What made Lake County, Indiana, the place where you focused?

Yeah.

I mean, maybe zooming out just for a second to Indiana as a whole, 'cause I think the state itself is really interesting.

It's gone almost overnight from really not being a data center hotspot to having, depending on who you ask, between, like, 35 and 50 proposed data centers in the state, and the state itself has done a lot of work to kind of incentivize, um, development.

And Lake County, as you said, it's kind of in the northwestern part of the state, and I was originally interested because there was this labor dispute between United Steelworkers and, um, a local utility about whether contract workers or union workers would be used to build infrastructure to support data centers.

But then as I started talking to folks there and kind of getting under some of the layers, I realized that so many of the narratives around AI and around energy that are playing out all around the country are, uh, kind of coming into conflict or, um, converging in this one kind of rural small part of the county, um, where there's been pushback against this data center project.

So really high electricity prices, concerns about kind of upheaval to an agricultural way of life, um, conflict with the utility, debate about whether local counties should regulate data centers or the state should do it.

No.

What does that mean? Characterize the mood right now.

Before I do that, I wanna give a quick caveat, which is that everyone expected a significant ideological shift, and in many cases people expected that their work and some programs would initially be paused as the new administration came to pick up speed.

That said, I do think there are two main things that have made this transition, this period particularly unprecedented, and Katharine and Jigar have set the scene for this really well.

The first is the complete chaos when it came to communication and coordination both across the agency and with external stakeholders.

So, people in various offices are still to this week telling me that hour to hour the instructions that they're getting from around the agency are different on what to say to applicants and awardees, when to say it, who they should be communicating with, and what's happening to these projects moving forward.

And that confusion and chaos goes beyond just folks working in these offices to the companies that were seeking funding, had been promised funding, had signed contracts, conditional awards, who in most cases were sort of left in the dark.

I talked to companies who said, "We're calling every week.

Maeve, I'm sure there's a lotta people you talk to who are sad to not have jobs, but what are they telling you about the, um, long-term lack of strategy, the long-term consequences?