for energy, the consumption of water,” she added. “And the much greater question hanging over it all is simply: ‘What for? Is it worth it?’” 

Of frogs and fish

When Müllner and Gruber pull up outside the vast construction site on a sizzling hot day in August, a steady stream of trucks exit the main gate, hauling debris dug up by a dozen excavators. 

Cranes loom over a half-finished server hall. Piles of metal panels, rebar and concrete tubes bake in the sun. Down the road, where the River Enns rushes toward the Danube, pump stations stand ready to extract cooling water for the new data center. 

Google’s name is nowhere to be found. The only hint the U.S. giant is responsible for the dust wafting across the nearby motorway is a small keep-out notice on the fence, framed in the company’s signature colors.

Yet, Google is everywhere. When construction began in April, regional politicians celebrated with a bundt cake, known locally as gugelhupf, renamed “Googlhupf” for the occasion. Locals call the woodland across from the construction site, which the company helped plant, the “Google forest”; a small pond by the entrance, an oversized puddle home to a handful of dragonflies and a lone frog, has been dubbed the “Google biotope.”

Google insists it’s taking steps to compensate for the environmental impact of the data center. The company will cover the facility’s roof in solar panels and set up a fund to improve the local river ecosystem, said Michiel Sallaets, Google’s European communications lead on technical infrastructure.  

“Greenwashing,” says Müllner, the activist.

They worry about the Enns, which will both provide cooling to the data center and receive the warmed-up wastewater. “Any warm water discharge alters the habitat and causes additional stress for the creatures living there,” Gruber said. 

Google insists there’s no reason for concern. “Independent expert reports from the permitting process also show that the data center’s impact on the temperature of the Enns River is negligible,” said Sallaets. 

What riles the activists is that, despite the potential effects, the data center didn’t need a comprehensive environmental impact assessment under current Austrian law. 

“We need a change in the law,” said Gruber. Building a wind turbine requires that environmental assessment while data centers are exempt, she pointed out.

Politicians on the left have seized on the Kronstorf case to demand the law is revamped. The center-left Social Democrats, part of Austria’s coalition government, now want to subject data centers to environmental impact assessments. They’re backed by the opposition Greens, but the center-right People’s Party running the energy ministry rejects more regulation. 

Google “went through all required processes,” said Sallaets. The company will “act as a good and transparent neighbour,” he added.

The project’s first stage projects a power demand of 150 megawatts per hour, rising to 500MW if Google decides to expand the facility. As data centers run around the clock, the site is expected to draw 1.31 terawatt-hours during the first stage, both the Austrian Power Grid and the Upper Austrian electricity network provider said.

That rises to 4.4TWh under expansion plans. All the households of Vienna, a city of 2 million people, use around 3.4TWh.

Unlike in the U.S., where many companies have built fossil-fuel-powered generators on site, the Kronstorf data center plugs into the national grid. Austria runs on almost 90 percent renewable power — a key reason Google picked this location, as the company aims to operate its data centers on clean electricity by 2030. 

But the activists worry that Austria’s renewable energy generation may not keep up. The country depends on hydropower, which is vulnerable to drought. During this dry summer, hydro production fell by up to a third. 

Given climate change, “that’s not going to improve,” said Müllner. “We're seeing a parallel trend where we're consuming more electricity and producing less.” 

Locals are also concerned the data center will push up electricity prices, as has happened in Ireland and the United States, said Gruber.

Higher prices are a risk if Austria doesn’t compensate for the data center’s energy needs with additional renewables, said Christoph Dolna-Gruber, an expert at the Austrian Energy Agency, which advises the government and power companies.

“When demand rises, but supply can't keep up, the price of electricity naturally goes up as well,” he said, cautioning that Austria’s close integration into the wider European energy market made it hard to say how much costs would rise. 

Despite connecting to Austria’s clean grid, the Kronstorf data center won’t be carbon-free: Google’s plans foresee the installation of massive diesel-powered generators to keep the data center running in case of a blackout. While power cuts are rare in Austria, such generators have to be switched on regularly for test runs, noted Dolna-Gruber. 

Ideally, the government should require data center operators to contribute to building out clean power generation, he added.

