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Business group calls for better coordination as California adopts AI

Chris Teale — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

If California’s local governments, and the state as a whole, are to successfully adopt artificial intelligence, they need to make sure it is done in a more coordinated manner, according to a report released by a local business group.

The Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the leading business association for the region’s innovation economy, said in the report that, while many agencies at the state and local level are experimenting with AI tools, they are doing so without the capacity, procurement systems, data infrastructure or governance frameworks they need to properly evaluate those tools and ensure the technology’s use is valuable for their residents.

The group called on local governments to evaluate AI based on the problem it is addressing, the data it is using, the product or model being procured and the way it changes interactions between residents, staff and government processes. That evaluation goes far beyond asking whether an AI tool simply works, the report says.

“AI adoption in local government is not hypothetical; it is already happening,” said Jake Brymner, the author of the assessment and a policy fellow at the Institute for California AI Policy, which is housed at SVLG. “The question is whether agencies have the information, staff capacity, procurement tools and governance structures they need to support adoption. Procurement of AI tools is not just a technical exercise. It is a policy and implementation decision that can affect service delivery, worker roles and public accountability.”

California’s state and local agencies have been at the vanguard of AI adoption compared to many of their counterparts, and they have used the technology in a variety of areas. The state has embraced AI for its Covered California health insurance marketplace, while its judges are in the midst of testing an AI clerk for some cases. Meanwhile, its cities have turned to AI to speed up the permitting process to accelerate home construction and improve public transportation.

The state recognized there is more work to be done, too, and unveiled an effort to invite residents to help shape AI policy through Engaged California, its digital community engagement platform.

SVLG highlighted various good work already underway, including Los Angeles County’s use of AI to search through and summarize complex documents in public benefits programs. But the group also offered cautionary tales, like Long Beach’s chatbot pilot that reportedly returned outdated or inaccurate information to residents.

And if California is to truly embrace AI and use it to improve residents’ lives, the SVLG report said major challenges remain around procurement and deployment, especially at the local level. The group said agencies’ procurement systems “have not caught up with AI,” as they often receive inconsistent or incomplete information from vendors about model performance, training data, treatment of personally identifiable information, data use and long-term oversight.

Then, deployment needs “significant” change management, SVLG said. Many agencies do not have enough AI training, while they also grapple with uneven data governance practices, staff anxiety about automation and collective bargaining considerations when AI changes workflows.

The report has a series of recommendations for local agencies, including that they designate AI policy leads to coordinate their efforts; create internal AI training programs; audit current AI uses and the data they use; publish internal guidelines and AI use inventories; update procurement methods to account for AI risks and disclosure needs; and share their ideas, best practices and lessons learned with their peers.

Meanwhile, the report urged the California Department of Technology to issue guidelines on information public agencies should receive when they procure AI tools. And more broadly, SVLG said the state should fund training for local agencies; create a state-supported sandbox to allow local agencies to test AI with synthetic data; pilot state data storage and compute services for local agencies; update data protection laws; and study how infrastructure can be scaled and financed.

“California has an opportunity to define what thoughtful public-sector AI adoption and deployment looks like,” Ziyang Fan, founding executive director of the Institute for California AI Policy at the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, said in a statement. “That means moving beyond fragmented experimentation and giving local agencies practical tools: shared standards, training, procurement guidance, testing environments and secure data infrastructure so AI can enhance public services while reducing risks.”

Despite the challenges that lay ahead, leaders said they are hopeful the state can continue to be a pioneer in AI adoption, and take advantage of that early movement to stay ahead of the curve.

“California is home to the world’s leading AI companies, and we are uniquely positioned to use these tools to expand human potential and solve real problems for Californians,” Ahmad Thomas, SVLG’s CEO, said in a statement. “Local governments are on the front lines of public service delivery. This assessment gives California a roadmap to help cities and counties adopt AI in ways that improve services, protect residents and build public trust.”

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A central Texas Library closing the digital divide

Madeline de Figueiredo, The Daily Yonder — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article first appeared on The Daily Yonder and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

In Caldwell County, Texas, between Austin and San Antonio, some residents are still struggling to keep up in an increasingly digital world. With broadband access lagging behind neighboring metro counties, older residents in particular are feeling the strain. Now, the Martindale Community Library is stepping in to help close that gap.

Census estimates from 2024 indicated that about 10% of Caldwell County residents did not have broadband access, a drop in connectivity compared to the adjacent metropolitan counties. For older people in Caldwell County, the shift to online platforms has created new and often frustrating challenges.

Recognizing these challenges, organizers at the Martindale Community Library implemented a course aimed at helping older residents adapt.

“I feel illiterate when it comes to [technology] and constantly have to ask friends to help me,” said Cecilia Murphy, a Caldwell County community member and one of the students in the course. “For example, my insurance company only does things online, they don’t provide hard copies anymore and it’s confusing.”

The library now hosts Digital Lift Navigator classes. The six-month free program is designed to help residents build practical technology skills, from using devices like Samsung tablets to navigating the internet safely.

“Everything is reliant on technology now,” said Michael Grubbs, the grants administrator at the Martindale Community Library. “It is all happening quickly and we are just trying to make the changes easier to navigate.”

The class currently has 10 students enrolled, each receiving a Samsung tablet to use throughout the program. At the end of the course, participants will complete a final project, a community cookbook, and will be able to keep their devices.

“We are aiming for senior citizens to improve their digital literacy. We are helping to connect them with medical resources, set up emails, and build familiarity with tools to navigate the internet safely,” said Amanda Traywick, the programs coordinator at the Martindale Community Library.

But reaching those that need help can take some creativity. The library started their outreach effort on social media.

“We've had a struggle to get the word out since many of these people are not on Facebook or Instagram,” Traywick said. “They're just not comfortable with using social media, so we’ve had to use other means.”

The library staff put up flyers and posters around the community.

“One thing we keep running into is figuring out which communication methods work best for everyone as people are differently aligned with technology,” Grubbs said.

For residents without reliable internet access at home, the program also provides mobile hotspots, allowing participants to continue practicing outside of class.

“We encourage everyone to take the [tablets and hotspots] home to continue learning,” Grubbs said.

The students not only lean on the instructors, but also each other.

“Our doctors and medical providers have portals, so they send messages to us that way now,” said Jane Cardiff, another community resident and student. “We just help each other as we have to figure out things like DocuSign.”

The students said that the lessons are helping them understand the online landscape and feel better prepared. At the Martindale Community Library, that digital gap is being closed one class at a time.

“I have learned a lot,” Murphy said. “We needed this class.”

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Federal judge blocks Trump administration’s overhaul of SAVE database

Natalia Contreras and Dion Nissenbaum, Votebeat — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Votebeat.

A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s overhaul of an immigration verification system to check voter eligibility across the nation, striking down a central pillar of the government’s efforts to exercise more federal control over elections.

The judge cited Texas’ use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, database, which flagged several voters who were actually citizens as noncitizens, as evidence that it threatened both privacy and voting rights less than five months before the November midterm election.

“The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote,” Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said in her 75-page ruling. “This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens.”

Sooknanan’s decision does not eliminate SAVE, a decades-old immigration-status verification program. But it blocks the Trump administration’s 2025 overhaul of the system, which made it easier for states to check their voter rolls against the federal database, which includes individuals’ citizenship status and Social Security numbers.

Election officials have found that the modified database, however, is prone to error, something Sooknanan referenced in her decision. Federal officials, she wrote, “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable.”

The ruling could strengthen challenges by voters who were removed, flagged, or placed under review by the system.

“States have partnered with the federal government to access the database and are actively removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information,” the judge wrote.

Voting Rights Groups, Trump Administration React to Ruling

The case was filed by the League of Women Voters and other groups who argued that the SAVE system was inaccurate and that using it to check voter rolls violated citizen privacy rights.

“Today’s decision is a resounding victory for voters,” said Marcia Johnson, chief of activation and justice for the League of Women Voters. “Efforts to create a federal voter database to facilitate voter purges threaten the fundamental right at the heart of our democracy.”

Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School who worked in the White House on democracy and voting rights issues under President Joe Biden, agreed that voters would benefit from the ruling.

“This provides incremental reassurance that they won’t be inaccurately singled out and have to jump through even more hoops to vote,” he said. “It stops the use of a deeply flawed process to cause trouble for real eligible citizens.”

However, James Percival, the general counsel at the Department of Homeland Security, which maintains the SAVE database, criticized the ruling as a misguided effort to block the Trump administration from trying to address voter fraud.

“It’s amazing how hard the Left will fight to stop us from solving problems they insist do not exist,” Percival said in a statement.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Michael Morley, a professor at the Florida State University College of Law and faculty director of the FSU Election Law Center, said the ruling prevents the federal government from using all the information at its disposal to ensure that only eligible voters take part in elections.

“It seems to leave the government in a somewhat tenuous position of being able to provide citizenship data to states for voting purposes that is less accurate than it otherwise would be,” he said. “It restricts the government’s ability to take advantage of all of the most accurate sources of information it has in order, in most cases, to confirm people’s citizenship status.”

Judge Cites Texas’ Use of SAVE Database in Ruling

Texas intervened as a defendant in the case since it had been actively using SAVE to verify the citizenship status of its more than 18 million registered voters. The state gained access to the database in March 2025 after signing a memorandum of agreement with the Department of Homeland Security.

In October, the Texas Secretary of State’s Office announced SAVE had flagged 2,724 people as “potential noncitizens” and sent the list to county election officials to investigate. That process involved mailing letters to each person flagged, requesting additional information to verify their citizenship. If county officials received no response after 30 days, the person’s registration was canceled.

Some voters who responded to the notices turned out to be U.S. citizens after all; others had their registrations canceled, although a specific number hasn’t been released. Hundreds of other registrants who were flagged had registered at the Texas Department of Public Safety, the agency that issues driver’s licenses and state IDs. In Texas, proof of citizenship is required to obtain those documents.

In the ruling, Sooknanan said the state’s use of the database burdened and risked disenfranchising voters by incorrectly flagging naturalized citizens as noncitizens. The judge pointed to examples of voters in Texas who were U.S. citizens and had to provide proof of citizenship to keep their registration active and at least one U.S. citizen whose registration was revoked without their knowledge.

Sooknanan also pointed to an amicus brief filed by Travis County voter registration officials as evidence that the use of the overhauled SAVE database was inaccurate. The state flagged 97 potential noncitizens in Travis County. Voter registration officials found that about a quarter of those voters had registered at DPS and therefore had likely provided proof of citizenship.

Travis County officials were later able to confirm that at least 11 people who were flagged as potential noncitizens were in fact citizens.

“Texas threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of information obtained through the modified SAVE system; and they were required to confirm their citizenship to maintain their voter registrations,” Sooknanan said.

The secretary of state’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Celia Israel, the Travis County tax assessor-collector and voter registrar, said the ruling is “validating.”

“We have asked a lot of questions in the past several months about the SAVE database and about its accuracy,” Israel said. “The lawsuit confirms that there are inaccuracies and that it is worthwhile for us officials at the county level to ask the state questions.”

Other civil rights groups and voters have also challenged Texas’ use of the database in a federal court in Austin. The lawsuit is still pending.

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When AI becomes the first interpreter, government needs a new information layer

David Rau — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

For decades, government communication has followed a consistent model. Agencies publish information through websites, press releases, public notices and social media. Residents access that information directly and interpret it within the context provided. That model is now changing.

Increasingly, residents are not reading government information at its source. They are receiving answers through artificial intelligence systems that summarize, combine and interpret information from across the web.

In this environment, publication is no longer the final step. Interpretation happens before the public sees the information. This shift introduces a new challenge. Even when government information is accurate, timely and clearly written, it is not always interpreted with the same level of clarity.

Why Interpretation Breaks at the System Level

AI systems do not read information the way people do. They rely on patterns, structure and signals rather than context or institutional familiarity. Those signals are often incomplete. Government information is distributed across thousands of independent entities.

Cities, counties and departments publish separately, at different times and in different formats. Authority is often implied rather than explicitly stated. Updates are frequently issued as new documents rather than structured revisions.

To a human reader, these distinctions are manageable. To an AI system, they introduce ambiguity. When multiple sources address similar topics, the system must determine which one applies. In doing so, it often prioritizes consistency or scale over local specificity. The result is not necessarily incorrect information, but information that is misattributed, outdated or misaligned with jurisdiction.

Why Fixing This Internally Is Difficult

A natural response is to improve how information is published within each agency. In theory, departments could standardize formats, enforce structured metadata and maintain consistent update signals across all communications. This would make authority, timing and jurisdiction clearer to AI systems. In practice, this approach is difficult to sustain.

Local governments operate under resource constraints. Communications teams are small. Departments manage their own workflows. Coordination across agencies is limited. Even within a single jurisdiction, maintaining long-term consistency across all publishing channels requires ongoing effort. More importantly, the problem is not confined to a single agency.

