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Former California CISO reflects on cyber’s importance in state government

Chris Teale — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

After nearly 20 years working in California state agencies and having served as the state’s longest-tenured chief information security officer, Vitaliy Panych is starting a new chapter in his career.

Panych recently joined technology company World Wide Technology as senior cybersecurity and risk advisor, having led the development of Cal-Secure, the state's first multi-year cybersecurity roadmap, and provided information security oversight and services for more than 140 executive branch entities as well as cities, counties, special districts, schools and more.

It’s been quite a journey for Panych, who said he joined WWT after being impressed with the “culture” of the company and its “deep bench of expertise” on various technology issues, whether it be cybersecurity, artificial intelligence or modernization.

Panych recently sat down with Route Fifty to reflect on his career in state government and the challenges ahead.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

ROUTE FIFTY: How would you say that the government's relationship with technology has evolved?

VITALIY PANYCH: At a massive scale, needless to say, technology's being used to issue benefits, facilitate permitting, enable public safety. Technology is literally embedded into all of our daily lives, and embedded into every mission set and business operation within state government. That's a good thing. It certainly adds a considerable amount of efficiency in how government does business.

However, there's definitely risk that needs to be balanced, that needs to be managed. Suffice to say, my mission when I first started in government, my goal or agenda, was I wanted to make everybody a risk-managed security practitioner, or a risk practitioner.

What that means is knowing what the upsides are when you adopt an attack surface or a level of technology that obviously can and will be abused, and then what are the downsides, and being able to objectively quantify that. That's what I've been doing over the past year, and that's what my role was within state government as the California CISO. I played that CISO role to about 140 different agencies and helped them shape their security programs, helped them convey those security programs where it makes sense in how you measure risk, where is it reasonable to handle that risk, and then provide pathways and roadmaps to help mitigate that risk.

It's not only me by myself. I relied on really talented security practitioners within the state that would make any commercial, board-level member for the dollar spent be really impressed because, obviously, public servants are underpaid, always constrained, but they certainly do a lot to scale risk management and mitigation practices and translate them into operations.

When I first started being the CISO, we developed and released this Cal-Secure roadmap, which is a universal roadmap applicable within 140 of our state agencies, and then it also eventually prevailed over time into a lot of our partner public sector organizations. California is pretty big, too: 140 different executive branch agencies, 500 cities, 58 counties, about 1,000 school districts, 2,500 special districts. Those could be water utilities, those could be municipal or regional transit areas.

There's a big ecosystem where organizations work with each other, so it needs a common framework, a common taxonomy to bridge what we do and how we operate as a common operating model between the state and local services. I was really proud to get that released, and we also released last month a version two of that. Version two of that encompasses a lot of risk management tactics and mitigation strategies around AI, which is top of mind for everybody these days.

ROUTE FIFTY: I know it's not all on your shoulders when you're the CISO of California, but you've got all these cities and state agencies and special districts, and you've always got someone trying to get in: hackers and nation-states. What's that like on a day-to-day basis?

PANYCH: Back seven or so years ago, we realized there was even back then quite a significant intake and amount of suspected cyber incidents and breaches and events.

So, we built up what we call the California Cybersecurity Integration Center, which is really intended to be the backstop for those decentralized organizations that are not under our authority, and really provide them some services, such as coordination of incident response, escalation coordination within incident response [and] collaboration with threat intelligence sharing. We have a big net from our Security Operations Center. We receive quite a bit of volume and day-to-day telemetry around gaps, vulnerabilities, threats and indicators of compromise.

We get an opportunity to use that net of things that we capture and provide actionable operational telemetry that those downstream organizations can react to. But then, over time, we've evolved the CSIC and some of the California Department of Technology services to be more proactive, like conducting more proactive risk assessments, continuous control validation mechanisms. I always like to say it's one thing to put in a security defense mechanism and a control at a point in time, but that needs to be continuously validated and tested, because the threat actors, their cadence literally evolves day-to-day, minute-by-minute. It's not evolving on a particular set of a budget cycle. Continually testing those defense mechanisms is of the utmost imperative, and that was of the utmost imperative for California.

ROUTE FIFTY: The role of the CISO, have you found that it's still a very techy, hands-on-keyboards role? Or is it a lot more about managing relationships now? How has it changed?

PANYCH: It certainly has evolved, and the role of the CISO does need to be evolved, not just from a techy perspective. I like to think of it as akin to a medical director at a hospital. The medical director at a hospital was a surgeon, who did the technical work of conducting delivery of a medical exercise. You still need to be aware of the context of what's going on to make things work, but also, you're in a position of managing a program, managing risk, which is super pertinent to the business, or as we so like to say in state government, to the program areas.

You do have to be that influencer, if you will, to convince the board or the legislature, the governor's office, to think of risk as it matters in their terms. What does it matter? Why and how does it matter to the constituent, to a given program, whether it means facilitating quality of health to a public health organization, or receiving a benefit? You really do need to be that influencer, at the same time as knowing the context around the technicalities of cyber and how that all bridges together.

ROUTE FIFTY: How do you balance cybersecurity and risk management, with the push to modernize service delivery and be more reliant on technology? How do you navigate that tightrope?

PANYCH: Earlier on, establishing close relationships with the legislators, the stakeholders at the appointed level, at the department levels. Every organization has an appointed director. Establishing those relationships and figuring out what mission, what statutory obligation are they in the business of fulfilling, and then we walk back from there in how we align our operators on the ground to support that mission.