The Austrian energy and economy ministry said in a statement to POLITICO that the power grid can manage the new data center. "In principle," it added, "the expansion of data centers must go hand in hand with the expansion of renewable generation, high-capacity grids, storage, and flexibility."

Europe first

There’s another reason the Austrian activists oppose the Kronstorf data center: Google is an American company. 

If you were to run a Google search for where to build a data center in Austria, says Müllner, the outskirts of Kronstorf would rank as a top result: An even plain to build on, river water available to cool the site, and an enormous power substation just around the corner.

So why, he asks, wasn’t that at least handed to a European company? “The Americans take the best spots, and then we have to build power lines to less desirable locations,” said Müllner. “We’ve let them take that.” 

Google says its project will create around 100 jobs. But the activists insist that the data center will send profits back to the U.S. and won’t benefit the local economy. 

“They use our energy. But where the revenues go we simply don’t know,” said Müllner. 

The Austrian economy ministry insisted that companies like Google "can make an important contribution to the region through investments, contracts for local businesses, and high-performance cloud and AI infrastructure."

While questions about energy and the environment must be "carefully examined," the ministry added, a "blanket rejection of such projects is not justified."

Given construction in Kronstorf is well underway, Gruber believes that it’s unrealistic to try and stop the project entirely. She and Müllner are targeting the expansion — the second phase that would triple the data center’s energy consumption. 

She hopes their protest will serve as a warning to other U.S. tech giants. Already, campaigners are gearing up to fight against new projects in the country’s east. 

“One thing we’ve already achieved,” she said, “is that it won’t be so easy for those who come next.” 

Big swing on data centers

California lawmakers take their big swing on data centers

The Legislature passed seven bills in an effort to stop the facilities from straining the state’s water and electricity systems.

By Noah Baustin

California lawmakers are rushing to rein in data centers, passing seven bills in the final week of the state’s legislative session to put stricter rules on an industry whose rapid buildout has sparked backlash across the country.

The measures, the last of which were passed just hours after President Donald Trump called Monday for communities to embrace data center development or risk becoming “backwards and poor,” represent California’s most significant response yet to growing public criticism of the facilities.

The measures would require data centers to report energy and water use to government agencies, undergo environmental impact reviews ahead of construction and pay special electricity rates designed to prevent them from passing costs onto other electricity customers.

Gov. Gavin Newsom, speaking to reporters after Trump’s social media post championing the spread of data centers, said, “If we’re going to do it, we’re going to do it right.”

“The president has a let-it-rip mindset,” the California governor said. “He’s not doing the industry any service by completely turning his back on public opinion.”

The passage of the bills marks a turn for California politicians, who have stayed relatively quiet on the topic of data centers, even as the massive buildout of server farms across the country has animated statehouses from New York to Illinois to Texas. Newsom, who had previously avoided data center debates, allowing his energy agency to quietly work on the issue, signaled a sharper focus on the facilities in recent weeks, saying they “ran roughshod” over Virginia, a national hub for the facilities.

“We have a number of projects that are obviously generating a lot of headlines and controversy and concerns about, not just electricity consumption, but obviously water consumption as well,” Newsom said in August. “We believe that all of these investments, the costs, should be borne by the companies.”

Meanwhile, a slew of California municipalities have imposed data center moratoriums in recent months as public outcry against the facilities has increased.

As the nation’s technology capital, California ranks third in the country in terms of the number of operating data centers, but its industry has grown more slowly than other states.

The most controversial bills in the California package were SB 886, by state Sen. Steve Padilla, and AB 2383, by Assemblymember Rick Zbur, both of which would require the state to create a special electricity rate for data centers. After the Newsom administration proposed a series of amendments, negotiations with lawmakers grew complicated, but the two Democratic authors ultimately cut a deal to incorporate the recommendations and move their pair of bills together as a package.

“Together, they make sure that data centers are paying their fair share,” Zbur said.

However, some electricity customer advocates and environmentalists warn that the last-minute changes leave open the possibility that the facilities won’t be powered by renewable energy and could find loopholes to avoid covering some costs to the electricity grid.

