{"id":1235572953,"date":"2026-06-05T10:33:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-05T14:33:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=1235572953"},"modified":"2026-06-05T12:59:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-05T16:59:29","slug":"alexis-goldstein-congress-ban-data-centers-financial-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/politics\/politics-features\/alexis-goldstein-congress-ban-data-centers-financial-crisis-1235572953\/","title":{"rendered":"The Candidate Who Wants to Ban Data Centers: \u2018This Screams Financial Crisis\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<!-- do not apply CSS styles to this element! -->\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"pmc-paywall\">\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tAlexis Goldstein has a simple pitch to American voters. Let her take out the data centers.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThere\u2019s more to it, of course. Goldstein has a long background in the finance and tech worlds, and a host of ideas on where public money that\u2019s being used for tax breaks to Big tech should be spent. But the core of her campaign for Maryland\u2019s 6th congressional district revolves around the clear image of a humming, reeking building soaking up cash in a needy community, hoarding its wealth in bytes of zeroes and ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThe district is currently represented by April McClain Delaney, whose husband, John Delaney, represented it from 2013 to 2019. Goldstein is one of several Democrats hoping to knock off Delaney in the party primary later this month, and one of several former federal workers running for Congress after experiencing Donald Trump\u2019s administration from the inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tGoldstein was fired from her job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by job-cutters at Elon Musk\u2019s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Before getting the axe, she worked to protect Americans from crypto scams \u2014 work that she says is only more relevant now in the days of AI.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tGoldstein spoke with <em>Rolling Stone<\/em> by phone this week about her campaign and what she\u2019d want to accomplish in office.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>When was the moment you decided you were going to run for office?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tOne of the things I did at the CFPB is I worked on fighting crypto scams. I have a degree in computer science, and I&#8217;m extremely online. In 2025, when the CFPB was very much under attack, there was a vote in the House of Representatives for a bill called the Genius Act, and then there was another bill called the Clarity Act. Essentially, [the bills] loosened the rules on all of crypto, and say there is a magic entity that doesn&#8217;t have to obey the same financial rules as every other financial product. April McClain Delaney, who is the incumbent in the 6th congressional district, voted for both of them. I was frustrated with every Democrat that voted for it, but having someone that is from the state that has lost the most federal jobs\u2026 it\u2019s like we were fighting for our lives and here was this vote that couldn\u2019t pass without Democratic support, and they demanded nothing for it.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>What would you be most excited to try to change if you were elected to Congress?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI worked on Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis. All of the financial engineering that happened in 2008 feels like child&#8217;s play compared to the financial engineering that is backing the rise of data centers. The difference being that at the end of the day, in 2008 the asset that was behind all of the securitization was a house, and the asset that&#8217;s behind the securitization in all of the debt structures for data centers is a graphics card that ages like milk and is obsolete in two to three years. Everyone thought a house will always have value, and that turned out to be wrong, but I don&#8217;t think a GPU will always have value.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tAs someone who worked on crypto during the Biden administration, and largely felt, for lack of a better word, gaslit\u2026 like, the SEC threw down and the FDIC tried really hard to keep crypto out of the banking system, but by and large the rest of the administration was trying to play footsie with crypto. So many of these bureaucrats were so afraid of being seen as stupid in tech that they would believe the most outlandish things, and not ask even basic questions about it, for fear of looking stupid. The Mark Andreessens of the world want to say oh, the Biden administration was out to get us, and that is not true. They were trying to be their friend! The White House had calls with Sam Bankman-Fried on them!