AI systems interpret information across jurisdictions simultaneously. A city’s update may be evaluated alongside county, state and federal sources. Even if one agency maintains perfect structure internally, it still exists within a broader environment that is fragmented. Because of this, internal improvements alone cannot fully resolve the issue.

From Publishing Systems to Interpretation Infrastructure

As AI becomes a primary intermediary, a different requirement emerges. Information must not only be published clearly. It must be interpreted consistently across systems that operate beyond any single agency’s control. This introduces the need for a new layer of infrastructure.

Historically, government systems were designed for distribution and access. Websites organize information for navigation. Documents preserve official language. Social platforms support engagement. None of these systems were designed to function as a consistent input layer for AI interpretation.

The Emergence of AI Citation Registries

Within these constraints, a pattern is beginning to form. Systems often described as AI citation registries are emerging as a response to how information is now interpreted. Rather than changing how agencies publish, these systems operate downstream of publication.

They translate existing communications into structured, machine-readable records that make key relationships explicit:

who issued the information
where it applies
when it was published or updated
how it relates to prior statements

By making these elements explicit, the need for inference is reduced. AI systems can identify authority and recency directly, rather than reconstructing them from fragmented sources.

Why This Becomes a Practical Necessity

The emergence of these systems is not driven by preference alone. It reflects practical constraints. Maintaining structured, machine-readable publishing across every agency, department and jurisdiction would require sustained coordination, resources and standardization that do not currently exist at scale. At the same time, AI systems already operate across all of those entities simultaneously.

This creates an imbalance. Interpretation is centralized at the system level, while publishing remains decentralized. AI citation registries address that imbalance by introducing consistency at the point of interpretation rather than requiring uniformity at the point of publication. In that sense, they function less as a new tool and more as a compensating layer — one that aligns fragmented publishing environments with centralized interpretation systems.

A New Baseline for Public Information

AI is now part of the civic information environment. It shapes how residents ask questions and how answers are formed. For state and local governments, this changes the definition of effective communication. Publishing remains essential. But it is no longer sufficient on its own.

As AI becomes the first interpreter, the clarity of authority, timing and jurisdiction must persist beyond the original publication. That requirement is driving the emergence of new infrastructure designed for interpretation, not just distribution.

The question is no longer whether government information is available. It is whether that information can be consistently understood in the systems that increasingly deliver it.

David Rau works at the intersection of public-sector communication and emerging technology, focusing on how authority, attribution and trust function as AI systems increasingly mediate public access to government information.

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Inside Indiana’s cybersecurity education expansion

Chris Teale — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Last month, Indiana launched an initiative to expand cybersecurity education across its K-12 schools, to connect its students with colleges, careers and — in a national first — military service.

The effort expands access to The College Board’s Advanced Placement Cybersecurity course, as well as Project Lead the Way’s cybersecurity courses, and it is led by the Indiana Department of Education, the Indiana Cyber Network, the Indiana National Guard and various other organizations, including business groups, academic institutions.

It comes as the state, like others around the nation, wrestles with the urgent need to fill more than 20,000 open cybersecurity roles. Right now, around 69 public high schools in the state offer cybersecurity courses, with access for about 560 students. Over the next three years, Indiana is looking to grow that number to 200 high schools, reaching approximately 4,000 students.

The state also wants to increase the number of students who enroll in cybersecurity degree programs, pursue a cybersecurity specialty in the National Guard and secure cybersecurity jobs with Indiana businesses.

“Through this collaboration, Indiana’s cybersecurity sector will be able to meet its talent needs with highly-skilled homegrown professionals, and our students will be better prepared than ever before to excel in these high-wage, high-demand careers that will shape the future of our state and nation,” Indiana Gov. Mike Braun said in a statement at the time.

The partnership aims to increase access to cybersecurity coursework and digital literacy opportunities for K-12 students; expand hands‑on learning experiences, including career exploration and work-based learning opportunities; strengthen collaboration between schools, higher education and industry partners; and support educators with professional development aligned to cybersecurity career pathways. It will look to make cybersecurity far more integrated into education.

“It's so unusual and not nearly prevalent enough for education, especially K-12, to focus on advancing technology and cybersecurity, specifically as a subject, let alone a skill, or even the human attributes that are needed to succeed,” said Debbie Sallis, executive director at The Cyber Guild, a cyber workforce nonprofit that is involved in this effort. “We're a network of leaders, basically, and it's a constant theme: How do we make this a subject of note much earlier in the system?”

And it’s not just about technical skills, either. Alyssa Chudnofsky, executive director at The College Board, said the curriculum will also be focused on building students’ soft skills like communication, problem solving, teamwork and other aspects that aren’t so readily explored in the high school setting right now.

“We sometimes have expectations that high school students are knowing those soft skills that they're learning, and then are able to communicate that in the job interview setting, and it's really hard to do,” she said. “Most people don't learn that until they're in their mid to late 20s, to be honest. Helping be more transparent and explicit about soft skills is going to be important, because I know it comes up all the time.”

This partnership comes at a pivotal time for cybersecurity, as those in the sector wrestle with the impact of artificial intelligence both offensively and defensively. While some aspects of cybersecurity could be automated, like threat monitoring and other repetitive processes, Sallis said there will always be a need for human beings. Getting people trained and educated is key, she said.

“We're some way away from understanding how this is really going to unfold,” Sallis said. “There's always the knee-jerk and the fear and the bubble at the beginning of a new technology. We're at the very beginning of something that we don't really truly understand… AI is nowhere near replacing human ingenuity that's required to really prevent attacks, understand and remediate attacks, and to increase security and mitigate risk.”

Chudnofsky and Sallis said measuring success takes a number of forms, including expanding access to cybersecurity education, especially in rural and disadvantaged schools, as well as seeing improved exam results and more students placed with various companies, as well as military and government organizations.

Gaining a better understanding of the skills that employers are looking for in cybersecurity students and graduates will also be key, Chudnofsky said, as it can help better match prospective employees with their first job.

“It takes a lot of coordination with employers, it takes a lot of coordination with the [Indiana Chamber of Commerce] to make sure that we can understand and connect the dots between what employers are looking for in these entry level, early stage roles and what's being provided to them through their high school and postsecondary education,” she said.

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Governor’s call for school cellphone ban has a familiar ring to it in Olympia

Aspen Ford, Washington State Standard — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Washington State Standard.

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson made a splashy announcement earlier this month that he would back legislation to ban student cellphone use from the first bell of the day to the last in public schools.

But the idea is not a new one in the Legislature.

The state superintendent and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have tried, unsuccessfully, to implement a policy like this for the past three years. A question now is whether Ferguson putting his political weight behind legislation will make a difference.

State Sen. Marko Liias, D-Edmonds, sponsored a bill this year to ban cellphones in schools. It was watered down to call for a study from the superintendent’s office, with a deadline to submit policy recommendations by December 2027.

Then, by 2030, the bill says, the Legislature will use that information to enable school districts “to implement a bell-to-bell cellphone policy that is tailored to the needs of their community.” School districts already have that ability, Liias pointed out.

“What we did this year was the — literally the bare minimum,” Liias said. “I’m excited that it helped catalyze attention to the issue and that now we’re hopefully poised to join, you know, dozens of states to go even further with evidence-based policy.”

Liias said he’s “delighted” that Ferguson and State Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal are pushing to get a statewide ban implemented sooner.

In 2024, Reykdal challenged school districts to enact policies restricting cellphone use ahead of the 2025-2026 school year. After his office released guidance on how to implement such measures, about 75% of districts complied.

But Reykdal has concerns that a patchwork approach is emerging.

“It’s time to have a statewide policy,” Reykdal told the public affairs network TVW in April. “You can’t have two neighboring districts with totally different policies and not see the difference.”

At least 29 other states have already implemented a form of bell-to-bell bans on phone use, according to Education Week. One national report gave Washington an F grade for its efforts in this area, or lack thereof. Supporters of the bans see them as a way to cut down on distractions in the classroom and to help improve students’ mental health.

Reykdal has suggested the state is falling behind and joined the governor last week, endorsing legislation to set a statewide “away for the day” policy for cellphones in schools.

State Rep. Stephanie McClintock, R-Battle Ground, has been trying to ban cellphones in schools for the last three legislative sessions. She said she can’t help but wonder if her bills didn’t become law because she’s a Republican in the Democrat-dominated Legislature.

“We don’t need more studies on the negative effects of cellphone use in our public schools. We need to act,” McClintock, a former Battle Ground school board member, said in a statement earlier this year.

McClintock’s most recent bill did not receive a hearing in the House Education Committee last year or this year, the first step in passing this type of legislation. In 2024, the bill advanced out of the committee but stalled in House Appropriations.

The bill would have required the state superintendent’s office to relay cellphone banning recommendations to the Washington State School Directors’ Association, which would then develop a statewide model policy.

Schools would have been required to adopt a policy ahead of the 2026-2027 school year, with the option to tailor it to the needs of their specific school district.

McClintock said in an interview “it’s frustrating” that a concept now backed by the Democratic governor didn’t have bipartisan support when she introduced it.

“Being on a school board, what I thought of every time we discussed a policy: what is best for kids? And I wish we could take that approach,” she said. “If everyone in that committee and in the Legislature took that approach, then this would have happened a long time ago.”

House Education Committee Chair Sharon Tomiko Santos, D-Seattle, chose not to give McClintock’s bill a hearing because school districts “don’t need special legislation” from the state to ban cellphones. They have that power already, she said.

“That’s something that has to be done at the local level,” Tomiko Santos said. “We need to wait for the report to come back that was embedded in legislation sponsored by Senator Liias. I think that it’s a little early to do something before we get to that study.”

Rep. Skyler Rude, ranking member of the House Education Committee, said he did his best to advocate for the passage of McClintock’s bill with the committee chair. He’s unsure if the governor’s support will persuade committee members to reconsider.

“It seems like a no-brainer move to me,” said Rude, R-Walla Walla. He described cellphone restrictions in schools as a low-cost way to improve academic performance.

Santos declined to comment on the prospects of a future bill backed by the governor to ban cellphone use because the details aren’t hashed out yet.

Over the summer, Ferguson will travel across the state to meet with students, teachers and other stakeholders to develop a detailed proposal for the ban. He plans to prefile the governor-requested bill on Dec. 7, and wants to implement the policy next September.

He recently sent a campaign email to supporters, touting the phone ban as one of his legislative priorities and asking them to sign a petition supporting the policy.

“Science supports a phone-free school environment. No single policy can solve every challenge in education, but this one will make a big difference in our students’ social and academic engagement,” he said last week. “I won’t let Washington be the last state in the nation to step up for our kids.”

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America’s data center backlash is bipartisan — can it stay that way?

Zoya Teirstein and Kate Yoder, Grist — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Grist.

This month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump, unveiled a set of sweeping recommendations to rein in rampant data center development, urging Texas lawmakers to aggressively regulate the tech industry in a state that has a reputation for welcoming new development with open arms. At the same time, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, the Democratic leader of a state known for regulatory restrictions, has declined to say whether she will sign a first-of-its-kind bill passed by her state legislature imposing a one-year moratorium on large-scale data centers.

Welcome to the weird world of data center politics, where the usual partisan scripts around energy and natural resources don’t apply — yet.

Facilities housing massive amounts of computing equipment are springing up across the U.S. to quench the tech industry’s unslakable thirst for artificial intelligence. These AI-ready data centers, which consume more energy than the traditional cloud-computing centers that already exist to host and store various aspects of modern digital life, have become a political flashpoint at lightning speed — reshaping local and state politics from coast to coast as Americans grapple with high energy costs, natural resource depletion, and the repercussions of megadevelopment.

In an era when political polarization is near record highs, data center backlash represents a rare area of consensus on both sides of the political aisle. Some 70 percent of Americans oppose local construction of AI data centers — 75 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Republicans, according to polling from Gallup. Dig a little deeper into additional survey data, and the politics of data centers gets even more surprising. There are more conservative Republicans (53 percent) who oppose data centers in their local area than moderate Republicans (44 percent) — meaning that staunch conservatives are actually nearer to Democrats in their opposition.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a chart where conservative Republicans are closer to liberal Democrats than liberal [and] moderate Republicans are,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Bipartisan anti-data center activism has emerged as one of the only counterbalances to AI’s inexorable rise. At least 75 data center projects worth roughly $130 billion were stalled or blocked in the first three months of 2026 alone. Political scientists and organizers tracking the backlash say the opposition is not driven by a single ideology so much as a recurring set of local grievances: rising electricity bills, water scarcity, noise, land use, tax breaks, distrust of tech companies and the billionaires who own them, and the fear that communities are being asked to share their resources with an industry that will provide little in return.

Still, those same experts note it’s too soon to say whether anger over data centers represents a lasting break in America’s partisan machinery. The backlash could trigger a broader questioning of Big Tech’s power in American life, perhaps resulting in real guardrails for an industry where few currently exist. Or it might be in its pre-partisan phase, waiting to be absorbed by the political tribalism that has shaped fights over climate, energy, housing, and so many of the other issues that have fallen victim to the culture wars.