That mission could be purely from, for example, a resiliency availability perspective. If resiliency or availability suffers a gap in terms of a blip or a major outage, what exactly does that mean to the business? Or, for example, if an organization is running an old, legacy 20-year-old mainframe, what workforce risks are we inheriting, or are we looking at a year or two down the line? The operators that support critical mainframe applications or any other legacy applications, the workforce is retiring, moving on. Is that system application supportable with the given staff?

We're managing all facets of risk, not just technical debt, but also workforce risk, public perception, and what does the public think about usability of a given benefit-based system, so working with our user experience teams as well to make sure we inherit or provide security controls that are conducive to that without impacting the user experience of a given application.

It all flows together, all facets of risk, including legal liabilities. Legal liability is another facet of risk. Then we, from a statewide perspective, over the last eight years, we've evolved a set of security control services where we can provide security control services on demand, and not just technical services.

I established a virtual CISO service, so that's an advisory service to meet the gap of workforce shortages and gaps where we can assign or align a resource on demand for a short-term, medium-term risk mitigation, risk buy-down project. Our mantra has always been aligning our resources to meet the people where they are.

ROUTE FIFTY: From a cybersecurity perspective, how big a game changer could AI be, for better or for worse?

PANYCH: In my personal opinion, AI in the long term definitely is a force for good. There will be difficulties in the interim as it gets adopted, and a lot of industry standards are being evolved as we start to operationalize them.

For example, putting in a set of guardrails for a specific use case, what exactly does it mean to a chatbot? What does it mean to an attack surface that's being used to service your business? In the short term, we're already seeing increases in mass efficiencies. I ran the Security Operations Center, and using AI tactics and automation, we reduced our alert triage timeframes by 98%.

What that means is we're able to have a lens in triaging and seeing more threats and higher fidelity outcomes of threats and being able to bring them to remediation. We're ultimately doing more work for the investment that we have.

There are certainly a lot of opportunities and enhancements that are yet to be realized in securing source code, securing software. AI is being incredibly useful in finding bugs at a faster cadence than a human can, and providing actionable recommendations on the fly. It's certainly already in the operational space being used for far greater multipliers of efficiency than we can operate with with an existing bench. I'm definitely optimistic.

ROUTE FIFTY: When you reflect on your time in state government, what were some of the biggest lessons that you would want to impart?

PANYCH: My big recommendation is to figure out how to scale security. Build up a security service and be able to serve one-to-many, because we are, at the end of the day as security practitioners, constrained and understaffed. Using some of these automation mechanisms to be a force multiplier, and working with the vendor and partner community to help them realize how they could service the public sector a lot more efficiently.

ROUTE FIFTY: What are the biggest challenges ahead, particularly when you think about state and local governments? What are the big concerns on the horizon in the next 12 to 18 months?

PANYCH: With the AI-accelerated attacks that we're already experiencing and seeing, government organizations are well on their way in using AI for business transformation, but the threat actors living in the threat landscape are using AI to make their phishing lures a lot more realistic and more efficient.

That really puts it on a lot of these cyber-underserved organizations to perform — and perform at a lot faster pace and cadence — and do the basics that everybody should be doing, such as patch management, continuous threat exposure management, asset inventory. Not at a cadence of a regular monthly patch cycle or monthly change control cycle, but it's really becoming a matter of real-time, days and minutes, as we've seen certain attacks happen, and being able to triage and mitigate or close those gaps in more in a continuous real-time fashion.

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Flock Safety tightens safeguards as states, cities question surveillance network

Amanda Watford, Stateline — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Stateline.

Flock Safety is tightening privacy and oversight controls for its nationwide network of automated license plate readers as more communities pull back from the technology and lawmakers across the political spectrum push for new restrictions.

The company announced Thursday that it will recommend that police agencies retain license plate reader data for seven days, down from 30, while adding tools to restrict data sharing between agencies and detect potentially abusive searches. Flock also plans to require law enforcement users to associate searches with case codes and automatically suspend users whose activity is flagged as abnormal.

The changes come amid growing scrutiny of a surveillance network that Flock says has more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states and serves thousands of law enforcement agencies and communities.

The cameras photograph passing vehicles and record information including license plates, vehicle characteristics, location and time. Police can search the resulting data during investigations, sometimes across jurisdictional lines.

More than 50 agencies or communities have canceled, suspended or rejected a Flock contract or deactivated their cameras since the beginning of 2026, according to DeFlock, a grassroots group that tracks license plate reader deployments. Cameras have also been vandalized in communities around the country.

Recent incidents involving police officers accused of using Flock to track friends, relatives and romantic partners have added to concerns about how the data can be accessed and shared. The technology also has been criticized after inaccurate license plate information contributed to wrongful police stops, arrests and detentions.

Flock says the new measures will give communities greater control over their data while strengthening safeguards against misuse.

“These changes, like I said, are the next chapter of a long book I hope to write on how we build a better version of America that’s both safer, protects our privacy and holds those who have power accountable,” Flock Safety co-founder and CEO Garrett Langley said in a video statement.

But civil liberties advocates say some of the safeguards have been tried before and question whether the company’s changes address broader concerns about a system that can create a record of people’s movements even when they are not suspected of a crime.

States have taken different approaches to regulating technologies used in policing, including artificial intelligence, facial recognition, drones and automated license plate readers. More than a dozen states have enacted laws governing such technologies, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but there is no consistent national framework for their use.