“This proposed set of legislation is a small step forward, but actually falls far behind what other states are doing to protect their [electricity] ratepayers and the climate,” said Monica Embrey, founder of the advocacy organization the Affordable Energy Campaign.

The other data center bills include Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan’s AB 1577, which would require the facilities to report their energy use to the government; Assemblymember Diane Papan’s AB 2619 and AB 2469, which would require data centers to disclose information about their water use to government officials; SB 1168, by state Sen. Jerry McNerney, which would require state regulators to find opportunities for data centers to pay their reasonable share of costs for maintaining the electricity grid; and Padilla’s SB 887, which would ensure that the facilities are not exempt from environmental review.

The Data Center Coalition, which represents the industry, opposed the entire set of bills, arguing that they unfairly singled out a single sector and that lawmakers should allow state regulators to develop rules on their own.

Last year, Newsom signaled his own hesitation to heap regulations onto data centers, vetoing a water use disclosure bill and noting that California should be “well positioned to support the development of this critically important digital infrastructure.”

But on Monday, he signaled that his position had shifted.

“We have been working with the Legislature on a number of these bills that landed fairly well,” Newsom said. “You’re seeing states all across this country leaning in. We’ll be leaning in.”

Europe isn’t having it

Trump welcomes Russia back to the G20. Europe isn’t having it.

Moscow's inclusion was a sharp change from how the U.S. handled such gatherings after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

By Michael Stratford and Rasmus Buchsteiner

 The Trump administration’s decision to bring Russia back into the fold at a gathering of the world’s leading economic officials is stirring fresh tensions with European allies who want to continue isolating Moscow over its war in Ukraine.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov was in the room Monday for the first day of the U.S.-hosted G20 talks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also held a one-on-one meeting with Siluanov on the sidelines of the summit.

Siluanov’s attendance, however, was opposed by European officials in Asheville on Monday, and the decision to include the Russian official in the meeting caused a stir in the planning of a group photo of participants.

“Secretary Bessent had a productive meeting with the Russian finance minister,” Erin Browne, Treasury’s undersecretary for international affairs, told POLITICO. Bessent “conveyed to him that the war needs to end, and we want to see a peaceful outcome,” she said.

A Treasury spokesperson said the two discussed “Trump’s plan for peace and economic growth.”

Browne said Russia’s inclusion was a decision made by the White House. “We are following the White House’s protocol,” she said.

Asked by reporters Monday about Russia’s inclusion in the gathering, Trump defended the decision. “We like getting along with everybody,” he told reporters. “One of the reasons that I’m so successful — that I get along with everybody.”

During his meeting with Siluanov, Bessent made clear that the U.S. would not provide economic relief to Russia until the war in Ukraine ends, according to a person familiar with the meeting. When the Russian finance minister “tried to discuss areas of interest to take action on, Secretary Bessent forcefully interrupted and said nothing is possible until the war is over,” said the person, who was granted anonymity to discuss a private meeting.

The inclusion of Russia represented a sharp change from how the U.S. handled such gatherings after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. During the Biden administration, U.S. officials joined European counterparts in publicly protesting Moscow’s participation in international economic forums. Then-Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was among Western officials who walked out of a G20 meeting in 2022 when a Russian official began speaking.

German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil told reporters he had made clear “that he would not pose for a group photo with the Russian finance minister,” noting that such a photo had not taken place in recent years.

Klingbeil said he coordinated his position with other European officials.

“The Europeans’ united approach ultimately meant that the group photo took place without the Russian finance minister and without the Russian delegation,” he said.

A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment on the photo dust-up. Treasury on Monday evening released the photo, which did not include the Russian official.

During the talks in Asheville, Klingbeil said he took the opportunity to “tell the Russian finance minister straight to his face” that the Russian government must end the war against Ukraine.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sharply criticized the administration’s decision to include Russia.

“The Trump Admin needs to pressure Putin and his cronies, not offer them a platform,” Shaheen said in a statement. She also urged the House to take up a new Russia sanctions package that overwhelmingly passed the Senate earlier this month.

No! Fuck NO! I don't want this shit so why do I have to deal with it?

‘An imperfect solution’ gains traction in data center fight

Governors are turning to community benefit agreements as they scramble to address data center blowback without alienating tech giants.