Part of what makes AI data centers different politically is that they are relatively new and unencumbered by the political baggage that weighs down other issues. Experts say the sheer scope of the AI buildout and related opposition is what gives the backlash its unusual scale and political force — currently, there are more than more than 800 group working across 49 states to oppose some 1,500 planned data centers.

But what might look like a unified anti-data center movement from a distance is actually a series of distinct fights unfolding simultaneously. The concerns motivating a community in Virginia to oppose a data center might be different from those inspiring a municipality in California to take up the same fight. Even within local fights, people often have varied reasons for showing up: light pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, or existential fears about AI.

Some research shows that Republicans and Democrats emphasize different risks when talking about data centers. “Republican officials often raise concerns about tax incentives and energy grid strain, while Democrats tend to focus on environmental impacts and resource consumption,” said a report from Data Center Watch, a project run by the AI firm 10a Labs that keeps tabs on local data center activity.

In Box Elder County, Utah, where Trump walked away with nearly 80 percent of the vote in 2024, a 40,000-acre data center project backed by celebrity investor Kevin O’Leary is facing intense backlash from rural conservative voters over its perceived impacts on the rapidly drying Great Salt Lake and the project’s electricity and property tax breaks. Earlier this month, voters in left-leaning Monterey Park, California, approved a ballot measure permanently banning data centers in order to “protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health.”

While the local opposition is place-specific, there are overlapping national political undercurrents that may be buoying the backlash regardless of place or party. The executives driving the data center boom — Tesla and SpaceX’s Elon Musk (who last week became the world’s first trillionaire), Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and others — are far more familiar to Americans than the leaders of most major industries.

“No one can name the CEO of Exxon Mobil,” said Alex Beauchamp, northern regional director at Food and Water Watch, a nonprofit advocacy group that has been pushing for the New York data center moratorium. That’s not the case with tech CEOs. “These guys are real, actual villains to a lot of people,” he added.

For years, tech moguls tried to position themselves as visionary leaders ushering in a more just future, hiring huge numbers of workers to companies they promised had altruistic intentions. But the tides of political opinion have shifted as tech firms have grown larger, more powerful, and more entwined with the federal government while also laying off tens of thousands of employees and spending billions on data centers (just four tech companies are projected to spend a total of $670 billion on AI-related infrastructure this year).

Polling suggests Americans are growing increasingly mistrustful of Big Tech and its growing concentration of technological, economic, and political power: Just 7 percent of voters in a recent survey said they trust tech CEOs to make decisions that affect their lives.

Then there’s the broader context of the rising cost of living motivating so many American voters right now, making communities especially sensitive to the effects of data centers on electricity bills and public resources.

“We have this war that is making all prices go up, energy prices go up, so people are super aware of the ways that building other infrastructure in their towns is potentially going to make their access to less expensive energy impossible,” said Dana R. Fisher, director of the Center for Environment, Community, and Equity at American University, referring to the Iran War. “I think that works really well across ideological lines.”

Still, experts warn that the ties that bind America’s broad political spectrum in opposition to the AI boom could fray as the 2026 midterm elections approach and politicians seek to use the issue to their advantage. “Issues that can unite people across partisan lines, once they attract that broad political attention, the forces of partisanship tend to overwhelm everything else,” said Megan Mullin, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles.

It’s a lesson Beauchamp, at Food and Water Watch, remembers well from the campaign to ban hydraulic fracturing in New York. In 2014, New York became the first state with underground gas reserves to ban the practice of shooting water at high speeds horizontally through buried rock to unlock deposits of natural gas. In the years leading up to the ban, a broad political coalition of New Yorkers shared many of the same concerns that today’s data center activists hold. Fracking poses serious risks to local water supplies, contributes to air and noise pollution, and brings heavy industrial activity to rural areas unaccustomed to industry.

After New York banned the practice, Beauchamp assumed other states would follow suit. But the issue quickly became deeply partisan, as fossil fuel lobbyists and Republican officials sought to position the anti-fracking movement as a green ploy to undermine energy production and hurt working-class communities. As of today, only five states have a fracking ban on the books. Politicians who were open to banning the practice have come to regret that position. Kamala Harris’ vow to ban fracking on the campaign trail in 2019 was one of Trump’s favorite offensive cudgels when the two candidates faced off for the presidency in 2024.

“This feels to me like the early days of the fracking fight,” Beauchamp said. “A lot of Republicans were really up in arms about it in the beginning, and then it slowly became a partisan issue.”

Data centers could soon be swept into that same right-versus-left vortex — but some activists are holding room for the possibility that new coalitions could emerge out of it. “It’s a moment to re-scramble people’s brains and build new cross-partisan alliances,” said Evan Sutton, the founder of the communications consulting firm Firekit Campaigns, who has helped people opposing data centers across the U.S. connect with one another. “It’s a remarkable and probably very rare opportunity to create something different.”

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More homes, safe neighborhoods, lower costs: The mayors’ agenda

Todd Gloria — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

At a time of economic anxiety, strained public trust and rising demands on local government, Americans are once again turning to mayors for pragmatic leadership and real results. There is evidence that local leadership still matters deeply to Americans.

In fact, while many Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, they remain optimistic about the direction of their own communities. Being a mayor today means serving as crisis manager, civic steward and chief problem-solver — often all in the same day. But moments like this are not new for America’s mayors. In fact, the very creation of the U.S. Conference of Mayors grew out of a time of extraordinary national hardship.

In 1932, during the throes of the Great Depression, Frank Murphy, then the mayor of Detroit, called on city leaders from across the nation to gather and confront a crisis that was overwhelming local governments. Murphy believed cities needed a stronger voice in Washington to ensure federal policy reflected local needs.

Together these mayors traveled to Washington, D.C. to advocate for federal relief. A bipartisan coalition in Congress ultimately helped pass a relief bill that provided desperately needed assistance to cities across the nation.

Soon after, on the eve of the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the mayors gathered at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington to write the charter for what would become the permanent U.S. Conference of Mayors, with Murphy serving as its first president. It was a watershed moment.

Nearly a century later, mayors once again find themselves on the front lines of great national challenges. And just as Mayor Murphy and his colleagues did in 1932, we will continue to use our collective voice to prioritize the people we serve.

In the year ahead, we will focus on what families across America are yearning for — more homes, safe neighborhoods and lower costs.

These are policies that everyone can support. They are everyday concerns that touch every community in America. And America’s mayors are working every day to deliver real results.

Across the country, families are increasingly questioning whether they can afford to live in the communities they call home. The shortage of housing has pushed prices beyond the reach of many working families. The real fight is not right versus left — it’s builders versus blockers.

To address this challenge, mayors are reforming zoning, streamlining permitting and converting underused spaces into housing — but local action requires continued and intentional support. We need federal policies that make it easier to build more homes and expand access to affordable housing. That begins with passing the first comprehensive housing bill in a generation.

The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act represents the most serious federal effort in decades to address this crisis. It would better align federal policy with the urgency cities are facing on the ground and help communities build the housing our residents need. Ensuring this bill becomes law is the top priority for the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

Families also want to know their neighborhoods are safe.

Everyone deserves a safe place to call home. Our cities have made great strides in reducing violence and crime, and in increasing the trust between law enforcement and our neighbors. We know there’s still more work to do, because no amount of violence and crime is acceptable. Together, we can — and are — pursuing smart initiatives and policies that make our communities better, safer places to live and grow.

And everywhere I go, I hear the same concern: the rising cost of living is simply unsustainable. Today, nearly 9 in 10 Americans say they are concerned about the overall cost of living. From rent to groceries to childcare, rising prices are squeezing working families.

Cities are finding innovative ways to lower costs, expand economic opportunities and raise incomes. These practical steps may not dominate cable news debates, but they make a real difference in people’s daily lives. We look forward to working with Congress on practical policies that help families keep more of what they earn, lower barriers to opportunity and make it more affordable to live and work in America’s cities.

When a streetlight goes out, when a business needs support, when a family needs a home — we need solutions, not partisan bickering. The nation’s mayors stand ready to work together with all in Congress and the Trump administration to strengthen our cities and improve the lives of the people we serve.

Nearly a century ago, in the depths of the Great Depression, a group of mayors came together because they believed cities deserved a stronger voice and that pragmatic leadership could help guide the nation through a crisis. Today, that mission continues. America’s mayors are on the front lines again — and together, we are ready to deliver.

Todd Gloria is the 37th mayor of San Diego and the president of the United States Conference of Mayors.

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A ‘bottom-up’ and ‘in-house’ approach to AI workforce training gains traction in San Jose

Kaitlyn Levinson — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 15:27:07 -0400

As technology like artificial intelligence continues to capture governments’ interest in the effort to drive efficiency and enhance service delivery, San Jose, California, has recognized that a tech-ready workforce is a critical first step to doing so.

The California city employs approximately 7,000 people, yet houses nearly a million residents who rely on the government’s systems, services and operations, San Jose’s chief innovation officer and budget director, Stephen Caines, told Route Fifty. For the city’s “lean” staff to get ahead of residents’ growing and evolving needs, officials see AI as a valuable force multiplier but recognize that many workers lack the tech experience and digital background necessary to optimize AI tools, he explained.

That’s where the city’s AI Upskilling Program aims to help even the playing field, equipping city workers with the training to build their own AI solutions that are tailored to their specific jobs and tasks.

More than 1,000 city staff, or roughly 15% of the municipal workforce, have completed the program since it launched in 2024, city officials announced Wednesday. Their next goal for the initiative is to have 30% of the city’s workforce participate by June 2027.

Through the upskilling program, staff can learn about responsible AI practices, prompt engineering and other skills to develop custom-built AI tools. The training involves self-paced online modules and a 10-week course, the curriculum for which city leaders developed in-house with assistance from San José State University.

The in-house approach aims to help San Jose staff feel more comfortable delving into the technology, particularly as resistance to AI often comes from skepticism or concern toward external products, Caines said. There’s “less friction” when employees can be more vulnerable and transparent about their AI learning away from the conditions or rules that may come with a commercial resource, he explained.

Indeed, program participation is “typically oversubscribed, so there’s a higher demand than we have seats,” Caines said. It’s not uncommon for city staff to repeat the upskilling course, “so we’re very happy to see people embrace this training and not only take it once, but also come back.”

Across the U.S., many states and municipalities have launched AI upskilling and training efforts as governments aim to leverage the latest tech to solve public issues, like housing shortages, emergency response planning, benefits administration and health care.

In April, for instance, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced that she is expanding access to an AI training and education tool to the entire state workforce after it was piloted among eight state agencies. Officials in Washington, D.C., also announced that municipal workers are now required to undergo mandatory AI training that will ensure agencies implement the tech responsibly and efficiently.

San Jose’s “bottom up” approach to workforce upskilling looks to expand upon that trend, especially as city officials increasingly recognize that executive leaders are often not the ones experiencing the day-to-day challenges agencies face, and therefore may not always know what the most efficient solutions could be, Caines said.

“San Jose is one of the only cities in the country to create a custom AI training program to empower our workforce to use these new tools,” Mayor Matt Mahan said in a statement. “The best way to protect workers from technological change is to invest in their skills and knowledge…. That's the kind of responsive and efficient government our residents deserve.”

In fact, a broader goal of the AI Upskilling Program is to not only enable participants to better identify pain points and AI-enabled solutions to their workflows, but also to ultimately share their learnings and AI tools with their colleagues, Caines said. Doing so can, for example, further standardize data and AI practices across city departments so employees can more efficiently collaborate on or adopt each other’s AI solutions.

“We have so many brilliant people in the city of San Jose, but inertia will kind of force you to stay in your department, and it's up to us to figure out how we can encourage those silos to break down,” Caines said.

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Las Vegas data center expansion approved as officials ponder need for future regulations

Jeniffer Solis, Nevada Current — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by the Nevada Current.

The Clark County Commission, in its capacity as the zoning board, unanimously approved a proposal to expand the largest data center campus in Southern Nevada on Wednesday, but not without adjustments and acknowledging the need for future data center regulations.

Switch, a Las Vegas-based tech company, is seeking to build a nearly 57,000 square-foot data center on nine acres of private land along the north side of Warm Springs Road just west of Decatur Boulevard. The new development requires a zoning change and would be built alongside existing data centers on the company’s massive southwest valley campus.

Switch’s original proposal sought a landscaping waiver that would allow the company to forgo planting trees along the perimeter of the property and in the building’s parking lot, as required by county ordinance to combat extreme heat.

However, the company agreed to withdraw the waivers Wednesday after discussions with county commissioners who signaled they would not support it.

“The waivers related to landscaping were withdrawn and are not ones that I would have considered,” said Clark County Commission Chair Micheal Naft.

Switch also agreed to cover the cost of a short reinforced concrete barrier along the sidewalk adjacent to the data center to provide adequate pedestrian safety, a condition the county required in order to approve the company’s waiver to forgo a detached sidewalk due to space limitations created by an existing county wall. In Clark County, all roadways 60 feet or larger require detached sidewalks — a feature that separates pedestrian walkways from roadway curbs by a landscaping buffer strip.

