The Wall Street Journal reported on 20 October 2026 that former officials from the Trump, Biden, Obama and other past administrations, among them Mike Pompeo, Janet Yellen, Jake Sullivan and Stephen Miran, signed a letter warning that the US is at risk of losing a technological and industrial race with China unless it adopts a sweeping energy-permitting bill.
The Senate legislation the officials are pushing “mandates that data centers pay for all of their associated transmission costs”, according to the WSJ, which says the letter was organized by Arnab Datta of the Institute for Progress.
Business Pill · GRID COST ALLOCATION
A one-minute explainer of grid cost allocation: who pays for a new power line as electricity demand grows. It teaches the general idea only and says nothing about any person or bill in this story.
The key insight: As we read it, the letter shifts the argument over AI power from cost to time: its own line is that US advantages “matter less” when the infrastructure to power a factory takes five, ten or fifteen years to plan and complete.
The officials said the US isn’t building energy infrastructure fast enough to remain globally competitive, in a letter to be sent on Tuesday to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the WSJ reports.
The WSJ names Pompeo as former secretary of state in the first Trump administration, Yellen as Biden-era Treasury secretary and Miran as a former Federal Reserve governor appointed by President Trump. It says Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, is also a signatory.
The letter’s central line, as the WSJ quotes it: “While the United States retains enormous advantages in technology, capital markets, attracting the world’s talent, entrepreneurship, and natural resources, those advantages matter less if a company cannot build a factory quickly enough to reach market or if the infrastructure required to power it takes five, ten, or fifteen years to plan and complete.”
The letter also notes that China has built more high-voltage transmission in the past 15 years than in the entirety of US history, according to the WSJ.
The WSJ says the letter was organized by Arnab Datta, director of policy implementation at the Institute for Progress, a think tank in Washington.
The same 15 years, two outcomes, as the former officials’ letter puts it: in the US, the power infrastructure for a new factory can take “five, ten, or fifteen years to plan and complete”; China, the letter notes, built more high-voltage transmission in the past 15 years than in the entirety of US history. Each icon is one year. A coalition of 185 groups opposes the Senate bill. Source: WSJ, 20 October 2026.
What Was Posted on X
Ex-officials from the Trump, Biden and Obama administrations are warning the U.S. is at risk of losing a technological and industrial race with Chinaโunless it adopts a major energy-permitting bill https://on.wsj.com/4jripVV
The WSJ’s politics account posted its exclusive on X at 10:34 UTC on 20 October 2026: former officials from the Trump, Biden and Obama administrations warning that the US is at risk of losing a technological and industrial race with China unless it adopts a major energy-permitting bill. The names, quotes and bill details in this piece come from that WSJ report.
WSJ reports that former senior U.S. officials including Mike Pompeo, Janet Yellen, Jake Sullivan and Stephen Miran have signed a letter warning Congress that the U.S. risks losing the AI and semiconductor race to China unless it dramatically speeds up construction of energy infrastructure.
The letter says major power infrastructure can take 5, 10 or even 15 years to plan and complete. China has built more high-voltage transmission in the past 15 years than the U.S. has built in its entire history.
The officials are urging Congress to pass sweeping energy-permitting legislation, arguing that the power needed for AI, semiconductors and other advanced industries cannot wait on decade-long infrastructure timelines.
The proposal would also require data centers to cover their associated transmission costs.
@choblin29 summarised the WSJ report on X at 15:10 UTC on 20 October 2026, highlighting the letter’s line that major power infrastructure can take 5, 10 or even 15 years to plan and complete, and the bill’s requirement that data centers cover their associated transmission costs. Both points match the WSJ’s text.
What the Bill Would Do
The Senate announced the legislation last month, according to the WSJ. It proposes an overhaul of environmental rules, introduces changes aimed at strengthening the electric grid and mandates that data centers pay for all of their associated transmission costs, the WSJ reports.
Trade groups for the oil-and-gas and renewable-energy industries have praised the bill, the WSJ says, and BP Chief Executive Meg O’Neill said it would help unlock the full potential of American energy and strengthen domestic energy security.
What the Signatories Said
Miran told the WSJ in an interview: “If we don’t have abundant cheap energy it’s just too expensive to manufacture here, and we’d be ceding a massive advantage to our competitors and adversaries.”
