The Trump administration is letting federal data centre oversight slide just as AI is turning power and water into causes for demonstrations and unrest.
According to Wired, the Federal Data Centre Enhancement Act is due to expire in September 2026 with no obvious replacement. That could end requirements for federal agencies to report on efficiency, resilience, energy use, water use and contractor sustainability.
The Office of Management and Budget has not told agencies how to handle the sunset. Current and former workers at OMB and the General Services Administration say that this is a more hands-off approach to data centre oversight.
The GSA oversees government IT services and helps implement the FDCEA. One GSA employee told Wired the lack of a follow-on plan was deeply unusual.
The employee said, “Never in the history of data centre policies has a policy expired without another one having been painstakingly worked on for three years behind the scenes. The technology has changed so much it’s not about getting everything right, it’s about doing the best they can and updating to a new policy. They claim they’re going to make sure private companies pay their fair share, but they haven’t explained how they’ll do that.”
Congress has seen a burst of data centre bills this year. Some would require environmental reviews, while others would protect local moratoriums.
None appears designed to replace FDCEA requirements and do not handle federally run or leased data centres either, which is rather awkward for a government drowning in server farms.
A search of reginfo.gov, the OMB site covering the president’s Unified Agenda, did not turn up anything for FDCEA.
The GSA employee said: “By letting this expire, OMB is going to enter into this new age of prioritising rapid AI development over any sort of centralised control or rigorous standards. In the absence of a new policy from OMB, [GSA] has no directive or measurable standards with which to point agencies towards managing data centres efficiently.”
This means that AI data centres will be allowed to suck up electricity and water while local communities complain about getting the noise, heat and infrastructure strain without much of the upside.
The Trump administration has already been pushing rapid AI infrastructure buildout. Letting FDCEA wither looks like another step towards trusting the market to behave itself, which has always worked brilliantly in tech, apart from all the times it has not.
There is little reason that mega data centres need to be water-cooled or powered off the local grid, or, bizarrely, be built in hot places with low water tables. The federal government used to care about whether agencies were building efficient, resilient and secure data centres, now it is pretty clear they don’t.