By Kinnia Cheuk

(I don't want AI. I want a job that I like. I want to earn a living how I want. If AI takes your job and they say they will give you a basic salary, who decides that? How much will they give you? Will it force you into a slum, living in a housing project, eating crap food??? No one says anything about that. Why?  * Not part of story)

Democratic governors have a new message for data center developers amid community backlash: Cut a deal.

Community benefit agreements are increasingly appearing in state strategies for handling the data center boom. In recent months, three Rust Belt governors — Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’ JB Pritzker and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer — have called on project developers to enter into legal agreements with communities that can cement pollution limits, hiring commitments and local investment promises.

“My message to data center developers is clear: if you can’t agree to our strict requirements and get the community where you want to build to say ‘yes,’ you’re not going to have the Commonwealth’s support either,” Shapiro said in a statement when he signed an executive order last month that features CBAs. “These are some of the biggest companies in the world — they can afford to be good neighbors, follow the rules, and do this right.”

CBAs first cropped up 25 years ago, when a coalition of Los Angeles community groups hammered out a deal with the developers of the Staples Center. That first-ever CBA traded promises of jobs and local investment for community support that helped secure city subsidies. Since then, communities across the U.S. have used versions of the legal agreement to secure economic benefits from a variety of developments.

Policymakers are now mulling mandates for such agreements. Shapiro signed an executive order last month ordering his state’s Department of Environmental Protection to only review permit applications for data center developers that have agreed to sign a CBA with their local community, among other requirements. Otherwise, DEP will not begin review until after all local approvals, including for zoning and land use, are secured.

The move was the latest sign that Shapiro, a likely 2028 presidential contender, has gone from a data center cheerleader to a vocal skeptic. He’s not alone. Both Democrats and Republicans are grappling with how to address a growing public backlash to the energy- and water-guzzling facilities, which are cropping up faster than political leaders and regulators can keep up.

CBAs appeal to moderate Democratic governors who are scrambling to address data center blowback without alienating the tech giants they hope can provide a much-needed boost to their local economies. But even progressives who support moratoriums on data centers, like Michigan Senate Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed, have referenced CBAs as a way to protect communities from data centers’ possible impacts.

Abre’ Conner, director of the NAACP’s Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, said organizers of the group’s Stop Dirty Data Centers campaign quickly realized that some projects can’t be stopped by advocacy efforts — no matter how fervently communities oppose them.

CBAs can be “a tool in communities’ toolboxes” during negotiations when data center developments turn out to be inevitable, Conner said.

Experts say that the legal agreements are far from a cure-all. So far, only one community seems to have cut a deal with a data center developer.

The Data Center Coalition also argues that the vast majority of its members— including the likes of Google and Amazon — have voluntarily invested in communities beyond the jobs they create, like filling school budget gaps. Mandating CBAs before zoning or permitting, as some states are considering, could create delays and drive developments away, said Brad Tietz, the group’s director of government affairs in the Midwest.

“We’re in uncharted territory,” said Tietz. “Mandating something legislatively is far different than it occurring naturally between the local government and the company.”

But some politicians see CBAs as a stop-gap solution, providing relief for communities and serving as a model for responsible developers before other regulations are set in stone. That’s the idea behind a package of bills that Michigan state senators unveiled in June. The legislation, backed by Whitmer, would require local governments to reach a CBA with developers before moving forward with zoning approvals.

“Community benefits agreements will not solve all of the problems, but if you can put it together with strong regulations on data centers and the entire regulatory framework, then I do think that we’re in a stronger position to have members of our community feel that they are being heard right now,” said Michigan state Sen. Darrin Camilleri (D), assistant majority leader and the package’s primary sponsor.

(Re)building trust

Data centers’ sky high unpopularity has given many communities the power to demand environmental standards and investments from developers.

“Two years ago, communities really didn’t have much leverage against a Google or a Meta. But now we’re starting to see so many data centers that are canceled because of public defense, and so now communities really have a lot more leverage than they had in the past,” said Dana Kuhnline, program director at regional coalition ReImagine Appalachia.

At least 20 proposed data center projects were canceled after local pushback during the first three months of 2026, accounting for more than $41.7 billion in investment and 3.5 gigawatts of electricity demand, according to data from Heatmap.