Trees and landscaping will instead be placed on an elevated platform along the wall.

“There is no room for a landscaping strip between the sidewalk and the face of the wall. We are just going to be shifting that quantity of trees and shrubs to the top side of the wall, so by net, the quantity will be the same,” said Natalie Steven Roberts, the vice president of construction development for Switch.

During public comment, more than a dozen residents spoke in opposition to the data center’s expansion, citing environmental impact, energy consumption, and potential strain on Nevada’s electric grid and water resources.

Before approving the zone change, Naft highlighted what he said is the board’s history of prioritizing responsible development, including working with the Southern Nevada Water Authority to ban the installation of new evaporative cooling systems in the Las Vegas Valley.

“The people on this board have done more than this entire state when it comes to demanding responsible development, when it comes to sustainability,” Naft said.

The commission chair emphasized business practices implemented by Switch to improve sustainability of their data centers, including the use of air-cooling to reach “near zero water consumption,” sourcing all their energy from renewable sources on the open market, and “using existing electric infrastructure that they put in place at their own cost.”

The new data center is on a “closed loop” water system and is only expected to use about 1,000 gallons of water a day.

“This application has received 6.5 out of seven points on the maximum of seven points that are attainable through the sustainability code. I think that is important to note for the record,” Naft said.

All members of the zoning board voted to approve the expansion while also emphasizing the need to look into a data center ordinance to manage future developments.

“I do think that going forward we should look at having some type of a data center ordinance or somewhere where we put all the pieces together,” said Clark County Commissioner Tick Segerblom. “Maybe come up with some type of criteria that we look at, because I don’t think we can sustain this very long.”

Municipalities in Nevada continue to grapple with where and how data centers should be built.

The City of Reno became the first municipality to place a moratorium on data centers earlier this month as they look into creating regulations for the resource-intensive facilities.

On Tuesday, the City of Henderson also introduced a measure that would place a moratorium on permit applications for data centers in the city. The bill will be heard by the city council at their July 21 regular meeting.

Last month, the Nye County Water District Governing Board unanimously approved an emergency order requesting that the Nye County Commission place a moratorium on data centers in the Pahrump Valley.

And the Clark County Zoning Commission raised concerns Wednesday about the cumulative effects of data center expansion without clear regulations on how to assess the large-scale facilities’ impact on utilities and city resources.

“Moving forward, I think that we should — as Commissioner Segerblom said — look at what those future regulations could possibly look like,” County Commissioner William McCurdy said.

County Commissioner James Gibson said that some data centers are “difficult for us to make a zoning decision on, because we don’t have ordinances, we don’t have structure that enables us to do that.”

“I’ve indicated that I don’t support data centers,” Gibson said. “They consume water and that they tie up the production capacity of the energy supplier in the valley, which creates a hardship on all of the rest of us and the way that we develop.”

County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick, who also serves as the chair of the SNWA Board of Directors, assured residents that county officials are “not willy-nilly approving things, we’ve thought about a lot of these things.”

Nevada Current is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Nevada Current maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Hugh Jackson for questions: info@nevadacurrent.com.

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US officials see Iran cyber threat persisting despite preliminary deal

David DiMolfetta — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement reached over the weekend likely won’t stop cyber operations launched by Tehran and Iran-aligned hacking groups at American systems, five current and two former U.S. officials told Nextgov/FCW.

Most of them were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss forward-looking perspectives of Iranian cyber activity after the agreement.

Cyber conflict is “definitely part of warfare that keeps going” and is pretty “accepted” as an “ongoing normal course of business,” one of the officials said, adding that cyber activity may decelerate, but that it “definitely won’t stop.”

There is “no chance” Iran and any affiliated parties would cease or slow down in cyberspace, a second official opined.

Hacking activity could decrease temporarily, said one of the former officials, but if pro-Iran hacking collectives don’t like any finalized resolution, they may conduct cyberattacks to express their issues, as Iran’s central government doesn’t always have the best control of these groups.

“There has always been anti-U.S. activity” from such “hacktivist” groups that align with Iran but aren’t backed by the regime directly, this former official added.

Their outlook aligns with past conclusions that cyber operations continue regardless of the status of a given conflict and that U.S. cyber teams have remained on alert for Iranian-linked activity against American networks as Washington pursues a diplomatic solution with Tehran.

Since the war broke out Feb. 28, experts expected the conflict would greatly test U.S. cyber defenses. What followed was a series of apparent Iran-linked cyber incidents, including an attack on medical technology giant Stryker, the targeting of FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal email account and various warnings from federal agencies about cyber intrusions on U.S. critical infrastructure.

On June 11, the California Water Service said it was investigating claims that Iranian hackers breached its systems. An assessment from Dataminr concluded that the group may have reached a customer billing database belonging to the utility. Nextgov/FCW also obtained a screenshot that appeared to show a customer billing account receipt accessed by the hackers.

A spokesperson said Tuesday that there are “no known operational disruptions” to water, wastewater and billing systems, and that it was working with state and federal government officials in its investigation.

The preliminary U.S.-Iran memorandum reached Sunday aims to halt nearly four months of fighting and set up a formal signing in Geneva later this week. But the agreement leaves major disputes unresolved, including regional flashpoints involving Israel and Hezbollah. It also appears to leave out mentions of cyber.

“The Iranians have targeted U.S. assets with malicious cyber activity for the last 15 years with espionage and some prepositioning for disruptive attacks,” said Meredith Burkart, the FBI’s former chief of cyber policy. “Unless there has been a material change in their cyber workforce, or a cyber specific component of the deal was reached, I would expect such targeting to continue.”

“I don’t know if these deals really ever include minimizing cyber activity,” another one of the current officials told Nextgov/FCW. Certain targets may be deemed off limits, “but we’ve always seen activity” continue in the digital space, added the official.

The deal also remains fragile, even on its central nuclear terms. CIA Director John Ratcliffe and others raised concerns about Iran’s willingness to make the nuclear concessions Washington wants in a final agreement, Axios reported Tuesday.

Tehran’s hackers have grown more organized, more coordinated and more willing to use artificial intelligence for influence operations in recent months — and have demonstrated many of those capabilities since the war with Iran began, Israel’s top cyberdefense official told Nextgov/FCW last month.

The U.S. intelligence community assessed this year that Iran and affiliated proxy groups remain a persistent cyber threat to American networks and critical infrastructure, and they intend to target the U.S. and its allies.

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From dial-up to iPhones: We’re sending people home unprepared for the digital economy

Saad Soliman — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

When I walked into prison at 17 years old in 1995, dial-up internet was the next big thing. When I walked out in 2010 at age 32, the fourth iPhone was already in people’s pockets.

Touchscreens had replaced keyboards. Job applications, government services, healthcare portals and daily communication had moved online. While I was incarcerated, the world had fundamentally transformed. Inside prison, I missed that entire digital evolution.

My first year out, I worked relentlessly: two full-time jobs and a part-time one. Despite that effort, my annual income was $24,600. I had motivation and grit, yet without digital fluency, I was missing the tools I needed to thrive in a digitized economy.

My story isn’t unique. It reflects a broader preparation gap experienced by the thousands of people who return home from incarceration each year, one that has little to do with effort or character, and everything to do with access.

Today, we’re living through another period of rapid technological change. In the early 2000s, the internet reshaped how we apply for jobs, communicate with employers and live our daily lives. Artificial intelligence is now propelling a similar transformation, so much faster and at an even greater scale, making digital fluency even more important.

Many of the people currently incarcerated are experiencing this second wave of transformation the way I experienced the first, without the tools that define it. The path to a different outcome already exists inside correctional facilities: secure tablets and technology platforms that allow incarcerated individuals to build digital literacy before they come home, ensuring they are prepared for the workforce they will actually enter, not the one that existed years ago.

Some of the most meaningful preparation doesn’t happen in classrooms or structured programs. It happens in quiet moments, alone in a cell, when someone chooses to learn. Reading. Researching. Practicing basic digital navigation. Applying for credentials. Staying connected to family. Developing habits of responsibility and focus. Avoiding trouble inside the facility.

That kind of self-directed motivation can’t be mandated, but it can be supported by access. Technology doesn’t create the will to prepare; it simply makes preparation possible for those who already want it.

Education and workforce programs inside facilities are essential, and most correctional leaders understand the importance of preparing people for life after incarceration. These programs must function within the realities of running safe and secure institutions. Technology can support that mission by expanding access to learning and skill-building without asking corrections agencies to step outside their primary role.

Technology extends access beyond physical programs. It allows preparation to continue during off-hours. And it mirrors the digital environment people will encounter the moment they return home.

Still, access alone is not enough because reentry is a system. I think of it as a quilt; each piece must connect to the next. Digital preparation inside a facility only leads to real outcomes if there is infrastructure waiting on the outside, like workforce organizations that begin engagement before release, not after; community partners who understand that housing stability and behavioral health support are prerequisites to employment; and employers who see digitally literate, credentialed candidates as assets.

For years, the conversation around reentry employment has focused almost exclusively on employer willingness. Should businesses “give someone a chance?” That question matters, yet the focus must start earlier.

Fair-chance hiring works best when there is a pipeline of people arriving prepared: digitally fluent, connected to support systems and ready to contribute on day one. Building that pipeline requires earlier investment in facilities, paired with intentional coordination across sectors.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, formerly incarcerated people face unemployment rates exceeding 27%, higher than the national rate during the Great Depression. This statistic represents lost economic productivity, increased taxpayer costs and unnecessary public safety risks. More importantly, it reflects a preparation gap we already know how to close.

I lived through the first version of that gap. I came home to the internet revolution without the internet, and I struggled to make it. Proper preparation could have changed that, and I now spend my days trying to build awareness of this issue.

Rather than starting from scratch, we can build more intentionally on what is already working. The tools are already inside correctional facilities, and with stronger partnerships, we can turn access into real opportunity. AI is transforming the economy faster than the internet did, but this time we can respond differently. That is how we build a reentry system that meets the future, one that works better for people, employers and communities.

Saad Soliman is the National Director of TimeDone at the Alliance for Safety and Justice, where he leads national efforts to advance policy and systems change for people living with past convictions. He is a recognized leader in reentry systems, with experience spanning the U.S. Department of Justice, federal courts and national policy and advisory roles.

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AI in criminal justice should start with governance and low-risk use cases, report says

Kaitlyn Levinson — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 16:46:41 -0400

The use of artificial intelligence in criminal justice systems could be surpassing governments’ pace of establishing adequate policies and guardrails to ensure the tech is implemented accurately and responsibly, a recent report says.

As the gap grows between the deployment and regulation of AI solutions in state and local courts, police departments, correctional facilities and other services, there is a critical need for policymakers and officials to better reign in applications that could significantly impact residents’ lives and liberties, according to a report released last month from the Council on Criminal Justice and RAND.

“The main thing is that governance is required immediately … but yet people are adopting these technologies faster than the conversations have developed,” said Kristin Warren, an engineer at RAND who researches national security and equitable policies. In doing so, she said, policymakers must consider, “What are the real human costs here?”

Such costs have become reality for people like Angela Lipps, now 50, who was jailed last year for a crime in a state she’d never visited. Lipps, of Elizabethton, Tennessee, was arrested last July after a facial recognition system incorrectly identified her as the suspect behind bank fraud in Fargo, North Dakota.

Lipps was arrested by the United States Marshals at her home and served jail time in Tennessee and North Dakota until December, losing her rental home, Social Security income, health insurance and coverage, her pet dog and other personal affects, according to Lipps’s GoFundMe webpage. The charges against her were eventually dropped when evidence showed she was in Tennessee at the time of the crime.

Lipps is pursuing civil litigation for her wrongful arrest, according to A&E. Reports of other issues that disrupt criminal justice proceedings due to AI have emerged in recent years, including legal citations increasingly containing hallucinations or other errors.

For policymakers and decision-makers, “the primary opportunity here lies in constructing accountability infrastructure. This could include developing audit frameworks, establishing transparency requirements and creating mechanisms for challenge and redress,” the report states.

Researchers also found that, based on academic literature, policy documents, practitioner reports and other sources, AI adoption in the criminal justice setting has largely concentrated around more high-stakes use cases, such as pretrial, sentencing and law enforcement decisions. Those findings present “an under-explored opportunity of repurposing AI capabilities to strengthen oversight and accountability, rather than expand decision-making systems,” the report reads.

Indeed, one of several recommendations from the report for criminal justice leaders is to develop and establish specific rules and standards for using AI in criminal justice proceedings, Warren said.

“Policymakers should establish explicit governance protections prohibiting algorithmic determinations of guilt, sentencing, prosecutorial charging and other liberty deprivations,” the report states. “Courts should be required to disclose in judicial findings when AI recommendations inform outcomes, and defense counsel should have access to information about all AI tools used in their clients’ cases.”