Strengthening Privacy and Accountability

Flock’s seven-day retention recommendation is one of its most significant changes.

When the company launched nine years ago, it set 30 days as the default recommendation, while allowing communities to choose shorter or longer periods.

For investigations that require older information, Flock is introducing “Evidence Mode,” which will allow detectives to preserve specific license plate data as evidence in an active case.

The change does not automatically apply to existing customers, which can keep their current retention policies. Communities also will continue to choose their own retention periods.

The American Civil Liberties Union called the shorter retention period a potential step forward but said its impact will depend on how the new mode works. In a statement, the group recommended a 48-hour retention period and warned that if searches cause data to be preserved, the new system could allow significant amounts of location information to remain available longer than seven days.

Flock also is giving communities more control over which outside agencies can search their cameras. Under the new “offense filtering” system, a community could allow another agency to search its cameras for specific crimes or offenses and block searches related to immigration enforcement, for example.

Flock also will require all law enforcement customers to adopt its audit assistance tool by the end of the year. The system looks for unusual search activity and flags it for administrator review. Flock plans to automatically suspend users whose activity meets certain criteria for abnormal behavior while their access is reviewed.

The company also will require case codes for law enforcement searches by the end of the year. Officers can bypass the requirement during emergencies, but those searches also will be flagged for review.

Police Misuse and Erroneous Alerts

Flock’s new controls build on safeguards the company has introduced in recent years, including electronic audit logs and requirements that users provide a reason for searches.

The ACLU, in its statement, said some of those earlier safeguards were ineffective. The group pointed to cases in which officers circumvented search-purpose restrictions by entering vague or meaningless explanations before Flock replaced a free-text field with a list of approved search reasons.

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that nearly 50 police officers had been charged or accused of using Flock cameras for unauthorized purposes, many involving attempts to track current or former romantic partners or family members.

In Savannah, Georgia, four police officers and two civilian employees were fired last week after a department investigation found searches involving personal acquaintances and family members, according to a news release. The investigation also found that an officer had allowed an outside law enforcement agency to access Savannah’s Flock system.

The activity was identified using Flock’s audit assistance tool. All six cases were referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for independent criminal investigations.

The technology has also drawn scrutiny when information in the system is inaccurate or outdated.

In Wisconsin, a woman was pulled over at gunpoint earlier this month after a Flock camera incorrectly flagged her vehicle as being involved in a homicide. Brookfield police stopped Amber Newell on Interstate 94 after receiving the alert, but Milwaukee police told officers they no longer needed the vehicle or its occupants. Newell was released.

Milwaukee police later said the incident was caused by an employee’s failure to remove an outdated wanted-vehicle alert from the Flock system, rather than an error by Flock itself. Newell said she had also been stopped at gunpoint earlier that week and was afraid to drive afterward.

In its announcement, Flock said its alerts are intended to be investigative leads rather than conclusions and that officers should visually confirm a vehicle’s license plate before taking action. The company said its system produces fewer than nine human-reported errors for every 1 million alerts.

Bipartisan Interest

A bipartisan group of Pennsylvania lawmakers announced Monday that they plan to introduce legislation establishing statewide privacy and accountability requirements for automated license plate readers, including Flock cameras.

The proposal would establish rules governing access to the data, documented reasons for searches, audit trails, data retention and transparency. It also would create civil penalties for unauthorized access, use or disclosure and allow people harmed by misuse to bring civil suits.

“Technology that can help keep our communities safe should never become a tool for stalking or abuse,” Democratic state Rep. Jennifer O’Mara said in a statement announcing the proposal.

Republicans in Congress also have introduced or plan to introduce at least two proposals aimed at restricting automated surveillance technology. One would restrict federal agencies from purchasing or using certain automated surveillance technology, while the other would bar state and local police from using federal funds to acquire automated license plate reader systems.

Last month, 15 Democratic lawmakers in Michigan sent a letter to the state Department of Transportation to end an agreement allowing federal agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol and Homeland Security Investigations, to install surveillance technology on state property. The lawmakers argued that automated license plate readers infringe on residents’ constitutional rights.

The West Virginia House Democratic Caucus also released a statement last month opposing Flock cameras and said it is monitoring canceled contracts and lawsuits involving the technology.

Abandoning the Technology

Some local governments are going further by ending their relationships with Flock altogether.

DeFlock’s tracker lists dozens of communities that have canceled contracts, deactivated cameras or rejected proposals since 2021.

More than 50 agencies or communities have taken one of those steps since the beginning of 2026.

Several communities in Rhode Island and Nebraska have acted this month, with city leaders voting to cancel contracts or uninstall cameras.

Earlier this month, the Burnet County Sheriff’s Office in Texas announced that it had removed all fixed Flock cameras after repeated vandalism damaged the equipment. The cameras were provided by the Heart of Texas Auto Theft Task Force, a multi-agency, multijurisdictional task force in Central Texas. The sheriff’s office has initiated criminal cases, but there are currently no suspects, according to a news release.

The debate over this technology is likely to continue through the rest of the year and into 2027, when more state legislatures return to session. That could bring additional proposals to regulate artificial intelligence tools used in policing, as well as how license plate reader data is collected, retained, shared and used.

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Blue states seek to stop DHS from accessing commercial driver's license database

Christian Robles — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

A group of 22 states is asking a federal court to invalidate a subpoena that would give the Department of Homeland Security access to about 17 million commercial driver's license records.