The opposition has prompted a wave of local moratoriums and restrictions: Virginia has enacted a new energy consumption tax and New York has paused new data center construction for a year. In Illinois, lawmakers have proposed the POWER Act, which would require data center developers to enter into a CBA with a coalition of community-based organizations or a community advisory board formed by the municipal government.

Meagan Niebler, program director at the nonprofit law firm Fair Shake Environmental Legal Services, said more communities want to stop data centers entirely instead of reaching a deal.

But if developments continue to move forward, communities will be thinking about how to hold companies legally accountable and ensure protections with CBAs, said Niebler, who has collaborated with Midwest communities to ensure environmental protections in data center development.

Pennsylvania’s regulations and proposed laws in Illinois and Michigan would mandate that companies negotiate with communities until both sides agree. But nonmandatory CBAs depend heavily on a developer’s good faith effort.

It’s “very hard” to get large companies to a table for open dialogue with communities, and locals often need a lot of organizing and legal leverage to even get their foot in the door, Niebler said.

“There’s a lot of things that make it an imperfect solution, but an imperfect solution is still better than nothing,” said Liza Paudel, senior program manager for tech equity at the nonprofit Greenlining Institute.

The data center industry says their key concern is timing. Delays can significantly derail a project if local governments are slow to appoint community members to an advisory board to discuss contract terms — like the Illinois proposal would require — or if negotiations are stretched out indefinitely, Tietz said.

“What if you have a local government who’s interested, but obviously opposition rises, and then you’ve spent 10, 12 months negotiating for the project that is not even going to advance?” Tietz said.

Developers would have more confidence in the project if permitting could occur while the CBA is being negotiated, Tietz said. That could mean, for example, requiring an agreement to be reached before construction begins — rather than before a permit is issued.

States could alternatively offer incentives — such as tax breaks — to developers who reach community benefit agreements, he said.

Past programs emphasizing community engagement have had mixed results.

In 2021, the Biden-era Department of Energy required all clean energy projects funded by the Inflation Reduction Act to submit community benefit plans detailing how developers would engage in the local workforce and benefit disadvantaged communities. But the plans were not negotiated — and many residents complained that the process left community members without a role in any talks.

Projects that won grants often fell short of true community engagement, according to a former senior DOE official under then-President Joe Biden who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak by their current employer.

Many communities had “no idea” that any sort of benefits were promised to them, and the terms of the program were often drafted and implemented unilaterally on the developers’ side, the former official said.

“I never wanted it to be seen as the gold standard. We did a lot in a very constrained environment, but it wasn’t enough,” the official said.

For mandatory CBAs to work, they said, the community has to have the veto power to shut the project down.

Looking to Lancaster

You have to travel to the heart of Amish country to find the data center industry’s only CBA, according to research by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Chirisa Technology Parks and codeveloper Machine Investment Group have an agreement with the government of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, over two data center sites in the city, encompassing approximately 2 million square feet with at least 700 megawatts of planned capacity.

First proposed by then-mayor Danene Sorace, the agreement was formally executed in November. The company had already planned to adhere to certain environmental standards, so executives thought the CBA was a “great idea,” said David Kelly, chief technology officer at Chirisa.

Barry Handwerger, who drafted the agreement for Lancaster as city solicitor, said the city determined the bulk of the terms. Chirisa mainly met with the mayor’s office, though it held an open house for the community early on in the process.

The final agreement requires that Chirisa source all its power from clean energy sources, employ a closed loop cooling system that conserves water and adhere to a publicly disclosed municipal water use cap, noise limits and wastewater regulations. The company must submit annual environmental and operational reporting and make its power use public, said Handwerger. The agreement also holds Chirisa to investing $20 million into clean energy and sustainable development for the city.

If those requirements aren’t met, the company faces millions of dollars in penalties and permanent injunctions for breaches of nonfinancial commitments like noise limit violations.

Several state and local officials within and outside of Pennsylvania have reached out to City Council members to learn about the agreement, said Lancaster City Council President Ahmed Ahmed, who voted to pass the CBA.