Sullivan said China would keep building its clean-energy infrastructure and advanced industrial capacity whether or not Congress passes the bill, according to the WSJ. “They’re not waiting around,” he said.
Jason Furman, Obama’s chief economist from 2013 to 2017, is among the former officials the WSJ describes as pushing for a swift adoption of the bill. “We wanted to throw a lot of money at the problem, and as we researched it, we realized that the problem was permitting, not money,” he told the paper.
Who Opposes It
A coalition of 185 community, labor, climate and environmental-justice organizations urged congressional leaders last week to oppose the bill, saying it would gut environmental safeguards and provide a golden ticket to huge AI data centers and tech billionaires, the WSJ reports.
“We can’t let this trillion-dollar industry keep ravaging neighborhoods and making Americans pay more for their electricity,” said Camden Weber, senior climate and energy policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity, according to the WSJ.
The WSJ says the November midterm election is teeing up a fight over the bill’s future, with some lawmakers wanting to delay any legislation until a new Congress sits. Rep. Jared Huffman, ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, said after the bill was introduced that “folding our hand now or in the lame duck makes no sense when we can keep working on this.”
Connecting the Coverage
The letter’s organizer, Arnab Datta, works at the Institute for Progress, which published “How to Increase America’s AI Lead Over China” on 19 October 2026. That report estimates the US AI lead at about 6.5 months; our piece on the IFP report set out its policy levers.
The power argument also runs through our piece on Goldman Sachs’ report, which put the AI build-out at $7.6 trillion and named power as the bottleneck. In our follow-up on AI’s local limits, we reported that Goldman counts 86 projects canceled or extensively delayed since January 2026, 76 of them linked to local opposition.
Earlier today we also covered Amazon’s plan to invest more than €16 billion in Germany in 2027; our piece on Amazon’s plan notes that €4.8 billion of it is for AWS.
The Structural Read
As we read it, the coalition is the notable part: the WSJ lists signatories from the first Trump administration, the Biden administration and the Fed, with an Obama-era economist among the officials it says are pushing for the bill.
As we read it, the data-center provision is where the fight concentrates: the WSJ says the bill mandates data centers pay all of their associated transmission costs, while 185 opposing groups describe it as a golden ticket to huge AI data centers.
As we read it, the timing is the open variable: the WSJ says the midterm election is teeing up a fight over the bill, and Huffman argues against folding in the lame duck.
Jake Sullivan, to the WSJ
“They’re not waiting around”
Three Implications
A LETTER TO FOUR LEADERS The WSJ says the letter goes to Thune, Johnson, Schumer and Jeffries and was organized by Arnab Datta of the Institute for Progress.
DATA CENTERS PAY FOR LINES The WSJ says the Senate bill mandates that data centers pay for all of their associated transmission costs.
185 GROUPS OPPOSED The WSJ reports that 185 community, labor, climate and environmental-justice organizations urged congressional leaders to oppose the bill.
The framework says “The structural bottleneck isn’t computing, it’s electrons.”
As we read it, the former officials’ letter makes the same point from the policy side: the constraint it names is the time to plan and build energy infrastructure. The framework was published in December 2025 and does not discuss this letter.
What Is Not Established
We read the WSJ’s report in full through its syndicated copy. The letter itself was not published on the Institute for Progress’s site when we checked on 20 October 2026, and the WSJ names only some of the signatories, so the full list is not established here.
The WSJ does not give the bill’s name or a vote date, and it does not say whether Congress will act before the new Congress is seated.
Business Engineer Framework
The State of AI Data Centers
A Business Engineer framework on the gigawatt-scale AI data center buildout and the power and grid limits underneath it.
Former officials from the Trump, Biden and Obama administrations signed a letter, organized by Arnab Datta of the Institute for Progress, urging Congress to pass a Senate energy-permitting bill that the WSJ says mandates data centers pay all of their associated transmission costs. A coalition of 185 groups opposes the bill, and the WSJ says the midterm election is teeing up a fight over its future.
A note on sourcing. This piece is built on the Wall Street Journal’s 20 October 2026 report by Benoît Morenne, read in full through its syndicated copy, the WSJ’s post on X, and a post by @choblin29 that pointed us to the story, plus our own earlier pieces. We have not seen the letter itself. Nothing here is financial, legal or investment advice.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
Scroll to Top
Discover more from FourWeekMBA
Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.