The coalition argues DHS has no legal authority to demand the truck drivers’ license records and would jeopardize drivers’ privacy if they receive them, according to a lawsuit filed Thursday. The group also alleges the demand is part of a pattern of DHS seeking personally identifiable records to build a “nationwide surveillance system.”

“Once again, the Trump administration is trying to unlawfully seize Marylanders' personal data with no legitimate purpose, no safeguards to protect it, and no warning to the public or consultation with the states,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown in a press release.

The administration previously sought to turn over Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other state data to immigration enforcement authorities.

The federal government is seeking data going back five years from the Commercial Drivers’ License Information System, or CDLIS — including names, dates of birth, license numbers and Social Security numbers — according to the lawsuit filed in the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, first asked the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, or AAMVA, for the commercial drivers’ data on June 25, the lawsuit says. The AAMVA raised concerns with the request in a June 30 letter, noting that the FMCSA is not entitled to CDLIS records and it must adhere to U.S. privacy laws.

At an in-person July 23 meeting, FMCSA allegedly threatened to withhold all of AAMVA’s federal grants and contracts and file litigation if it did not inform the Department of Transportation by the next day whether it would hand over CDLIS records, the lawsuit says. The next day, the association told FMCSA it would disclose requested information by or around August 17, the filing continued.

But several days later, DHS served a subpoena asking for the same CDLIS records as FMCSA. That subpoena was withdrawn, but a new one was issued on Tuesday and gave AAMVA until this Monday to respond, according to a court filing.

On Friday, a federal judge ordered an administrative stay, punting the deadline for AAMVA to respond to DHS’ demand to an unknown date. The judge also scheduled a hearing on whether to invalidate the subpoena for this coming Thursday.

The latest subpoena implies DHS is seeking CDLIS data to investigate “illegal practices in commercial driver’s license schools” and conduct immigration enforcement.

“It is incredibly dangerous for illegal aliens, who often don’t know our traffic laws or even English, to be operating vehicles on America’s roads," DHS said in a statement. "These sanctuary politicians must stop giving illegal aliens driver’s licenses before another American gets killed."

AAMVA did not return a request for comment by publication.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to include a statement from DHS.

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Serving military-connected students is a strategic imperative for higher education

Ruth Bauer and Chris Tilghman — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

Higher education is entering a period of significant demographic change. The long-anticipated decline in traditional college-aged students is now well-underway, forcing institutions to rethink where future students will come from. Among those audiences are the hundreds of thousands of military-connected learners — veterans, active-duty service members and their families.

This disconnect is striking given the deep and longstanding relationship between higher education and the military. From the original GI Bill, which helped expand and democratize American higher education, to today’s Post-9/11 GI Bill and Yellow Ribbon Program, the two systems have long been intertwined.

Colleges and universities have helped prepare service members for civilian life, while military-affiliated students have brought maturity, leadership and purpose to campuses across the country. In many ways, this partnership has shaped both the modern military and the modern university system.

Despite this shared history, the relationship has not kept pace with today’s realities. Too often, institutions treat military learners as an administrative category rather than a critical population requiring intentional design — and support. If higher education is to meet the moment, it must move beyond processing benefits and toward building coordinated systems of support — ones that connect academic pathways, career outcomes and a genuine sense of belonging.

Increasingly, it’s become clear that military-connected learners cannot — and should not be — treated as a niche audience for higher education, and instead viewed as part of its core. There are now more than 800,000 active-duty, National Guard, reserve and veteran learners enrolled in college. VA education programs, meanwhile, benefit about 900,000 people each year.

These learners include first-time students, working adults, parents and mid-career professionals. Many bring leadership experience, persistence and a strong sense of purpose to their education — all qualities any college would say it values in its student body.

More than half of those serving say that educational benefits are a primary reason they chose to enter military service, just one-third have a bachelor’s degree. Nonetheless, institutions must treat military learners as a strategic priority, not a population in need of accommodation, which is a win-win for institutions and the country.

Yet institutional support for military-connected students is often narrow and fragmented. Military-connected learners often interact with higher education through systems not designed for them. They are more likely to enter college later in life, enroll part-time, transfer between institutions, or weave in and out of enrollment due to deployments, relocations, and work and family obligations.

At many colleges, serving this population begins and ends with admissions and processing benefits paperwork. After that, students are largely left to navigate the institution independently unless they actively seek assistance. Benefits support is essential, but it is only the starting point. Military-connected students need an intentional approach that links financial support to academic advising, career guidance and a clear sense of belonging on campus. Without that coordination, too many struggle to persist, even when tuition is fully covered.

Even when such support is available, military-connected students are typically expected to locate and access those resources on their own. Research on student veterans consistently shows wide variation in utilization of support services — suggesting that availability alone does not translate into meaningful engagement or persistence.

Some states and institutions are beginning to demonstrate how to approach this population differently. At Golden Gate University, for example, support for military learners is built into the university’s broader student success model. The institution participates in the Post-9/11 GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program, a voluntary partnership in which colleges help cover tuition costs beyond what the GI Bill pays.

But the university’s commitment to veterans goes beyond financial support. Golden Gate pairs benefits navigation with dedicated success coaching and a veterans center staffed by military veterans. The focus is not only on enrollment, but on helping students stay enrolled, complete their degrees and translate their education into meaningful careers.

