The House Passed a Bill to Make Data Centers Pay Their Own Power Costs, 417-3. It's the Only AI Legislation Getting a Vote This Year.

A near-unanimous vote, on lawmakers' last day in Washington before facing the voters who forced it.

The US House of Representatives passed the Ratepayer Protection Act by a vote of 417-3 on Wednesday, September 16, requiring state utility regulators to consider standards that would force AI data centers with 100 megawatts or more of demand to cover the costs of the new power sources, transmission lines, and grid infrastructure their facilities require — rather than passing those costs on to ordinary ratepayers. The bill now heads to the Senate.

The near-unanimous margin is itself notable: House GOP leaders fast-tracked the bill under a suspension procedure requiring two-thirds support, and it cleared with bipartisan backing on lawmakers' last scheduled day in Washington before the November midterms. The only opposition came from three progressive Democrats — Summer Lee, Delia Ramirez, and Rashida Tlaib — who argued the bill doesn't go far enough, not from anyone defending the industry. This newsletter has tracked the political pressure building behind this exact vote for weeks: Trump's own "backwards and poor" post, more than $215 million in AI-aligned super PAC spending, and now a recent NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll finding nearly 70% of respondents oppose data centers in their own neighborhoods, with 45% strongly opposed.

The bill was introduced by GOP Rep. Gabe Evans of Colorado, himself running in a competitive reelection race, with several other Republicans facing tough contests signing on as cosponsors in recent weeks — a direct read on how seriously vulnerable incumbents are taking the issue heading into November. President Trump, who otherwise backed the AI industry aggressively and dismissed slowdown calls from Anthropic and OpenAI just days earlier, has separately pushed data-center developers to sign a voluntary pledge to build or purchase their own power supply — a softer, industry-driven parallel to what this bill would make a regulatory standard. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the legislation "a step forward" while saying "more clearly needs to be done."

Supporters describe the bill as a "modest first start," and it's genuinely modest — it recommends a standard to state regulators rather than mandating one, preserving the state-level authority that has already produced Pennsylvania's harsh data-center rules and Florida's gubernatorial primary fight over the same issue. But a 417-3 vote, on the last day before an election, on the single AI-related bill Congress managed to bring to the floor all year, is itself the clearest evidence yet that the backlash this newsletter has tracked since August has fully arrived in Washington — not as rhetoric, but as a recorded vote every member of the House just had to take.