For example, California lawmakers this year are considering a bill that, if passed, would establish guardrails that aim to protect confidential information from being used in AI systems, make cite-checking a nondelegable task and prevent arbitrators from delegating decision-related tasks to AI.

The Indiana Supreme Court AI Governance Committee developed guidance for courts to navigate the adoption and implementation of the technology late last year. The guidance suggests that judges in the state consider how to transparently use AI tools in court processes, how to ensure any AI tool has a human verification step and how to hold vendors accountable to their AI services and solutions.

At the local level, the Fourth Judicial District of Montana, for example, updated its rules of practice late last year to require that the use of AI in court filings be disclosed. The new rules stipulate that users must share details like “the specific tool the party used; how the party used the tool in preparing the relevant document; and that the party certifies they have checked the accuracy of any portion of the document drafted or assisted by the tool, including all factual and procedural background, citations, and legal authority.”

“I'm not saying that innovation should slow down or people shouldn't use these AI tools, but you have to match the speed of safeguards to the stakes of the decision being made and how much risk is involved, particularly as it pertains to someone’s freedom,” Warren said.

Indeed, such concerns are at the center of an AI tool being tested by two California county courts. The tool aims to assist court staff with drafting orders and producing research memos, but many observers have raised flags over plans to expand its use from civil to criminal cases due to the risk of AI discrimination or bias impacting court proceedings.

Ultimately, when adopting and implementing AI tools in criminal justice systems, state and local leaders should consider how “the criminal justice system [can] actually serve the community that they’re supposed to empower, protect and serve,” Warren said.

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Worries mount about another state AI law preemption

Chris Teale — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Congress has put forward another effort to preempt states’ artificial intelligence laws, leaving leaders once again on edge and fearful they will be prevented from regulating the technology and mitigating its worst effects.

Reps. Jay Obernolte and Lori Trahan introduced a draft measure earlier this month as part of their Great American AI Act that would allow the federal government to preempt state AI laws for three years.

It’s the latest attempt to block states from regulating AI, both from the administration and Congress. And opponents said it, like every other attempt to tie state legislatures’ hands, cannot be allowed to proceed.

“The current draft of the bill preempts and forbids states from passing laws that regulate the development of AI,” Zephyr Teachout, a professor of law at the Fordham Law School and a former candidate for statewide offices in New York, said during a press conference hosted by the nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation. “This is an incredibly broad preemption regime.”

Congress and President Donald Trump’s administration have tried before to preempt states from regulating AI, whether it be through various versions of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that were eventually quashed, or via an executive order issued last year that was threatened with legal action. The Federal Communications Commission has also said it could get involved in preempting states’ AI laws.

Meanwhile, in the absence of concrete federal action, states have pushed ahead to legislate on AI themselves, especially in areas like child safety, elections, worker safety and surveillance, among others. Any federal AI standard must prioritize keeping people safe and protecting their civil rights, speakers at the press conference said This bill does not, and states have been trying to do so.

“Leaving civil rights behind is unacceptable,” said Alejandra Montoya-Boyer, vice president of the Center for Civil Rights & Technology at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “That omission means that people across the nation will be at risk for data-driven discrimination. People will get locked out of quality jobs, housing, educational opportunities and health care, or can even be wrongfully jailed or imprisoned because of faulty AI systems that supercharge discrimination at massive scale and scope.”

That opposition escalated this week, as ARI released an open letter from more than 200 bipartisan lawmakers from 42 states urging Congress to oppose any preemption of state AI laws. The signatories noted that state legislators are on the front lines of protecting their residents from the technology’s harms and should be allowed to continue that work.

“The Great American AI Act’s preemption provision promises to override state AI laws related to the development of any AI model without implementing a federal framework to replace current state protections,” the coalition of state lawmakers wrote in the letter. “Such a sweeping category of laws would include measures addressing AI models trained on copyrighted works or child abuse content, legislation ensuring that AI is not developed in a way that discriminates against workers or homebuyers, and state bills that protect the privacy of consumers. Not only is the provision extremely broad as written, but the tech industry will almost certainly weaponize such a provision in court to strike down state measures not intended to fall within the scope of GAAIA.”

The open letter from legislators pointed out previous mistakes made by failing to regulate technology and said those mistakes must not be repeated.

“For years, state lawmakers have worked tirelessly to address the risks and harms of social media created by Big Tech companies,” the letter says. “The lessons of the social media era are clear: allowing Silicon Valley to write its own rulebook leaves industry unaccountable and leaves American families vulnerable to AI’s dangers.”

Other opponents of preemption agreed that state lawmakers remain the best people to regulate, especially as they see the effects on their constituents more quickly than their federal counterparts.

“The preemption is what makes this bill illegitimate as a democratic matter, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” said Teachout during the press conference. “We have to return to the core principle of people governing themselves, and that means people being able to respond in real time to the most significant technological development in generations.”

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As data centers seek to tap Texas’ energy, grid regulators are close to approving a new way of vetting requests

Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Texas Tribune.

If you look at recent forecasts for future demand on Texas’s energy grid, the state must find a way to more than quadruple its energy production in the next six years or risk high energy prices and blackouts.

However, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the energy grid operator that produces the forecasts, says they are wrong thanks to a massive influx of data centers prematurely requesting connection to the grid.

“Our existing process really was not designed for the volume of large load interconnection requests that we have been experiencing,” Jeff Billo, ERCOT’s vice president of interconnection and grid analysis, said at the organization’s June 2 board meeting.

Interconnection requests from “large loads” like data centers, cryptocurrency mines and industrial facilities that use significant amounts of energy have forced ERCOT to revise its planning and approval process to keep pace with a changing world and economy. ERCOT now wants to evaluate data centers in batches, voting June 2 to proceed with its first combined study, or batch, of such facilities, known as “Batch Zero.”

That new process for vetting energization requests from energy-intensive facilities will be reviewed and potentially approved by the Public Utility Commission of Texas on Thursday.

ERCOT’s last preliminary forecast issued in April found a peak load forecast of 367,790 megawatts in 2032, far exceeding the highest recorded peak demand for Texas’ grid — 85,508 megawatts in August 2023. That is largely due to over 250,000 megawatts of forecast demand from large load projects, ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas said at the June meeting.

The current system, built for a large load queue totalling 40 to 50 projects, is now bogged down by the 225 new interconnection requests ERCOT received in 2025, according to a December report. About 70% of the large load projects requesting connection to the ERCOT grid are data centers, according to ERCOT.

This rate of requests makes it harder for ERCOT to evaluate what electric infrastructure it needs to build in a given area to connect a data center to the grid when other nearby projects are being proposed so frequently. The current process is also challenging data center developers because by the time one data center finishes its planning studies, those results are out of date almost immediately by other data centers joining the interconnection queue and changing local transmission needs.

Matthew Boms, executive director for the Texas Advanced Energy Business Alliance, said that while ERCOT does not have an exact number, many of those data center connection requests will never come to fruition. Speculators put their names in the queue seeking to capitalize on the “gold rush” of data center development without doing the necessary work to actually get a new data center financed, approved and built. All companies have to do to get in line is to fill out an information form.

“The old, one-at-a-time interconnection process wasn’t built for hundreds of gigawatts of large load requests,” Boms said. “Texas as a state is welcoming all of these growth opportunities, but ERCOT and the (PUCT) have to separate real projects from paper projects and protect grid reliability, which is always the No. 1 issue for us in Texas.”

The new process aims to separate the “mature” proposals from the speculative ones by evaluating proposals in groups, Billo said.

“Batch Zero” will be made up of data center proposals that have already secured financing and land to build on. It’s not clear how many or which companies are in the batch to be vetted, but most likely all of them will be data centers.

The vast majority of data centers in the queue will be eligible in subsequent batches, which will face new regulatory hurdles to be set next year, Billo said.

ERCOT has spent much of this year seeking feedback on the process from corporate stakeholders, including Google, Meta, CenterPoint, Amazon and OpenAI, which are all looking for grid capacity in Texas. The effort began after the PUCT, which oversees ERCOT, urged the grid operator to rework its process to meet the coming energy demand.

“That was sort of our ‘put a man on the moon by the end of the decade’ moment, and we rallied internally,” Billo said.

Vegas lauded his organization’s efforts, noting ERCOT is one of the first grid operators in the country to grapple with the question of how to address the rapid growth of their interconnection queue.

“When we get this done, it will be the first step in that solution set actually being defined,” Vegas said. “We could potentially be solving a national issue on how to do this in a way that can be done reliably, stably, with consideration for the economic growth considerations, with consideration for the cost implications and with consideration for the reliability and stability of the grids that are going to support these assets.”

Disclosure: Google has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Department of Justice sides with Elon Musk’s xAI in Southaven lawsuit

Katherine Lin, Mississippi Today — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The U.S. Department of Justice is intervening on behalf of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP, claiming xAI is illegally operating gas turbines to power its data centers in Southaven and Memphis.

xAI on Monday asked the court to dismiss the case, arguing that the NAACP does not have legal standing to sue. The DOJ, Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves and Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, also asked the court to dismiss the case.

“The state urges you to take immediate action to intervene and protect these vital state and national interests,” Reeves said in a letter to the court.

Last summer, xAI began operating 18 mobile and temporary turbines in Southaven and has since upped the number to 57, according to recent court filings. Southaven residents say that nearly constant noise coming from xAI’s turbines is intolerable. In a separate class action lawsuit against xAI, residents detail how the noise has disrupted their daily routines, caused them to lose sleep and lowered their property values.

In Mississippi, mobile generators do not need an air permit if they operate for less than a year. The Southern Environmental Law Center, which is representing the NAACP, says that the turbines are polluting the air and should require a permit. They have asked the court to stop xAI from operating the generators until it gets air permits for them.

xAI is using the mobile turbines until it finishes constructing a permanent power plant, which will be early next year according to court documents. In March, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality approved air permits for xAI to build permanent gas turbines at the site.

Reeves wrote that xAI’s $20-billion investment in Mississippi data centers will create thousands of jobs and prevent electricity rates from going up for other customers. He said that if the state granted the NAACP’s request to shut down the turbines it would create an “immediate and substantial disruption to the state’s economy.” In January, when the investment was announced, Reeves said it was the largest economic development project in the state’s history.

Both Reeves and Stanley said that stopping the turbines would pose a national security risk and threaten U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.

Stanley said that xAI’s AI model, Grok Gov Mode, “provides critical support” for the U.S. military and was used in recent attacks against Iran.

“If xAI is hindered from continuing to improve and upgrade Grok, including the Grok Gov Model, (the military's) ability to meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries will be impaired,” Stanley said in the statement.

The motions came just days after SpaceX, xAI’s parent company, went public last week with the largest initial public offering in history.

In xAI’s motion to dismiss the case, the company argued that the NAACP cannot sue xAI on behalf of its members and that under the Clean Air Act states hold “primary responsibility” for implementing federal air quality standards.

xAI also wrote that the Clean Air Act’s provision that allows individuals to sue a polluter for violating federal environmental law is unconstitutional. It argues that only the executive branch can enforce federal law. Other companies have tried to use this argument, including in two cases that the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear last year.

“At a time when the ultra-rich seem to be protected and supported by some of our government entities, it is important that polluting industries don’t get to benefit at the expense of the health of Black communities,” said Abre’ Conner, NAACP Director of Environmental and Climate Justice. “Laws like the Clean Air Act are a bedrock insurance policy for communities to hold polluters accountable for decisions that cause them harm.”

Update, 6/16/2026: This article has been updated from its initial version to include comments from an NAACP spokesperson.

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Feds praise BEAD’s progress, but others aren’t convinced

Chris Teale — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

To hear the federal government tell it, the effort to roll out broadband infrastructure in its massive $42 billion initiative is going swimmingly. Others, however, are not so sure.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced in May that Nebraska had connected its first household under the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, making it one of the first BEAD-funded connections in the United States. At the time, Gov. Jim Pillen said in a statement it was a “tremendous victory for Nebraska.”

That connection came just under a year after NTIA and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced various changes to the program that was initially funded under the 2021 infrastructure law. In a speech to the Free State Foundation think tank in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth called it a “really exciting stage,” as states are “finally moving into the deployment stage that we waited so long for.”

“The states are in the process of negotiating contracts with providers, getting them signed and finally seeing deployment happening, and we’re looking forward to much similar good news in the months ahead,” Roth continued.

Program changes announced last year, in what NTIA described as the “Benefit of the Bargain” round, included a removal of a preference for fiber in favor of technological neutrality, as well as limiting labor and employment requirements and obligations to review projects’ impact on the environment. The Government Accountability Office said in a ruling late last year that those changes were illegal as they had not been submitted to Congress for approval beforehand.

A lot of uncertainty remains around the fate of approximately $21 billion in savings the NTIA said it delivered under its tweaks to the BEAD program. The future of that money has been a continual source of debate, with various ideas floating around, including a reserve fund to use for a second round of bidding and to mitigate any provider defaults; cash to support network resilience; and another chunk to spend on digital literacy, among others.