Fordham University, meanwhile, has taken a similar approach. The university maintains a dedicated Office of Military and Veterans’ Services, supports an active Student Veterans of America chapter, and offers programming designed to help military-connected learners understand how their experience fits within academic and professional pathways.

Because skills developed through service do not always map cleanly onto civilian job descriptions or academic expectations, Fordham’s model focuses on helping military learners articulate their experience, plan their coursework and prepare for life after graduation.

Both institutions share a refusal to treat military learners as an exception. Support is coordinated rather than piecemeal, and institutional responsibility does not end once benefits are approved.

State and federal policy and funding can also play a critical role. In Alabama, state leaders are working to create stronger education-to-career pathways for military veterans. The state legislature, for instance, recently advanced a bill to establish a faster route into the teaching profession for veterans. The program would allow eligible students with a minimum number of college credits to earn a temporary teaching certificate and begin working in classrooms sooner, with mentorship during their early years.

The state also recently launched a statewide partnership with the mental health platform Uwill to provide veterans—whether they are students or not—with free teletherapy and 24/7 crisis support.

As colleges confront a demographic cliff and growing public skepticism toward higher education, they will need to be more deliberate about whom they serve and how they serve them. Military-connected learners represent a substantial, motivated population backed by significant public investment and a clear demand for postsecondary education.

Higher education should take that reality seriously. Military-connected learners neither want nor need charity. They need institutions that recognize them as a central part of the future of higher education.

Ruth Bauer is president at student success nonprofit InsideTrack. Chris Tilghman is CEO at MissionWise, which supports colleges and universities that enroll military-connected students.

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6,000 BEAD projects need 86K+ permits, report finds

Chris Teale — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

As states and internet service providers prepare to roll out more broadband under a $42 billion program, a new report found that permitting is a major obstacle to getting it done.

Researchers found that 86,402 distinct permits would be required for the 6,933 terrestrial projects planned under the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program. Over half of projects require more than 10 permits, while 1 in 7 require more than 20 across the state, local and federal levels, according to the report released last week by the New York Law School’s Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute.

Of those projects, researchers said, 95% require a federal environmental review, 76% require state permits — typically through the highway right-of-way — 71% need agreements with private entities or other third parties and 62% need municipal permits. The report said a typical build engages with eight separate entities, each with a separate process.

Questions around permitting continue to swirl as the feds dole out BEAD cash. Lawmakers across the political spectrum have been asking if the process can be tweaked to get projects built quicker, or if it works as intended to protect local residents. The new rules on this federal program, however, have some worried that projects may be stymied before they even begin.

“The thing with BEAD is there are timelines around the project,” said Michael Santorelli, ACLP’s director and a co-author of the report. “They only have about four years to build, and because of the new rules really driven down how much money they were getting for these projects. They're on a stricter budget; they have compressed timelines within which to operate. These permitting processes can add time and money to the build process, even for a simple project.”

The Commerce Department and National Telecommunications and Information Administration, which run the BEAD program, announced various rule changes last year that they said were designed to save taxpayer money. Those savings are estimated to be worth around $21 billion, half of what was appropriated for the program under the 2021 infrastructure law.

But the report raised concerns that having less money available could result in projects being delayed or scrapped as the cost and complexity of permits remains, in some cases, high. The biggest driver of permit requirements are wetlands and floodplains, the report found, but thousands more are required to cross existing infrastructure, including roads and highways (4,964 projects), railroads (3,072 projects) and transmission and pipeline corridors.

For states and localities, which typically manage those sorts of permitting requests, that can present numerous challenges, Santorelli said.

“When you get down to the local level, and depending on where you are, where you're building, counties or localities might be under-resourced, they might not be able to handle multiple requests,” he said. “They might not have timelines in place or processes that require them to make a decision quickly. There might not be rules in place that put a cap on how much they can charge for a permit.”

The fragmented nature of the permitting structure in the U.S. can also be frustrating, Santorelli said, even though it appears to be a “bug” or a “feature of the American way of government.” Different permits at different levels of government may have overlapping requirements but need separate paperwork, while the issue of which level of government has jurisdiction remains a thorny one.

In an opinion piece for Route Fifty late last month, Brandon Tatum, CEO of the National Governors Association, and Jonathan Spalter, CEO of USTelecom, said projects can end up “trapped in overlapping reviews from multiple agencies operating on different timelines with no coordination and no accountability for delay.”

“That is not oversight,” the pair continued. “It is obstruction by inaction. Death by a thousand paper cuts.”

It’s an issue that lawmakers have looked to address. Repeated hearings in the House and Senate have featured calls to reduce or streamline the permitting process to get projects built quicker, while elected officials have passed some legislation to that end. But it remains tricky, especially as local government groups are keen to preserve their authority and not be preempted by federal legislation.

In the meantime, Santorelli said the federal government could consider providing states and localities with some of the leftover BEAD money to help staff up their permitting offices, in addition to their mandated permitting roundtables that look to resolve delays and disputes while collecting complaints from subgrantees.

But the disagreements around permitting go far beyond just broadband, Santorelli said, and touch various other areas including building affordable housing, data centers and electricity infrastructure while looking to protect the environment, neighborhoods and the public right-of-way. Hopefully, he said, the discussions around BEAD can help push the conversation forward.

“Hopefully this will draw attention to the issue, and looking longer term, there could be a more concerted effort at the state level in particular to really take a hard look at what their localities are doing on so many different issues, try to streamline things, and provide some of the consistency that's needed,” Santorelli said.

