LoaderSave StorySave this storyCommentLoaderSave StorySave this storyThe US government is quietly planning to allow a rule outlining the standards for federal data center usage and operations, known as the Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA), to expire, according to sources who spoke to WIRED. Neither Congress nor the Trump administration appears to be making significant moves to protect or extend the rule, or put alternate plans in place.
Data centers have become a hot-button issue in recent months, as the tech industry goes all in on artificial intelligence and the infrastructure needed to power it. According to a Gallup poll from May, more than 70 percent of Americans oppose the construction of data centers, the energy- and water-intensive buildings that power the AI boom, in their communities. From Utah to Georgia, residents across the political spectrum have united to voice their resistance to the data center build-out.
Despite the public backlash, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the government agency that sets guidance for how agencies implement policies in line with the president’s agenda, is not providing any plans for how federal agencies should manage the sunset or continue to implement reporting beyond the timeline of the law. This, current and former workers at OMB and the General Services Administration (GSA) say, signals that the Trump administration is set to take an even more hands-off approach to data center oversight and regulation.
A replacement for the requirements laid out in FDCEA would, in other administrations, have been in the works for months ahead of its expiration. An employee with the GSA, the agency that oversees the government’s IT services and helps to implement the FDCEA, says that the lack of any sort of plan is highly uncommon. The employee spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“Never in the history of data center policies has a policy expired without another one having been painstakingly worked on for three years behind the scenes,” says the GSA employee. “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 fare share, but they haven’t explained how they’ll do that.”
As the federal government continues to push agencies to adopt AI tools, demand for data centers and other technical infrastructure is only set to grow. The Electric Power Research Institute, a nonpartisan research organization, estimates that by 2030, data centers could be consuming at least 9 percent of electricity in the US.
WIRED reached out to the offices of three senators who originally sponsored the FDCEA about what, if any, plans there are to replace or renew the law.
There has been a burst of data-center-related legislation introduced in Congress this year, from bills that mandate environmental reviews of data centers to bills designed to protect local moratoriums. However, it appears that none of these bills are designed to address the requirements in FDCEA, nor do they specifically address federally run or leased data centers.
“Data centers across the country house critical and sensitive information, and we need to ensure they are protected from increased cyber threats and natural disasters,” Senator Jacky Rosen, who sponsored FDCEA when it was passed in 2023, told WIRED in an emailed statement. “My team and I are aware that the Federal Data Center Enhancement Act is set to sunset this fall and are looking at all options to ensure Americans’ personal information housed in data centers continue to be secure.” Rosen’s office, however, would not elaborate on what those plans are.
A search of reginfo.gov, the OMB website that contains reports on the president’s Unified Agenda, also turns up nothing for the FDCEA.
The White House did not respond to requests for comment. A GSA spokesperson referred WIRED to OMB, a spokesperson for which said it will fulfill all statutory requirements.
During then president Barack Obama’s first term, the administration began a multiyear effort to monitor and clean up agency data centers, including efforts to retire certain data centers and move their information to cloud-based services. A landmark piece of legislation passed in 2014 to reform information technology across the government included an initiative to consolidate and more closely monitor data centers. Federal agencies were given targets to meet that would help save money, secure data, and monitor energy usage. The FDCEA, passed in 2023, is a continuation of many of those efforts.
“An extraordinary effort has been put into this over many years,” Clare Martorana, the federal chief information officer in the Biden administration, tells WIRED. “An enormous amount of this ecosystem was cleaned up, and the government saved billions of dollars.”
Current and former federal workers who spoke to WIRED say that regulations like FDCEA and its predecessors were constructed for a different world: one which focused on resiliency, sustainability, cost savings. The coming age of AI, they say, dictates a need for a different strategy around the federal government’s involvement in data center construction. The federal government is the largest employer in the country, and regulations around how and why data centers are built to house federal data are even more crucial to the national data center build-out—especially when it comes to water and energy use.
Doing away with FDCEA would remove guardrails for federal agencies looking to either update their existing data centers or build new ones. A crucial guardrail is energy efficiency: The OMB, in compliance with the FDCEA, requires agencies to get a data center energy specialist to recommend how to build the most energy-efficient design, and consider water use in the designs. (It also requires agencies to report on the sustainability of offsite contractor data centers.) Doing away with FDCEA would get rid of crucial requirements mandating that agencies consider how federal data centers or contractors use energy and water.
Unlike earlier regulations, the FDCEA did not come with funding to help agencies comply with the law, meaning that every agency’s chief information office (CIO) had to manage to find the money somewhere to comply. Without the pressure to do so from the law and OMB, Matt Triner, founder of Hunter Strategy, a Washington, DC-based IT consulting company, says, “that effectively means to me that they're giving a lot more discretion to CIOs and what they emphasize in their reporting.” But differences in reporting across agencies, Triner says, can also lead to errors.
And though Congress passed the FDCEA, Triner says that the administration “absolutely could have issued this with OMB memoranda and circulars. That is how most at least executive agency reporting is done.”
The administration has also sunset public federal IT monitoring metrics, like the Federal IT Dashboard, which includes information on government contracts and spending on data centers and cloud services. This means that any future government contracts with private sector companies for data center usage could be harder to track and identify.
“They’re going to stop collecting IT data,” says the GSA employee. “That’s a feature, not a bug.”
Lack of transparency, says Triner, could also impact cybersecurity for federal data centers. While FDCEA’s expiry would not necessarily decrease cybersecurity requirements, the reduction in reporting requirements means that there would be less visibility to understand what measures have been put into place, or what problems are or are not being addressed. “Visibility is a big part of security, and you're stripping away a lot of tools that were used to make sure that it happens,” he says.
The federal government’s wholehearted support of data center build-outs began early on in President Donald Trump’s second term. In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order intended to throw the weight of the federal government behind the US data center build-out, ordering various agencies to find ways to “utilize federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers.”
July’s executive order also revokes a late Biden-era executive order to “[advance] United States Leadership in Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure.” That executive order contained provisions meant to encourage the development of clean energy, including on federal land to power data centers built there, and required data center builders to make sustainability plans for water and energy use.
Sources tell WIRED that the move from OMB to let these regulations sunset is meant to be in keeping with the spirit of the executive order signed in July.
“By letting this expire, OMB is going to enter into this new age of prioritizing rapid AI development over any sort of centralized control or rigorous standards,” says the GSA employee. “In the absence of a new policy from OMB, [GSA] has no directive or measurable standards with which to point agencies towards managing data centers efficiently.”