So far, the only public statement from NTIA on that $21 billion came in early March, when Roth said in a statement the agency was “taking additional time to review the comments and finalize our approach to ensure these funds are spent as efficiently and responsibly as possible.”

She has not been drawn on the money’s future since that March announcement, and NTIA spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment. Roth has said, however, there is little time to waste in getting projects moving.

“Statutorily, there's a four-year deployment timeline,” she said at the Free State Foundation event. “We would love to see projects deployed as quickly as possible, and so certainly that's something that we're closely monitoring. Having an all-of-the-above technology solution is really critical to that expeditious deployment.”

Some lawmakers, however, have found the NTIA’s limited public statements on its leftover $21 billion unacceptable. In a letter to Lutnick and Roth sent last week, four Democratic members of Congress said they have yet to receive a response to questions they raised last year about those leftover funds, and said states “still lack the basic guidance needed to responsibly plan for and deploy a significant portion of their BEAD allocations.”

“Instead of communicating with states and answering Congress’ questions about how it is now evaluating and allocating these funds, DOC has unclearly touted $21 billion in claimed BEAD savings,” Rep. April McClain-Delaney, a Maryland Democrat and a signatory to the letter, said in an accompanying statement. “This raises concerns about whether those funds are purposefully not being utilized by this Administration or whether said funds have been diverted for other unauthorized purposes.”

The letter continued to say that Roth’s calling the money as “savings” is “disingenuous and misleading,” and added that NTIA must commit in writing to not try to return it to the Treasury Department, which would be illegal as the money has been appropriated. They criticized the agency for its lack of transparency.

“These dollars are lawfully available for nondeployment uses, and any true surplus is already directed by statute to other eligible recipients,” the members wrote. “These funds are state allocations — not discretionary federal reserves that may be repurposed or reclaimed.”

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How are New York’s congressional candidates using AI? Debate moderators want to know

Annie McDonough — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

There’s a new rapid-fire question rapidly growing in popularity on New York’s debate stages.

Candidates in New York’s 7th, 10th and 12th Congressional Districts have been asked if, and how, they use artificial intelligence in their daily lives during multiple debates this primary season.

A question of that nature is unsurprising in the 12th Congressional District, where super PAC spending linked to industry behemoths OpenAI and Anthropic has cast an AI shadow over nearly every aspect of the race. (City & State has asked the Manhattan congressional candidates about their AI habits for that reason.)

But the fact that questions about AI usage are surfacing on debate stages where spending by the booming industry isn’t as prevalent – like in the Brooklyn-Queens 7th Congressional District and the Manhattan-Brooklyn 10th Congressional District – suggests a bigger, more permanent shift is happening.

During the New York City mayoral race less than a year ago, AI usage by campaigns was so stigmatized as to rise to the level of political scandal. (Though some of that came down to how campaigns used it – like Andrew Cuomo’s housing policy proposal citing ChatGPT as a source.)

That candidates now openly admit to using AI – and in particular chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT – is a mark of how fast the industry is moving, political consultant Ryan Adams said. “In a year’s time, the adoption has gotten so intense. It’s been injected into everything,” he said. “If you say ‘I don’t use AI,’ you’re lying. Because Google forces you to use AI. Every time you search something, it gives you a shitty summary of it.”

Though even if stigma around AI use in general has dissipated, candidates’ answers are still subject to plenty of judgment. “The stigma that still remains is are you using it for stuff that is good, or are you using it for stuff that is dumb,” Adams said. “I think when people are asking ‘Which LLMs do you use, and what do you use them for?’ it’s secretly asking, ‘Are you doing your own thinking or are you outsourcing it to the robots?’”

Some early trends have emerged in candidates’ answers on debate stages so far this spring. Just like proudly claiming a bagel order or favorite in-district restaurant in other popular rapid-fire debate rounds, candidates can use the question to signify something about their character or alignment, or even get one last jab in at an opponent. Democratic socialist Assembly Member Claire Valdez signaled a wariness about AI, stating during the NY-7 debate she doesn’t use it at all if she can help it. Jack Schlossberg used questions about it in both NY-12 debates to criticize Assembly Member Alex Bores – the target and beneficiary of Open AI-linked and Anthropic-linked spending in the race, respectively.

Most other times, candidates give pretty boring answers, saying they use it often, but in an unspecified way to prepare for the debate. (The equivalent of “plain cream cheese on everything.”)

Here’s how candidates in debates so far this primary cycle have answered the question of how they use AI.

NY-7 Democratic primary debate on NY1

Question: When was the last time you used an AI chatbot, and what did you ask?

Council Member Julie Won: I use it pretty frequently, especially because of my tech background, I would say. I used it to summarize some of my notes to prepare me for this debate.

Assembly Member Claire Valdez: I have never intentionally used a chatbot. Unfortunately the fact of the matter is, when you Google anything, you immediately get an AI summary, which you can’t even turn off. But I do not use AI, I prefer to do things the old-fashioned way.

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso: I’ve been married 10 years and we did our vow renewals. I needed to put together a list of invitees, and Claude helped me put that together to send out invites.

NY-10 Democratic primary debate on NY1

Question: When was the last time you used an AI chatbot, and what did you ask?

Rep. Dan Goldman: Yesterday, I would imagine. I have no idea. I do not remember. I use it pretty frequently.

Brad Lander: I used it today to check on one of Rep. Goldman’s votes.

NY-12 Democratic primary debate on PIX11

Question: When was the last time you used AI, and what for?

Assembly Member Micah Lasher: Within the last week, to do some research.

Assembly Member Alex Bores: Earlier today, in gathering prep for this debate.

Jack Schlossberg: I put Mr. Bores’s proposal for AI into AI just to see if it was AI-generated. And the results would interest you.

George Conway: On the taxi ride on the way here, to look up Susan Collins’s vote on impeachment in 2021.

NY-12 Democratic primary debate on NY1

Question: When was the last time you used an AI chatbot, which one did you use, and what did you ask?

Assembly Member Alex Bores: I used Claude … Two or three hours ago, and I was researching for this debate.

George Conway: I used Claude sometime today and I just don’t remember what I used it for.

Assembly Member Micah Lasher: This morning, I used Claude, I was looking up some statistics about the housing shortage.

Jack Schlossberg: I ran Mr. Bores’s transcript from the last debate through AI just to see which policies would be favored by Anthropic.

Nina Schwalbe: I used Claude to prepare for the debate.

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Louisiana courts more voting system vendors ahead of 2028 elections

Wesley Muller, Louisiana Illuminator — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by the Louisiana Illuminator.

Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry is giving voting system vendors another chance to get their systems certified as potential replacements for the state’s decades-old machines, though it could take another year before any new machines reach the polls.

In a news release last week, Landry announced she is reopening the certification process for any voting machine vendors interested in applying. The application deadline is July 2.

According to a 2021 state law, vendors must have their voting systems and system components certified by the secretary of state before they can compete for a state contract to replace Louisiana’s 35-year-old machines, many of which have broken and cannot be repaired because parts are no longer available.

This new certification round will be open to any voting systems and components not considered in the previous certification period last year. Systems that previously received certification are not required to do it again, according to Deputy Secretary of State for Communications Trey Williams.

Last year, Landry certified six different voting technologies, including five complete systems and a sixth ballot scanning component. Although the law doesn’t require it, the secretary of state has chosen to hold a second certification round rather than move forward with the six vendors already certified.

The companies with products already certified are: Clear Ballot of Boston; Democracy Live of Seattle; Election Systems & Software of Omaha, Nebraska; Hart InterCivic of Austin, Texas; Liberty Vote of St. Louis; and VotingWorks, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization.

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In a phone interview Monday, Williams said Landry’s decision will allow vendors to certify and showcase any technological upgrades they may have incorporated into their voting systems since last year.

“When you’re talking about systems this big, you wanna make sure you’re getting the latest technology and software that’s available,” he said.

Reactions from some of the previously certified vendors have so far been mixed.

In an emailed statement, Election Systems & Software spokeswoman Katina Granger said the company welcomes Landry’s decision as a “constructive step” to letting new vendors compete and to let current providers submit enhancements and updates for evaluation.

Clear Ballot spokeswoman Carolyn Weigold gave a more muted response.

“We are continuing to communicate with the Secretary of State’s Office about their procurement process and do not have any additional comment on the process at this time,” Weigold said in an email.

Landry’s office insists the second certification round won’t delay the procurement process. Williams said the agency is on track to select a new system by the end of the year and begin using it in some parishes for elections in 2027. It will then take roughly two to three years to completely transition from and replace the old voting machines, he said.

During last year’s certification round, Landry’s spokesman at the time, Joel Watson, said the secretary hoped to select and purchase a new system by the end of 2025 and begin using it in select parishes for the 2026 congressional midterm elections. The certification process, which requires public demonstrations of each vendor’s technology and additional vetting from the state’s new Voting System Commission, was completed in late December.

“It’s the most intensive procurement process probably in the history of the state,” Williams said.

Louisiana has been trying to buy new voting machines for at least a decade. But every previous attempt has encountered delays or outright cancellations as a result of vendor disputes and conspiracy-fueled political pressure.

Former Secretary of State Tom Schedler began shopping for a new voting system in 2018, and his replacement, Kyle Ardoin, took over the process when sexual harassment accusations led to Schedler’s resignation. Ardoin had finalized a contract with Dominion Voting Systems that year when a competing vendor tanked the deal with accusations of an unfair bidding process.

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When Ardoin tried to reopen bidding in 2021, the process was halted again when supporters of President Donald Trump mounted a pressure campaign against elected officials across the nation based on false claims of voter fraud following Trump’s 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

The small but vocal group bogged down committee hearings at the State Capitol that year with conspiracy theories against Dominion and SmartMatic, a London-based elections equipment company. The group offered no actual evidence to support their allegations but called for a return to hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballot systems.

Some Republican state lawmakers embraced the disinformation and crafted Act 480 of the 2021 legislative session. Among other things, it requires voting systems that produce a paper record for each ballot cast.

Fallout from false election fraud claims has shaped the field of competitors for Louisiana’s voting system contract.

In October, Dominion was sold to LibertyVote, one of the companies seeking Louisiana’s voting machine business. Its founder, Scott Leiendecker, is a former Republican elections director in St. Louis, and his company supports the use of hand-marked paper ballots.

Local elections officials in Louisiana have raised concerns about their ability to manage a paper-based system. They have said they will need more climate-controlled facilities to adequately store the equipment and paper supply.

Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.

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The evidence is on camera. Keeping it there requires an identity resilience strategy

Lou Karu — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 10:00:00 -0400

As law enforcement expands its digital footprint, the same happens to its attack surface. And adversaries have taken notice. Recent examples of stolen data include informant identities, crime scene photos, weapon licensing records and video evidence.

Hackers aren't just locking public safety organizations out of systems. They're positioning themselves to manipulate what law enforcement sees and what courts see:

An attacker inside a compromised video management system can delete footage retroactively, alter timestamps or kill camera feeds mid-incident.
Ransomware groups and nation-state actors increasingly target identity infrastructure because controlling identity means controlling everything downstream.
Compromise the right account, and an attacker will shut off cameras, destroy evidence or lock investigators out of case files at the worst possible moment.

The consequences are severe. Case dismissals. Civil liability. Wrongful releases. Broken chains of custody.

Build Identity Recovery From the Start

Security frameworks that restore clean identities, roll back tampered configurations and footage and re-establish an evidence chain that organizations can trust.

Closed-circuit television networks authenticate through enterprise identity platforms. When an attacker steals credentials, they're not just getting a password. They're getting every permission Active Directory says that account holds, including access to evidence.

CCTV Security Starts With Identity Recovery, Not the Cameras

When a ransomware group compromises an organization, the cameras keep recording, but the evidence may already be gone. Footage is only as trustworthy as the identity infrastructure controlling it.

That's why an identity recovery strategy should be built before an attack, not after.

Tampered footage starts with tampered identity. When attackers access identity configurations, they control what cameras record, what investigators retrieve and what courts see. Immutable backups are the integrity guarantee for every frame of video captured.
Where organizations restore matters as much as how fast. Rebuilding Active Directory or Entra ID inside a breached network risks reintroducing the same vulnerabilities. Clean-room recovery, restoring identity in an isolated, verified environment, belongs in an organization’s operational playbook.
Siloed recovery tactics create siloed blind spots. Various public safety organizations run on-prem AD and cloud Entra ID. The organizations that recover fast can pinpoint exactly what changed: which accounts, which permissions, which timestamps. For instance, in an active case, that precision determines whether evidence holds up in court.

Identity recovery should also be viewed as a chain-of-custody decision. Every CCTV expansion, evidence management modernization and offender tracking system runs through identity. Building recovery capability into the architecture before the cameras go live can reduce risk.

A Model for What's Possible

A major West Coast sheriff's department offers the blueprint. When the department expanded its CCTV network, leadership recognized that their network infrastructure was only as valuable as the identities controlling it.