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The data center industry’s PR blitz Is backfiring

Lisa Sorg, Inside Climate News — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Inside Climate News.

HENDERSON, N.C.—On a recent summer evening Mitzi Parrott, who lives in Vance County, saw a television commercial on the evening news that gave her pause. Kathie Hamm and Bobbie Lequire, also of Vance County, saw it, too, streaming on Sling and posted on Nextdoor.

The ad extolled the purported economic benefits of data centers, including the claim that these enormous power-hungry facilities pay their own energy costs so “North Carolina families don’t have to.”

“I knew it wasn’t true, and it concerned me that other people wouldn’t know the other side,” said Parrott, whose land could back up to a proposed data center. “I figured somebody in the data center industry had to be behind it.”

Parrott was right.

Over the last two months, to counter the souring public sentiment, a group called North Carolina Connects has been running ads on TV, radio and social media promoting data centers.

What the ads don’t disclose is who’s behind North Carolina Connects: The Data Center Coalition, a powerful trade group composed of some of the largest tech corporations—Amazon, Microsoft and Google—as well as smaller companies that build, support or operate the facilities.

The Data Center Coalition is based in Virginia, which has the largest number of data centers in the U.S., 674, according to market intelligence firm Data Center Map. The coalition launched as a nonprofit group in 2019, federal tax records show, with total revenues of $304,000. As the data center industry expanded, the coalition’s fortunes grew: In 2024, the group reported $4.6 million in revenue.

The DCC has formed similar nonprofit groups in several states, such as Ohio, Virginia and Texas. The websites look alike and contain no contact information aside from an online form.

During a video interview with Inside Climate News, Dan Diorio, DCC’s executive vice president of state policy and government affairs, kept his camera off. He did not answer questions about the link between North Carolina Connects and the larger organization. Instead, he directed Inside Climate News to a company statement that reads in part:

“North Carolina Connects represents stakeholders from the data center ecosystem, including the Data Center Coalition, working to inform North Carolinians about the benefits of data centers. … Through North Carolina Connects, the industry seeks to better explain the role of data centers to the public—including how they operate, why they are important to our daily lives and the 21st-century economy, as well as information about the industry’s responsible usage of water and its commitment to paying for the energy it uses.”

The coalition touts the windfalls they say data centers deliver to communities. In North Carolina, the DCC says data centers generate $1.3 billion in state and local tax revenue, based on public documents. However, without fuller public disclosures it’s difficult, if not impossible, to verify some of the claims.

Diorio acknowledged that data centers keep some operational details confidential, but “what you’re seeing now is very much a concerted effort for the industry to get a better handle on what information is proprietary and confidential, and then how do we release the information.”

Developers frequently require local governments to sign non-disclosure agreements. They don’t release their energy and water use and their wastewater discharges. Amazon recently asked the state Division of Air Quality to keep confidential details of its air permit application, but relented after the regulators questioned the company’s reasoning.

Opposition to data centers is increasing nationwide, according to a recent survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) of the University of Pennsylvania. Of the 1,320 U.S. adults polled in mid-June through mid-July, 61 percent said they opposed the construction of new data centers in their area.

That figure is 12 percentage points higher than a similar survey conducted by the APPC in February and March.

The public relations push isn’t working, said Jeremy Solomon, president and founder of Learnewable. His company uses AI to analyze government ordinances, moratoria and public comments about data centers, renewable energy and electric transmission projects in each of the nation’s 3,144 counties.

Nationwide, approximately one in seven counties now has some form of restriction, Solomon said, and advertising won’t win the public’s trust.

“The real counter to a moratorium wave is disclosure,” he said. “Publish the energy load, the water and the actual value of the tax breaks.”

Microsoft announced last spring that it would no longer require local governments to sign NDAs, and the company terminated any existing ones, such as one with Person County officials over a planned data center north of Roxboro.

The Data Center Coalition has tried to counter public concerns about rising electricity prices and the facilities’ voracious appetite for energy. In the PJM territory, which includes northeastern North Carolina and a dozen more states, data center demand, coupled with a recent heat wave, tripled energy prices, according to Oil.com.

“We pay for every single kilowatt hour,” the North Carolina Connect ad says. “That’s building responsibly.”

It’s also common. Most businesses, such as factories, restaurants, hair salons and banks, as well as homeowners and renters also pay for all of their energy usage. What the North Carolina Connects ad omits is that until early July, when the legislature repealed an exemption for data centers, most paid no sales tax on electricity.

Under that exemption, a large project that consumed 100 megawatts of energy avoided paying as much as $2.2 million a year, state Commerce Department figures show.

“The legislature agreed to remove the data center’s sales tax exemption for electricity, so you and I will no longer be subsidizing their energy consumption,” Gov. Josh Stein said at a press conference in July as he signed the bill.

Lawmakers kept data centers’ sales tax exemption on certain equipment, worth more than $45 million that would otherwise go to state and local governments each year.

Anne Harvey David is chief counsel for environmental justice with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, which has represented residents fighting data centers.

“There are just so many unanswered questions with every single one of these projects that I think it’s really a big part of why people are so opposed to having these data centers in their communities. It has a very cloak and dagger feel,” Harvey David said. “You don’t even know when there is an NDA, and communities don’t have a chance to oppose these data centers until it’s nearly a done deal for their community.”

Job Creation, Trade Secrets

The data center industry promises local governments that the facilities will create dozens, if not hundreds, of good-paying jobs. Amazon told Richmond County officials that 500 people will eventually work at its hyperscale data center in Hamlet.