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tSo a healthy dose of skepticism is what I\u2019m hoping to bring to Congress. I support AOC and Bernie Sanders&#8217; data center moratorium, but I also think it doesn&#8217;t go far enough. Like everything about this screams financial crisis to me. They spent $1.4 trillion on data centers, and they&#8217;ve only earned $600 billion industry-wide, not even half as much as they spent. Meta did a bond issuance last year for $25 billion of corporate bonds to raise money to build more data centers. It was the largest corporate bond issuance in history, right? None of this is being paid for with anything but debt. And if you look at the sharks, and by that I mean, the hedge funds and the private equity funds that are financing this, it&#8217;s the same people as the 2008 financial crisis!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI just have alarm bells going off in my head. I feel like this is an issue where the public gets it, and our leaders and Congress don&#8217;t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>There\u2019s no public benefit to having a data center in your backyard, right? Like, in the worst of the financial crisis people got suckered in because they thought that they would make money off of it, but nobody sees a data center moving in and thinks, oh, great, I\u2019m going to get a better rate on a vacation home.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tYeah, and it&#8217;s very bipartisan. I mean, in Maryland\u2019s 6th, where I&#8217;m running, they&#8217;re trying to build data centers everywhere. They actually smell bad, which I didn&#8217;t realize until I visited one. Obviously they sound bad, but they smell bad, too. Nobody wants them. I think a lot of people are sleeping on the movement against them. It\u2019s why those graduation videos \u2014 people are shocked that all of the graduates are booing someone who says AI is the future. I think Congress is really behind the curve on this, and if nothing else, I just want to talk about this as much as possible. I think I&#8217;m uniquely situated to talk about it, because I have the expertise from my finance background and work in government. I\u2019m seeing the same hype cycle play out that I saw in crypto, and I&#8217;m like, guys, we just did this, and it didn&#8217;t end well. Shouldn&#8217;t we be a little more skeptical this time? And it doesn&#8217;t feel like our leaders are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI sort of have a three point plan: number one, find the billionaire money, and that&#8217;s this bill that I worked on with AOC, that in 2021 passed the House Financial Services Committee, but then was never brought to the floor. Step two is take the billionaire money, and then step three is give it back to the people they took it from in the first place. I guess I&#8217;m kind of like the skunk at the garden party that&#8217;s always telling people \u201cI think AI is a bubble, I think it&#8217;s going to crash.\u201d I\u2019m just a nerd, but I\u2019m a nerd who has watched the same ostrich game over and over again from all these different perches.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tWhen I was on Wall Street, and the bailout happened, I asked my boss, \u201cHow will the public ever forgive us for the bailout?\u201d He was like, \u201cWell, here&#8217;s the thing, in the savings and loan crisis, everyone freaked out, and yeah, they closed a regulatory agency, but then everyone forgot, and everything went back to normal \u2014 and that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going to happen this time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI was disgusted by that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>What are you hearing on the campaign trail?&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThey hate data centers. When people find out that one of my platforms is banning data centers federally, they&#8217;re thrilled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThere&#8217;s five counties in Maryland&#8217;s 6th district. April McClain Delaney is the incumbent. She won the Democratic primary in 2024 with about 24,000 votes across five counties. Frederick County had a citizen-led ballot referendum to roll back the local elected approval of a data center, and 22,000 people in a single county signed the petition. The same amount of people who voted for the current incumbent in the last primary, across the whole district, signed a petition opposing data centers in one county.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThere\u2019s another emergency in the district, which is a DHS warehouse that was purchased in Washington County. I&#8217;m a little bit unique in my data center position. Everyone is opposed to the DHS warehouse, but I\u2019m like, well how do you think they put people in the detention center, they use the surveillance dragnet. These things are connected.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>Playing a little bit of devil\u2019s advocate here, what role do you see the tech industry playing in our society?&nbsp;<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tLet me just clarify: I don&#8217;t mean data centers full of server racks. I mean specifically, AI data centers that are full of nothing but these graphics cards.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThis comes from my time at the CFPB. The powerful people need to obey the laws that already exist. That was the whole crypto situation. I believe crypto is a security. I believe it should have had to follow all of the securities laws that the SEC enforces.