The data center issue is a “very difficult topic” to discuss in the public forum, he said, but the CBA quelled residents’ anxieties on whether the project would use too much water or rely on fossil fuels.

The activist organization Lancaster Stands Up challenged the city’s approval of the Chirisa project, encouraging residents to express their concerns at City Council meetings. Some meetings drew 100 people to city hall, said Frank Arcoleo, a Lancaster resident and member of the group. Arcoleo appealed the zoning approval for the data centers in August but was ultimately unsuccessful.

The group also submitted detailed recommendations for the CBA, including requirements for renewable energy, noise limits and decommissioning. Arcoleo said nearly all of them made it into the final agreement.

“Had there been a little bit of public grousing and complaining about these data centers, but it went away, I think they wouldn’t have done anything,” he said.

Lancaster Stands Up, which is part of Pennsylvania Stands Up, has shared its documents and experience with other chapters of the organization, especially those involved in data center fights themselves, Arcoleo said.

“Where they’re winning, they’re stopping the data centers to begin with. Where they’re losing, they’re at least demanding that the community benefits agreement be at least as good as Lancaster’s,” he said.

Complementary solutions

CBAs are only one aspect of the major new strategies that states are rolling out for the data center boom.

Pennsylvania’s regulations, as well as the proposals from Illinois and Michigan, include provisions that protect ratepayers from bearing the cost of data center projects and prohibit developers from entering into certain nondisclosure agreements to maintain transparency.

Republican senators in Michigan say that the legislation is more talking points than substance. State Sen. Jim Runestad, assistant minority caucus chair of the Michigan Senate, has proposed a one-year moratorium on data centers. Absent a moratorium, developers may still be able to have their way over community’s needs, he said.

Mandating community benefits between local government and developers may mean that “some board, county board, city board, negotiates something for themselves, which may be a swimming pool close to the elected official’s backyard,” he said. “It’s all fluff.”

While CBAs can be valuable tools for some communities, blanket local zoning ordinances can provide many of its benefits, said Christina Libre, attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Zoning ordinances ensure that all baseline considerations are taken into account every time a data center application comes before the locality, rather than relying on the goodwill of any individual developer to negotiate an agreement with the community, she said.

Possible ordinances could require all data center developments get city council approval, she said, or mandate pollution limits.

Lancaster began drafting a data center zoning ordinance only after Chirisa proposed building its data centers last spring. The ordinance passed this July, mandating noise mitigation plans, air quality testing, and water and power use reporting. The law also limits data center development to land zoned for suburban manufacturing, reducing land open to data centers from 200 potential parcels to only 16.

But Christopher Delfs, Lancaster’s director of economic development, still sees a role for CBAs in the future.

“Zoning is about regulation and what you can’t do, but a CBA is more creative about what you want a data center to achieve, like finding other ways for the city to realize its sustainability plan by investments in renewable energy, and other funds like the economic development and innovation funds,” he said.

Chirisa is currently partnering with the nonprofit Economic Development Co. of Lancaster County to determine how the financial commitments from Chirisa will be used, said EDC Lancaster County President Ezra Rothman. He hopes that Chirisa’s data centers won’t just be “server rooms” for Lancaster, but can help drive how the city’s schools and companies prepare for an AI future.

“Hopefully the agreement is a start, and the partnerships in our community can really become a model for leveraging the physical construction of a data center to drive innovation,” he said.

Do you want this?

Own a gun? Go to church? Do yoga? AI can find out in seconds.

A series of demos on the Hill has both Democrats and Republicans alarmed about artificial intelligence’s ability to plumb commercial databases for information on Americans.

By Alfred Ng

Republicans and Democrats across Capitol Hill are getting a glimpse of artificial intelligence’s latest power: its ability to churn out instant dossiers filled with details about ordinary Americans, from a gun store owner’s leaked email passwords to a church member’s yoga workouts to people’s visits to abortion clinics.

And it’s freaking them out.

Lawmakers and staffers from dozens of congressional offices have seen AI’s privacy-busting prowess in demos arranged in recent months by CivAI, a nonprofit that says its aim is to educate the public about AI’s dangers and capabilities.