Rather than ripping out legacy systems, they layered identity resilience on top. This strategy protected existing investments and new ones simultaneously.

Identity protection isn't a separate security project. It's the insurance policy on every public safety technology investment made for government modernization.

What’s Next for CISOs, Sheriffs and State IT Leaders

The next major identity layer breach won't appear outright.

It will look like missing footage. A dismissed prosecution. A corrupted offender record.

The organizations that get ahead of this moment share one trait: they treat identity infrastructure with the same rigor they apply to physical security.

The funded projects are already on the table. The cameras are going in. The only question is whether identity protection is part of the conversation before they go live.

Lou Karu is area vice president for U.S. state and local government and education at Rubrik. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Rubrik. These views are for informational purposes only and do not constitute business or legal advice. Organizations should consult with legal and compliance professionals to ensure their cybersecurity strategies meet all applicable federal, state and international requirements.

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Former New Jersey official argues AI could strengthen, not weaken, democratic institutions

Chris Teale — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Few technological advances have caught the attention of state and local governments like artificial intelligence, both for its promise but also its pitfalls.

One state that witnessed AI’s opportunities and wrestled with its challenges was New Jersey, which has been a leader in adopting the technology both among its residents as well as for government employees. The state has, among other initiatives, embraced an AI assistant to help save employees time on various tasks, expanded the technology’s use for public benefits programs and instituted an employee training program for generative AI.

At the heart of the state’s AI embrace was Beth Simone Noveck, New Jersey’s first chief innovation officer, then its first chief AI strategist. She is also a professor at Northeastern University who directs its Governance Lab and Burnes Center for Social Change.

This year, Noveck joined the Australian Resilient Democracy Network as a Global Fellow, and published a book, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy, about the fragility of democratic institutions, and how AI could help strengthen them, if used correctly.

Noveck sat down with Route Fifty recently to discuss her new book, her vision for the future of AI and its role in promoting democracy.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

ROUTE FIFTY: Why did you write this book, and what is the overarching message you want people to take away?

BETH SIMONE NOVECK: I wrote it in large part because I think we're having the wrong conversation about AI, where you're talking either about the robot apocalypse and how AI will be the death of humanity and the end of all jobs, or we're having a euphoric conversation about how AI will solve all of our problems and how it will compete with other countries for dominance in the AI marketplace. What we're failing to talk enough about is that messy middle of how we are already making more progress on using AI to repair our institutions, improve governance and focus on our democracy. It was really an effort to shine more light on what's already happened, and what we need to do more of to use AI well, so that's the motivation.

What I also hope people will take away is that we have this singular opportunity, and there's both the crisis that we're facing in our democracy, there is the subversion and fear of subversion of our elections. There are the failures of representation and the lack of voice that people have in their government. There is the sense that government is lacking capacity and doesn't do as well as it needs to solve problems for people. By any measure, our democracy is not doing as well as it needs to, and that creates an opportunity for us to look at how we can use these powerful technologies to address that change.

ROUTE FIFTY: Why are we so glommed onto those two themes that you talked about? Why are we not having the conversation you want us to have about AI?

NOVECK: If it bleeds, it leads, and we love to talk about what's going wrong in the world and it makes for good headlines. Number two, we love to talk about the sport of politics and who's up, who's down, who's winning, who's losing, and this predates AI. We don't talk enough about what happens the day after the election, and the hard work of governing. Getting attention for these topics used to be more difficult, and I feel like now, there is more interest in questions of government functioning, government capacity. There's a recognition that government is an incredibly important set of institutions for solving problems, and they need to work better… The third thing is the messaging that's often pushed at us, and we have to look at where they're coming from. Even [telling us] AI is a dangerous thing is often said by the very same people who make these technologies, and it is done as a distraction from focusing on some of the more urgent and immediate issues to focus on when it comes to AI and how we use it. It's long been a problem that we have not focused enough on. We have not focused enough on the question of actually having fixed the problems of our democracy and our institutions here and now.

ROUTE FIFTY: You were with the New Jersey state government in various roles. What role did that play in shaping your thinking?

NOVECK: For us, I do think that [role is] as the first state to have the new AI use policy to encourage all of its workers to go out and learn how to use these tools, training all our workforce in AI, not because we're so AI lucid, shall we say, because we rightly viewed the fact that this tool, the next generation calculator, the next generation load processor, is something we all need to know how to use, both to understand what these tools are good for and what they're not good at, but more importantly, how do we think about using them to serve the public better?

I tell a lot of stories about the work we did in New Jersey, but also work we've done around the world to focus on how we are using these tools to actually serve the public interest to do the work of government. Stories like using AI to comb through our databases and find 693,000 kids who are entitled to a food benefit who weren't getting it because they got lost between two databases. These powerful data processing tools are really good at trawling through huge amounts of data, and we were able to find those kids who otherwise would have gotten lost.

It's the ability then to use AI to sort through and synthesize and summarize citizen comments that allowed us to do a lot more. For example, public engagement and asking people, both the public and workers for the state, what should be our AI policy? How should we be using these tools? What do we want to do with them? What don't we want to do with them? To do things differently in ways that we might not have been able to do before. It was very much inspired by that work.

The Chief Forester of New Jersey, we went out and started asking, what should be the future of our state parks? How should we design them? What services do people want? He was able to go out and do that and actually act on people's feedback, because he had AI to make it easy for him to do that. He's trained in forestry, not in computer science, so the tools enable better ways of working with information that were not possible before. Definitely in New Jersey we had a lot of very entrepreneurial public servants doing great stuff, and because we did have policy for them, we gave them access to a platform, we gave people access to AI, and then we also trained them, we were beginning to unlock some exciting public entrepreneurial spirit.

ROUTE FIFTY: Does that speak to this idea of fixing our democracy a little bit, and showing what the technology can do to help make people's lives better?

NOVECK: A lot of the reason why I wanted to write this book was to show what some people are beginning to do in the hope that we can engender more of that. Government trust is at an all-time low, as we know people's concerns about and fears for our democracy. Only 7% of young people in America think democracy is helping and functioning as it ought to. Globally, we have, by some measure, only 29 democracies left in the world, and I think this decline of democratic institutions really has at its root — there's many different complex long historical reasons, but if we can pinpoint one thing — it really is this lack of government capacity, the ability of institutions designed for an age of information scarcity who are now struggling to keep up with and be effective dealing with incredible challenges of the current era. People don't trust our institutions, because, in many cases, our institutions don't deserve people's trust, they're not resourced to do as well as they need to. Where my hope is that, used well, these tools can really help, but we need to have an agenda for doing that nationally.

ROUTE FIFTY: We've got Congress trying desperately to stop states regulating AI. We've got everything coming out of the Department of War with Anthropic. Who's in charge of this technology?

NOVECK: At the moment, some very powerful companies that are extraordinarily wealthy and stand to become much, much wealthier, especially as two of the big players just announced they are going to go public, we're going to create a new class of trillionaires. We've seen the consequences both with our social media and now with AI, what it means to have fully corporate control over platforms that we're using for how we speak, how we have conversations, how we process information. We've seen the consequence of what happens when your AI starts spitting out, for example, white supremacy or some other racist meme or whatnot. We have very little public accountability, public oversight, public insight into these tools and how they're used.

One of the reasons to use the term democratic AI to insist on naming this thing, is really to be able to call attention to the fact that we need much more democratic control over these tools. That doesn't just mean regulating what the training data is that goes into them, or just regulating testing these before we deploy them. There is so much more that has to go into thinking about what it means to create AI for public purpose. You see a lot of jurisdictions now beginning to experiment with creating their own large language models, either as a government project or as a public-private partnership, or using their procurement or regulatory authority to push back on private companies and make demands. You just say you want to have more control over these tools than the last generation of tools, that you recognize the consequence, especially with social media, where now we worry about the addiction it's created, especially for young people, the impacts on mental health, and the consequences of essentially ceding the public square to fully commercial outfits that have very little public oversight.

One of the helpful things is that, maybe, as some of these companies go public, we will at least get more insight into how they operate. But we need much better ways of building these tools in an open way, in a collaborative way. Smaller models that are publicly run, governed and controlled. We really need a public AI infrastructure to complement the also necessary commercial infrastructure that we have.

ROUTE FIFTY: Do you think governments are up to the task?

NOVECK: We're seeing a lot of governments outside the U.S. take strong action, motivated — my concern is — much more by this debate around so-called AI sovereignty. One of these I'm excited about is the role states can play using their collective action, their purchasing power, but also their collective design and building power. So much of the debate with regulation, the desire for a moratorium on state regulation, is still very focused on a narrow set of issues, which is the safety of the model and who is testing data that was included. That was just a fraction of the set of issues. I think instead about, for example, how Los Angeles has worked with UCLA to design [a tool] and be able to predict people at risk of homelessness, and to use that algorithm to engage in what some people call anticipatory or one-click government, to call people before they become homeless and offer them services identifying the people most at risk and potentially most in need.

I think of the GrantWell project that the AI for Impact Fellowship students built with Massachusetts to help small cities and towns apply for grants, and now taking that tool free and open source and rolling it out to multiple states so that they have access. It's free, it's open source, it doesn't cost the taxpayer anything, but more importantly, it's tools we've learned in open collaboration with citizens that are designed for public purpose. I think there is a huge amount that we are already doing and much more that we can do if we focus much more on this question of AI for public purpose, and we start asking the question, what are the problems that we're actually trying to solve with these tools?

We're having lots of debates about tech in schools and the dangers of mental health and phones and all of this, which is an important conversation, but what we're not doing is having the conversation about the fact that only 40% of kids in this country read at grade level and why we're not racing to make investments in tooling that could help give every kid a personalized reading tutor. Yes, we should not have kids on TikTok in the middle of the school day, but we should be asking how we can augment the teaching staff we have to give more kids access to a reading tutor or a math tutor, the ability now to use AI to give little Jimmy a book about dinosaurs, which interests him, and Jane unicorns or trains, which interest her, so that they're more engaged in reading. Those are the conversations we need to be having, and my concern is that, when we're only talking about a very narrow set of issues around governing AI, we're not talking about using AI to govern.

ROUTE FIFTY: You've drawn this parallel already, but I do want to double click on it. Is the social media phenomenon the worst-case scenario that could happen if we get this wrong?

NOVECK: We're already seeing some of the consequences of putting these tools into our governments, our schools, our communities. Tools over which we have no insight, no oversight, that are run by companies that are not accountable to us. The concern that we raise, for example, to say we're going to train teachers in AI and put AI in schools, is that AI that's designed to maximize corporate profit, or AI that is designed to actually benefit kids while protecting their privacy, safety and security, or are we going to be putting in AI to push advertisements to people to create more addiction and profit and eyeballs. The danger is that we see the same problems with social media are amplified 100-fold. People who bring these large language models into their lives become very dependent on how we use them, so best case it's trying to sell you a product and worst case, it's pushing you a political agenda, trying to control how we think, how we talk, and creating new forms of addiction.

There's a lot of concerns about the future of human agency and human creativity. There are concerns about displacement of workers, obviously, that have existed for a long time, but we have to come back to the fact that this is a choice. These are tools. AI doesn't do anything by itself. AI doesn't fire workers; CEOs fire workers, managers fire workers. AI is not as autonomous as we are led to believe. These are tools for processing information, and, in this day and age of information super abundance, there are huge benefits we can reap from them, depending on the problems that we're trying to solve.

I'm most excited, for example, about those jurisdictions that are saying they have for too long operated behind closed doors, and with frankly some good reason, because when you ask the public to give input, it can be very, very hard to manage more information coming at you, especially in a polarized and highly politicized environment. But I'm excited about those places that have gone out and said they recognize that the public has beneficial insights to share, have collective intelligence and wisdom, know how to share, and can go out and ask people.

Because AI can make it easier to listen, you have places like Hamburg, Germany saying they're going to do all of their city planning decisions, they have AI tools to help make sense of what people are saying, and they've shared those tools free and open source with nine cities, with places like Bogota that have gone out and said they're going to go out and expand their participatory budgeting efforts to go out and hear from 50,000 people in two weeks in their last participatory budgeting effort, and to recognize that more participatory, more robust democracy is actually something that could be possible. But it's not automatic. It really is going to depend on how we choose to use these tools, how we design them, and what kinds of problems we're trying to solve with them.

ROUTE FIFTY: What should a government executive be doing right now, today, on AI?

NOVECK: The two big things we need to think about, one is universal training and learning, and how important it is that we're not only understanding what these tools are, but how we use them in our day-to-day work. There's a big difference between these two things. It's one thing to understand you can use AI to summarize something, to write something, to edit something, and another thing to incorporate them. I can have, for example, summaries of every meeting, whether it's internal meetings or city council meetings or whatnot. What do I do with those? I can collect police body camera footage, and now I can use AI to analyze that footage, but what do I want to do with that? It's the North Carolina police precinct that's using the ability to create summaries to create training videos to learn from these to train officers, as opposed to just collecting this information. The learning and the conversations around how we want to use these things is incredibly important.