In North Carolina, data centers aren’t required to publicly disclose their employment numbers, even if they receive tax breaks. Last year Google signed an agreement with the City of Lenoir designating the company’s job figures as a trade secret.

The Data Center Coalition commissioned a report by PWC, a research, management and consulting firm, to estimate the economic impact of data centers in the U.S. Using federal labor data, PWC calculated that the industry created 1 million direct jobs in 2024. Of those, 24,000 were in North Carolina.

Another 4.5 million “indirect and induced” positions were supported nationwide; 56 percent were service jobs, and 10 percent were in real estate, finance and insurance. North Carolina accounted for 107,000 of the indirect and induced positions.

The report doesn’t have a breakdown of the pay scales for the types of positions. The figures also include part-time workers, the self-employed and contractors, who might not qualify for company-supported health insurance or retirement plans.

DCC said that while it paid for the study, it did not dictate how PWC conducted its research or the results.

Diorio provided Inside Climate News with an example of how data centers can spark new or expanded companies. In Northern Virginia, two veterans started a portable toilet company and added data center construction sites to their clients. They’re now in five states, Diorio said, with 70 employees. “It’s been a huge part of how they’ve been able to expand.”

So far, those success stories aren’t resonating with many North Carolina residents and their elected officials.

Ten counties, 17 cities and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians have enacted their own temporary moratoria on data centers, according to information compiled by Frank Muraca, a former analyst with the N.C. Department of Commerce. Two local governments rejected a moratorium.

The terms range from one year to 32 months, the maximum allowed under state law. Local governments can’t pass a permanent development moratorium without legislative approval.

Data center developers encounter greater resistance in counties with more people, Solomon said. Learnewable’s most recent figures show developers are shifting toward lower-population counties in the Upper Midwest, Colorado, Wyoming and Alaska.

These areas have fewer restrictions, simpler permitting processes and could be lured by promises of additional tax revenue and employment benefits, according to Solomon. Fewer people could also mean fewer conflicts involving traffic, noise, water consumption and competing land uses.

Vance County, a rural area that borders Virginia, doesn’t have any data centers yet. That could change. Despite public opposition, the county commissioners in April rezoned land to allow Natelli, a Maryland real estate company, to develop the land potentially for a data center. If built, the facility would be near five rural neighborhoods, a school and a church.

Natelli had planned to develop a data center site near Apex, in southern Wake County, but withdrew the proposal because of local opposition.

Kathie Hamm, who lives in Vance County, said the county hasn’t shared any information about the Natelli project. “Nothing but secrecy,” said Hamm, who is co-organizing her community against the proposals. “I’m not a protester, but this is what we’re faced with.”

The situation in Vance County illustrates what Learnewable’s analysis has shown.

“It doesn’t even take a finished building,” Solomon said. “Once a proposal shows up in a county’s public record, sentiment turns negative and the odds of maximum hostility nearly triple.”

There is no goodwill dividend for doing it well, Solomon added. Counties where past projects were positive and successful still score worse than counties that never had one.

“The most favorable counties are favorable,” he said, “because nobody has proposed anything there yet.”

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Data center audit lacks specifics even as Gov. Abbott, industry leaders tout it

Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This article was originally published by Texas Tribune.

Tech companies are lining up to voice support for Gov. Greg Abbott’s audit of data centers seeking to connect to the power grid, although little is known about what the audit will entail or what it means for the data center construction boom.

Since the Aug. 3 announcement, at least 43 companies — including juggernauts like Meta, OpenAI, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services — have issued public statements expressing support for Abbott’s audit, despite the governor ordering regulators to not approve any new grid connections until the audit is completed. The governor has similarly touted their endorsement of his plan.

“We share your commitment to ensuring data centers are true partners in every Texas community where we operate — protecting residential ratepayers, strengthening grid reliability and promoting responsible water stewardship,” read a letter to the governor sent Tuesday by the Data Center Coalition, a trade association representing many of the largest tech companies in the world.

Abbott directed the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which regulates the state’s power grid, to conduct the audit, but it’s unknown how long the audit will take, how long the moratorium on grid connections will last, how many data centers will be audited and how the information gathered in the audit will be used by regulators and legislators.

Without these questions answered, it’s unclear how much of this audit will address the public’s concerns about data centers, particularly their impact on energy access, water use and the environment.

Citing polling data that shows growing discontent among rural Texans toward the buildout of data centers and competitive General Election contests for governor and U.S. Senate, Texas Politics Project Director Jim Henson said the moves by Abbott and the companies raise questions about how impactful the audit and freeze of approvals will actually be.

“It’s all very performative, it’s performative on everybody’s part,” Henson said.

Abbott’s office has largely directed questions about the audit to his public statements on the topic since Aug. 3. The PUCT and ERCOT have also remained largely silent on the matter, and the PUCT scheduled an emergency meeting for Friday morning to discuss the issue.

ERCOT did say in a Monday filing it expects the audit will last “several months” and is expected to begin shortly after Aug. 20.

Navigating the Politics of Data Centers

Michael Jewell, an attorney who has represented large industrial companies on energy issues and policy, said it’s no surprise the companies are willing to play along because they were already working to address many of these issues in response to public backlash.

“I think the data centers are going to comply with it, and they’re absolutely willing to comply with it,” Jewell said. “They want to be sure they understand what the requirements are and how this is going to develop, and that’s still a work in progress. I’m hoping that what we’ll do is on Friday, start to get a better understanding of what the process is going to be.”