Besides building troves of personal information gleaned from commercial databases, the dossiers offer advice on potential ways to blackmail, coerce or stalk the individual in question, according to four Republican and eight Democratic staffers who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.

The demos started landing amid the debate over whether to renew a set of government spying powers that expired in June — legislation that offers the most realistic chance for addressing the issue during this Congress, a Democratic House aide who witnessed one of the briefings said.

While commercial databases have long made it possible to purchase information on people’s travels, shopping habits, subscriptions, employment histories and social media profiles, AI makes it easier to quickly pull that data into one place — and to build detailed profiles about virtually any American who owns a phone. The technology adds to long-standing concerns from some lawmakers about federal agencies buying this kind of data on U.S. citizens without obtaining a warrant.

“Today, anyone with access to a frontier AI model can buy your data from a broker and reconstruct an intimate picture of your life, including your location, your purchases, your browsing history, and even who you love or where you worship,” Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said in a statement. “CivAI’s work showing members and staff exactly how easy this is should be a wake-up call for Congress, which has spent years failing to act.”

Despite the typically bleak prospects for strong privacy laws on Capitol Hill, the demos were effective at introducing the issue to congressional offices not steeped in tech policy, staffers said, thanks in part to the briefings’ focus on potential harms to voters such as gun owners, activists or people seeking abortions.

“It made clear that our constitutional and statutory privacy protections have not kept pace with modern technology,” said a Republican House staffer who saw one of the demos in July. “Congress needs to act before AI and the unchecked commercial sale of personal data erode the privacy protections Americans have relied on for generations.”

‘Find church-going Christians in Janesville, Wisconsin’

The dozen staffers who spoke to POLITICO work for lawmakers spanning the ideological spectrum, including members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Artificial Intelligence Caucus and Second Amendment Caucus.

The potential for AI to amplify surveillance capabilities has long worried many of the lawmakers and staffers who saw the demonstration, but the demonstrations marked the first time they saw these warnings come to life.

“The scalability is quite frightening,” said a Democratic Senate aide who saw one of the briefings.

CivAI also performed a demo for POLITICO, producing a dossier that included its reporter’s love of spicy food.

“These are the earliest days of what AI is going to enable for surveillance,” said CivAI co-founder Sid Hiregowdara. He added, “As things become easier, as you can click a button to do things that would’ve taken a month or had been very arduous before. That’s a different level of capability.”

CivAI built its demonstration in about two weeks, using a Chinese open-source AI model called GLM-5.1. The model is well known across Silicon Valley as a cheaper alternative with fewer guardrails against surveillance compared with so-called closed software from companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI — though the closed models also present their own threats.

Anthropic’s usage policy doesn’t allow its models to be used for tracking people or for tools such as facial recognition or stalking purposes, while OpenAI’s policies prohibit anyone from using its services for creating facial recognition databases and profiling people.

While the terms of use for Z.ai, the parent company behind GLM-5.1, prohibits its services from being used to infringe on people’s privacy rights, CivAI was able to use its model to create the demo without constraints.

But government rules on AI wouldn’t address the issue, argued Neil Chilson, the head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, which advocates for lighter regulations for emerging technologies. Regulating AI could also stifle the technology’s ability to comb through datasets for purposes such as marketing and election campaigns, Chilson said, adding that lawmakers should pursue stronger privacy protections to limit the surveillance threats raised in CivAI’s briefings.

He said it would be especially difficult to regulate open-source models.

The data brokers’ main trade group, the Consumer Data Industry Association, did not respond to a request for comment.

The agent used in CivAI’s demos is connected to a handful of data brokers, with subscriptions costing about $500 a month. The nonprofit declined to share which companies it subscribes to, saying it did not want others to recreate the demo.

Spicy food and Super Smash Bros.

The demo starts with a fairly blank page titled “AI Data Broker Search,” with a box prompting users to enter a name, email, phone number or profile URL. Then comes a sample prompt such as: “Find church-going Christians in Janesville, Wisconsin. Write a detailed dossier on one.”

The bot then crawls through databases to surface information such as a person’s interests and social media posts and their network of family and friends.