The public defender in the state of New Jersey, an office that, until this spring, did not have Wi-Fi — we're talking under-resourced in the extreme — sat down with her team. They didn't just go out and build a chatbot or buy a tool or adopt AI, they sat down and they had a conversation around using the tool in their work, getting everybody hands-on to say, “What is it we want to do with these things? What is the problem we're trying to solve, and where might AI help us?”

We're seeing this in all of our data around the people through the InnovateUS project that I run, where we run this peer-to-peer free learning community around AI and other skills. The number one differentiator for people around adopting and adapting to the use of new technology is whether leadership gets training or not. It's not the staff; the staff will tell you it is whether their leader understands what these tools are, what they're for, and can therefore steward that conversation.

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Microsoft’s clean energy reversal collides with Virginia’s climate goals

Charles Paullin, Inside Climate News — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Inside Climate News.

One of the world’s most profitable technology companies could be abandoning an ambitious clean-energy goal in Virginia as it races to build electricity-hungry data centers. Several of the company’s facilities are already operating in Virginia, the data center capital of the world, and more are planned, creating a tension with the state’s own climate commitments.

Microsoft is considering ending its round-the-clock or 24/7 clean energy goal, which aims to meet 100 percent of its energy consumption 100 percent of the time with zero-carbon electricity by 2030.

“It’s always easier to work in partnership than it is to work against them if our goals are aligned,” said Tim Cywinski, communications director for the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club. “Our goals should be aligned. This is Microsoft telling us that they aren’t.”

In Virginia, Microsoft has a hub of data centers for its Azure cloud services in Mecklenburg County. There, in rural Southside Virginia, there are more than 20 different data center buildings, according to datacentermap.com.

The company also has several data centers in Northern Virginia across Loudoun County near Dulles International Airport; Prince William County and Fairfax County. More data centers are planned for Mecklenburg and Prince William counties, which would more than triple the company’s statewide employee count to 2,042 by the end of the year.

Amazon has the largest data center footprint in the state, Cywinski said, followed by Microsoft and Google, which is also expanding. Meta has a data center outside Richmond.

Microsoft’s retreat is happening at the same time as the Trump administration’s attack on clean energy development and investment. Despite the consequences of rising climate change devastation and recovery costs, the company and its counterparts—Amazon, Google and Meta—are planning to power their computer warehouses with fossil-fuel plants.

In 2024, Virginia had 81 million metric tons of carbon emissions, according to Rhodium Group’s Climate Deck. That’s down from the 85 metric tons the state emitted in 2020, when it passed the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). The law was designed to decarbonize the state’s grid by mid-century, but that goal is now in question.

Rather than imposing a carbon budget, the law incentivizes Virginia’s two largest utilities to use renewable energy and retire fossil fuel sources in the state to reduce emissions. But utilities can ask regulators to build new fossil plants, or keep existing ones online, if there is a threat of running short on power.

By 2030, the state is projected to rank 30th nationally in power-generation-related emissions with about 57 million metric tons of carbon emissions. Separate research in Environmental Letters found that data center demand could contribute to a 28 percent increase in power sector carbon emissions, compared to no data center demand. That would be partly due to “coal-fired generation rebounds to meet demand in Northern Virginia,” the study found.

Data center growth in Virginia has created tension over the state’s pursuit of the goals in the VCEA, with Republicans advocating to abandon the law. Even if no constraints were holding up data center development, like needing transmission lines to deliver power, Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found in 2024 that it “will be very difficult, with or without meeting VCEA requirements” to meet the demand projected. During her campaign, now Lt. Governor Ghazala Hashmi, a member of the Democratic Party that has trifecta control of state government, indicated that data center development conflicts with the VCEA.

“The single greatest threat to our clean energy goals is not the lack of resolve or purpose or goals, but rather it is the sheer speed and the size of what is coming at us, explicitly…the growing demands within our commonwealth for energy,” Hashmi said at a Virginia Clean Energy Summit last fall.

Leading up to and following Microsoft’s 2020 climate commitment, the company made deals for various amounts of solar and energy storage technologies in Virginia and PJM, the regional grid operator for Virginia, 12 other states and the District of Columbia. When announcing its commitment, Microsoft concurred with the scientific community’s conclusion that emissions needed to decrease to reverse the harm caused by climate change.

“Already, the planet’s temperature has risen by 1 degree centigrade,” read a post from Brad Smith, president and vice-chair. “If we don’t curb emissions, and temperatures continue to climb, science tells us that the results will be catastrophic.” In unveiling “a new plan to reduce and ultimately remove Microsoft’s carbon footprint,” the company acknowledged that combating climate change would demand a worldwide effort. Still, Microsoft had a responsibility to act, Smith wrote: “those of us who can afford to move faster and go further should do so.”

But last fall, Microsoft supported new gas proposals from Dominion Energy, the state’s largest utility, despite VCEA deadlines to retire carbon-emitting sources by 2045.

In 2023, 36 percent of Dominion’s electricity came from natural gas. At the time, no new natural gas power plants were planned. Then, following the surge in data center development, Dominion called for six gigawatts of new natural gas generation to be built over the next several years. That alone would meet about 24 percent of Dominion’s record peak demand of 25 gigawatts from this past winter. While the utility has its own net-zero climate goal, its latest plan, called an Integrated Resource Plan, or IRP, includes eight gigawatts of new natural gas capacity.

Other big tech companies rushing to build more data centers are also turning to fossil fuel use, but some, like Google, have announced several battery storage projects. Microsoft’s reconsideration is the most public acknowledgement of the tension with clean energy. The reversal signals dishonesty, said Cywinski, of the Sierra Club.

“All of the industry, including Microsoft, have proven their voluntary commitments mean nothing unless it lines up with their bottom line,” Cywinski said. “Whether it’s climate, whether it’s affordability, whether it is doing right by customers—none of it matters if they think that their profits are going to be at stake.”

Microsoft said it remains committed to becoming carbon negative, which is a goal that allows emissions to continue. To be carbon negative, the company’s emissions are totaled, and Microsoft can receive credit for projects like planting trees, which absorb carbon. Those credits can be subtracted from emission totals to lower footprints to zero or into the negative. The company can also match or buy clean energy generation sources in an amount that corresponds to its energy consumption.

In 2024, the company created 11.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions, about 40 percent of which came from powering their data centers and other operations.

“Fulfilling our carbon commitment requires ongoing effort to review and refine our approach as markets mature, policy environments evolve, and emerging innovative solutions scale,” Melanie Nakagawa, chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, said in a statement in response to questions from Inside Climate News. “At times we may make adjustments to our approach toward our sustainability goals. Any adjustments we make are part of our disciplined approach—not a change in our long-term ambition.”

But the difference between matching and the 24/7 clean energy goal is “significant,” said Gary Cook, a U.S.-based independent renewable energy and sustainability consultant who formerly worked with environmental advocacy groups Stand.earth and Greenpeace.

Whereas matching allows emissions to continue while mathematically being offset, it can also be satisfied with clean energy from other, cheaper places in the country. Then, fossil fuel emissions from power plants in Virginia that are powering the data centers there can continue to operate.

“You’re subsidizing renewable deployment in a different part of the country, but doing nothing to meet your footprint,” Cook said of the matching goal.

Tech companies were a “catalyst” for utilities to shift and provide clean energy to large customers like them, but the rush to build out AI is now causing companies like Microsoft to seek their own fossil fuel generation sources, like in a planned gas-powered project in West Virginia, that aren’t connected to a grid that needs years-long upgrades, Cook said.

That West Virginia project aligns with Microsoft’s walk back, Cook said, which is “bad locally, it’s bad globally.”

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Local Tennessee officials are putting data center plans on ice to consider regulations

Cassandra Stephenson, Tennessee Lookout — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by the Tennessee Lookout.

Local governments in Tennessee are pausing data center development after outcry from residents while officials determine how to regulate the resource-intensive facilities.

McMinnville and Coffee County, both rural areas southeast of Nashville, each unanimously passed moratoria on data centers on June 9, with other moratoria votes expected in Warren and Knox counties on June 22. In Nashville, more than 150 people attended a Planning Commission meeting to speak against planned data center developments near the Nashville Zoo and Fisk University. The capital city’s council passed a moratorium bill on its first of three readings on June 9, and a bill that would codify restrictions and requirements for data centers will next be considered by the Planning Commission on June 25.

McMinnville, Tennessee resident Kai Sage is one of several locals who recently took up the mantle against a planned 25 megawatt data center that would be located near her home and other residential neighborhoods.

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“I think that they’re aiming these at … these smaller places in Tennessee because our land is so cheap, our laws are so lenient, the income isn’t taxed like it is anywhere else, and generally they’re just not going to get a lot of pushback, because a lot of people don’t know what’s going on, and they don’t know anything about this,” Sage said. “Luckily, a lot of people around here were informed, so as soon as we alerted people about this, people quickly reacted.”

Data centers power modern communications, commerce, entertainment and more, and artificial intelligence and cloud computing are driving development of the facilities throughout the country.

Sixty-one data centers are operating or under construction in Tennessee, including 26 in the Nashville area, 13 in Memphis and 11 in Knoxville, according to market intelligence company Data Center Map.

Nearly 90% of existing data centers nationwide are located in urban areas, according to an April report from the Pew Research Center, but 67% of planned centers are in rural areas, many of which don’t have any data centers yet. The South holds the top rank for both the country’s existing number of data centers and planned data centers, Pew reports.

The International Code Council, a nonprofit organization sponsored by building trades that publishes codes and building standards, launched its own committee this month to shape guidelines specific to data centers.

I think that they’re aiming these at … these smaller places in Tennessee because our land is so cheap, our laws are so lenient, the income isn’t taxed like it is anywhere else, and generally they’re just not going to get a lot of pushback, because a lot of people don’t know what’s going on, and they don’t know anything about this.
– Kai Sage, McMinnville resident

Proponents say the centers can be sources of tax revenue, but detractors cite concerns about immense resource requirements — a large data center can use enough power and water to run an entire city — and environmental impacts.

Elon Musk’s xAI currently faces two lawsuits over air pollution and harmful, “near-constant” noise related to its Memphis-area data centers and the gas turbines that power them.

McMinnville Passes 18-Month Moratorium

In Warren County, the McMinnville Board of Mayor and Aldermen unanimously passed an 18-month moratorium on data center permitting on June 9, buying time for local officials to consider “electrical grid capacity, water and stormwater impacts, environmental and public health concerns, noise and community fit,” McMinnville City Administrator Nolan Ming said in a social media post after the vote.

“A moratorium is not a permanent ban. It is a responsible time-out,” Ming said. “It gives us time to study the issues carefully, update our zoning and land use regulations, and make sure any future decisions are based on solid information, not rushed approvals.”

The proposed 96,064-square-foot Hixson Data Center would have a 25 megawatt output powered by natural gas and diesel generators, according to the project’s website, which estimates an opening date in early 2028.

Alex Hixson, the center’s development director and a McMinnville resident, did not respond to questions about plans for the project after the moratorium vote. Hixson told WKRN earlier this month that he loves the area and wants to “do something good for it.”

Sage said the 14,000-resident city known for its hundreds of plant nurseries is not built for this type of industry, citing concerns over electricity demand, water use and pollution and noise. Now that McMinnville’s moratorium is in place, Sage plans to reach out to neighboring counties and cities that may also want to advocate for moratoriums or local regulations. Her primary goal is to keep data centers out of McMinnville and Warren County.

“We can’t just say in a law, these data centers are banned, right? That wouldn’t hold up in court,” Sage said, but local governments can create codes that make it more difficult or less appealing for data centers to develop there.

Elon Musk’s company, xAI, is building a massive supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, called “Colossus,” in Memphis, Tennessee. The project has spurred lawsuits and concerns about the environmental and health impacts of the data center. (Photo: Karen Pulfer Focht/Tennessee Lookout)

Tennessee Data Center Regulations Don’t Contemplate Environmental Impact

About a dozen states are considering statewide moratoria on permitting for data centers, but Tennessee is not among them. Maine’s state legislature passed the country’s first statewide moratorium on data centers, but Gov. Janet Mills vetoed the bill in April.

Tennessee legislators this year enacted a law stipulating that the owners of data centers that require at least 50 megawatts of power must pay for any infrastructure upgrades needed to produce the electricity the center needs. For reference, a large data center capable of supporting Artificial Intelligence can use more than 100 megawatts of power, or enough to support roughly 80,000 households, according to a congressional report.

Sponsors said the law is meant to protect people from larger electricity bills — utility companies are not allowed to use ratepayer funds to pay for upgrades solely associated with data centers, unless those upgrades also benefit other customers.

But the law also allows data centers to produce their own power without state or local oversight using equipment like gas turbines, something opponents say removes important guardrails protecting communities from pollution. Data centers can also purchase power from independent producers.

Bills that would have set permit requirements for data centers or required the centers to report water, electricity and fuel usage did not garner enough support to make it to a final vote.

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Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com.

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