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tIt\u2019s similar with Big Tech. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act already says that you can&#8217;t discriminate based on protected characteristics, and we know that a lot of these algorithms \u2014 Facebook, or you name it \u2014 are doing that, and it&#8217;s already illegal. So why don&#8217;t we just enforce the laws we already have against these entities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI really don&#8217;t think that we need to reinvent the wheel. I think the playbook that we&#8217;ve seen from tech over and over again is we&#8217;re different, we&#8217;re special. I think we can do a lot if we just start to have leaders that reject this very arrogant argument that tech keeps making over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>What do you think a normal, everyday person can do about data centers in their community?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tMy knowledge is mostly based in Maryland, but I definitely have friends that are organizing across the country. People are going to hearings and making their displeasure known. People are organizing ballot referendums, like they did in Frederick County. People are writing letters to the editor. People are doing it across the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tThe only other thing that I think would help that I don&#8217;t currently see is like, OK, this is the exact amount of money you want to give for the data center. This is what we want to do with that X billion dollars instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>What would you want for your district with the money that\u2019s currently going towards data centers?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI want more funding for our schools, which are very overcrowded. I want more funding for libraries, which I believe have become these beautiful centers of resistance and gathering. They\u2019re one of the last places we can be together without spending any money. There&#8217;s immigration clinics at the library in Maryland. You can get free Narcan at the library in Frederick County and in Washington County. Rec centers are something I hear a lot from folks, because a lot of people work two jobs and it would be really nice if kids had somewhere other than the library or in addition to the library to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tIt&#8217;s really important that we are spending our money on things that are making our lives better, as opposed to spending our money on tax breaks for Big Tech building data centers that only enrich them, or waging war in Iran.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI think people are really just sort of fed up. Why does it have to be so hard here?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\t<strong>Have you heard from anyone else who&#8217;s currently in Congress right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tA lot of federal workers have been in really close contact with current electeds in the last 18 months, and you probably won&#8217;t be surprised by the names. There&#8217;s something called the Federal Unionist Network, it&#8217;s a relatively new nonprofit that is represented by federal workers in unions that are trying to radicalize their local unions and push for more radical change. There are a whole bunch of us [running for office].&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p\n\t\tclass=\"paragraph larva \/\/ lrv-u-line-height-copy  lrv-a-font-body-l   \"\n>\n\tI guess what I see running for office is more about how do we address the crises we face? It\u2019s just one way to grab the mic.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI just have alarm bells going off in my head,\u201d says former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau staffer Alexis Goldstein<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":1235572400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"override_post_title":"","override_post_excerpt":"","authors":["jack-crosbie"],"contributors":[],"styled_by":[],"_image_credit":"","_wp_attachment_image_alt":"","pmc_selected_wwd_video_media":"","pmc_top_video_source":"","pmc_top_video_duration":"","wwd_top_video_source":"","wwd_top_video_duration":"","pmc_selected_featured_media":"","pmc_selected_video_media":"","pmc_selected_variety_video_media":"","variety_top_video_source":"","variety_top_video_duration":"","pmc_featured_media_has_alt_text":true,"_pmc_featured_animated_media_id":0,"_pmc_featured_video_override_data":"","_pmc_featured_video_override_url":"","_pmc_featured_video_response_data":"","pmc-gallery-linked-gallery":{},"pmc_list_item_description":"","primary_category":"","primary_vertical":"","_mt_pmc_exclude_from_seo":"","_pmc_opengraph_title":"","_pmc_opengraph_description":"","categories":26,"subcategories":27,"pmc-gallery":[],"pmc-imdb-id":"","pmc-review-type":"","pmc-review-rating":"","pmc-review-rating-out-of":"","pmc-review-snippet":"","pmc-review-title":"","pmc-review-canonical-link":"","pmc-theatrical-release-date":0,"pmc-director":"","pmc-review-image_attachment_id":0,"thr_post_headlines":"","_variety-sub-heading":"","mt_seo_title":"Alexis 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