The GOP staffer who attended the July briefing said the results included passwords associated with a gun store owner’s email address, which had turned up in commercial databases because of previous data breaches. Staff members who have seen the briefing said dossiers also flagged a person’s history with mental health treatments, as well as visits to abortion clinics and lawmakers’ offices.

At the end of the dossiers is a section about potential vulnerabilities to exploit — where a foreign government actor or domestic extremist could use the information to harass, blackmail or stalk their targets.

In the demo for POLITICO, CivAI’s agent found personal information on a church volunteer in Wisconsin, including details about where she lives, her social media accounts and her shopping habits. It suggested that her predictable weekly routine, including her church volunteering hours and work commute, and the fact that she reuses passwords for multiple accounts could be used to locate her and collect even more information about her.

“[Anyone] can go out and start to dox people who are engaged in reproductive access, or go to church or go to protests,” a senior Senate aide who saw the briefing in May said. “That should be scary to people and shows the importance of having regulatory reform.”

CivAI anonymizes the dossiers’ information in its demos, replacing personal details with generalized information such as “Jane Doe” and AI-generated images rather than real photos. But the live demonstrations are based on the data collected on real people, the nonprofit says.

In a search for “Alfred Ng,” CivAI’s model found genuine photos of the POLITICO reporter and accurately identified that he enjoys the video game series Super Smash Bros. and eating spicy food, but also provided inaccurate results on his address, age and occupation.

Hiregowdara attributed the errors to the low-cost subscriptions that CivAI used in that demo. He said a motivated attacker, such as a foreign adversary, could have access to higher-quality data.

The portion of the Hill demos featuring location information uses simulated data — based on sample offerings that companies hand out for potential customers — to show lawmakers how AI could create similar dossiers about people’s whereabouts.

CivAI’s demo for POLITICO using this data showed a dossier about another church attendee, in North Carolina, and listed the locations of her home, workplace and a nearby bar she frequents, along with routines such as regular visits to a yoga studio, a park and a diner.

Staff members said they know upfront that the location data is simulated and the personal data is obscured, but said the concerns are still real.

“I would have significant concerns if they were coming around in meetings and showing a real person’s data. That almost never happens,” a Democratic aide for the AI Caucus said. “This is the only way where they could do a briefing along these lines, and I don’t think it really changed the scope of what they were able to show us.”

Hoping to prod Congress on privacy

Both Democrats and Republicans said the briefings show that most Americans are vulnerable to mass surveillance.

Trahan raised her concerns about these threats during a hearing in June on the SECURE Data Act, which would create data privacy requirements for businesses, arguing that the legislation does not address the capabilities highlighted from the demo.

House GOP members, meanwhile, expressed concern about the dossiers built on gun store owners, according to three Republican staffers.

“The gun registry couldn’t make it more clearer — we don’t believe in those, we don’t think they should exist, and this is a de facto gun registry,” said the Senate staffer who watched the July demo.

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told POLITICO that he did not see the briefing directly but shares concerns about commercially available data affecting gun owners. His committee three years ago advanced the Fourth Amendment is Not For Sale Act, which would limit the federal government’s ability to purchase data about Americans without a warrant.

“We’ve always had that concern about government [and] your privacy,” Jordan told POLITICO. “You shouldn’t lose your Fourth Amendment rights because you’re exercising your Second Amendment rights.”

CivAI’s briefings began in late April, as Congress debated renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the law that allows the government to conduct warrantless surveillance of non-U.S. residents’ communications. Lawmakers allowed the spying authority to expire for the first time since Congress had approved it in 2008, citing a variety of concerns about government breaches of people’s privacy.

Without any active legislation on AI and data brokers, a Democratic House aide said, the FISA renewal fight will be lawmakers’ most realistic chance at addressing the issue this Congress. The briefings have helped with a bipartisan push to require warrants before federal agencies can buy information from data brokers, said a second Republican House staffer who saw the briefing in July.

“If you’re on the fence and you saw this, I would think it’d make some impact in the direction of needing greater protections,” the aide said.

With privacy legislation frequently stalled on Capitol Hill, Hiregowdara said he hopes the demonstrations help get Congress moving on any legislation that advances the ball.

“We’re not hoping for any single law,” Hiregowdara said. “What we want is durable attention on this problem.”