by Greg Walcher, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow
The Daily Sentinel
In planning the nation’s 1976 bicentennial celebration, Congress made one of its dumbest-ever boondoggle decisions. Recognizing the near death of railroad passenger service since the 1950s, Congress decided to spend millions turning the aging and crumbling Union Station into the National Visitor Center. But they missed the obvious red flag — the millions of visitors to the nation’s capital during 1976 would not be coming by train.
The red-carpeted National Visitor Center sat mostly empty that year, after which the old depot was boarded up, its roof caving in by 1981. Still ignoring reality, Congress spent millions more on several studies of what to do with the building. Each study concluded that the highest and best use would be as a train station — what a revelation. It took $181 million to restore it, and $8 billion more since then. Today, the magnificent Beaux-Arts structure functions much as it did when first built by the railroads in 1907.
There is a lesson in such waste that should be atop the planning agenda at the President’s Council of Science and Technology Advisors that will oversee his artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, along with David Sacks, the new “AI and Crypto Czar.” The president is intent on shifting the focus of federal AI policy, from the technology’s potential risks to its potential economic benefits, possibly in the trillions. He wants the U.S. to dominate the field, and has touted AI investments of $500 billion from Oracle, OpenAI, SoftBank, MGX and others.
One of the greatest obstacles to the new data centers is their massive need for electric power, in many cases beyond the capacity of the existing grid. Trump has endorsed the idea of building new power plants right next door to the data centers, even fast-tracking their permits, rather than connecting them to an already over-burdened electric grid.
