Former Trump and Obama advisers propose bipartisan data center rules

A Democrat and a Republican walked into a policy debate and came out with a joint plan. Robert Wolf and Stephen Moore, former economic advisers from the Obama and Trump administrations respectively, have released a framework for how America should handle the wave of AI data center construction. Their pitch is a middle path. They reject both a free-for-all approach and outright bans, and they call for federal guidelines built around five priority areas. What the framework actually proposes The paper carries a title that does most of the summarizing on its own: “Beyond the ‘Wild West’ and Moratorium: A Bipartisan Framework for Smart and Responsible Data Center Investment.” It was published by Unleash Prosperity Now and released around October 22-23, 2026. The core idea is coordinated federal standards, paired with local control over where facilities can actually be built. The five areas the authors want federal guidelines to cover are: Ratepayer protection. Developers would pay for the incremental infrastructure costs their projects create. Put simply, the company building the server farm picks up the bill for the extra grid capacity, not the family down the road. Energy security and...