Many of the companies have planned projects in the ERCOT large-load queue, or the line to receive approval for energization, which Abbott said no data centers may advance from until the audit is completed. While the ERCOT grid does not include the entirety of the state, Abbott said the pause on grid connections is statewide because the PUCT authority extends beyond the ERCOT grid.

This attempt to rein in data centers is a reversal for the governor, who called Texas the “epicenter of AI development” in November.

Abbott has touted many of these company announcements of compliance with statements of his own, each arguing that both his audit and previous directives to the PUCT and ERCOT have established clear guardrails that will prevent the data centers from passing costs on to the residents living near them.

“What Governor Abbott is doing is working,” wrote Andrew Mahaleris, Abbott’s press secretary. “Data centers across the state have announced their full compliance with those standards, which provide guardrails that protect our communities.”

Fox News’ July 30 poll showed Abbott leading Democratic state Rep. Gina Hinojosa by one percentage point in his bid for reelection. The poll’s crosstabs found a narrower margin of support among rural Texans, a group that typically supports Republican candidates in large numbers and live where many data centers are cropping up.

A Texas Tribune analysis found more than half of all data centers planned to be built in Texas are planned for unincorporated areas only governed by a county government, which typically have little power to block development.

Henson described Abbott’s audit and the data center companies’ support for it as a “political balancing act” as both parties work to maintain public support — Abbott for his upcoming reelection bid and data center companies for their plans to keep building the facilities in large numbers.

“These kinds of pronouncements and maneuvers will look differently and get different kinds of coverage after the election and once we get into the legislative part of the policy response process.”

Is Abbott’s Plan Enough?

Abbott’s letter said the audit should ensure data center developers provide information on tax breaks they will receive; power use and generation; water use and cooling operations; efforts to reduce impacts on local communities; and ownership of the facility. Any projects that fail Abbott’s ordered “comprehensive verification and audit” should be denied connection to the grid, the governor said.

A June 10 letter by Abbott directed the PUCT to ensure data center interconnections to the grid will result in reduced residential electricity bills and data centers will pay for all of their electrical infrastructure costs.

Abbott has already called on the Legislature to repeal the state sales tax break for data centers, which has ballooned to more than $1 billion a year in value as more data centers were built in the state. Officials from the Comptroller’s Office said in late July that at least 10 new data centers a month are expected to be certified to receive the sales tax break through the end of the year.

It is also unclear how effectively the pause on interconnection approvals will slow the data center buildout. While companies will not be able to be energized by the ERCOT grid, a March paper by law firm Troutman Pepper Locke highlighted the growing trend of data centers partnering with energy companies to build power plants connected directly to data centers, circumnavigating the need for broader energy grid connection.

Hinojosa has argued the governor should immediately call a special session so the Legislature can quickly pass regulations, or a total moratorium on the construction of data centers until the Legislature’s regular session begins in January.

“When the companies being regulated are cheering for the rules, you know the rules were written for them, not for Texans,” Hinojosa wrote in a statement.

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The precision pivot: The case for local, lean and governed AI

Josefin Rosen — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

For years, the dominant narrative in artificial intelligence has been one of scale. Bigger models, broader databases, more parameters, under the assumption that being that size alone would unlock transformative capability.

Governments and regulated industries have watched this race unfold, and many have invested heavily in the promise that general-purpose AI would deliver equally general-purpose results.

Despite record investment, large language models are proving too expensive to scale in resource-constrained environments, too opaque to satisfy audit requirements and too generic to perform reliably in the specific, high-stakes contexts that define public sector work.

What is emerging in response is not a retreat from AI but rather a shift toward more precise, context-aware systems, designed to be locally accountable, efficiently governed and fit for purpose.

The Case for Fit-for-Purpose Data

This shift begins by rethinking data as something to be curated with intent instead of consumed in volume.

Representative over raw: A model’s value is defined by the context it inhabits. For public institutions, that means grounding AI on data that reflects actual operational realities such as local demographics, regional service patterns and jurisdiction-specific regulatory frameworks. Generic models tend to reflect the populations best represented in large-scale internet data, which rarely mirror the actual populations and communities governments serve.

The Role of Synthetic Data: One of the more significant advances in fit-for-purpose AI is the use of synthetic data, which is algorithmically generated datasets that replicate the statistical properties of real-world information without exposing sensitive records. Using end-to-end platforms, agencies can model citizen services and simulate infrastructure scenarios without compromising personal information. Used wisely, synthetic data can level the playing field for under-resourced agencies. Used poorly, it can amplify the gaps it was meant to close, particularly where underlying datasets are already biased or unrepresentative.

Strategic intent by design: The most effective public sector AI deployments begin with clearly defined use cases and working backward to the data required. By designing pipelines with intent, agencies ensure their AI is built on verifiable, high-quality inputs that can be demonstrated to auditors, oversight bodies and the public.

Agentic AI as an Efficiency Enabler

Fit-for-purpose data enables a fundamentally different architecture and movement from massive, centralized processing toward “edge AI,” agentic systems that operate at the point where data is generated.

In practice, this means AI monitoring environmental sensors, processing field-collected health data or supporting local emergency response, without the latency, bandwidth costs or connectivity dependency of a centralized model.

The gains are already being documented: research from SAS and the Global Center on AI Governance examining AI deployment in the Global South found that agentic systems, when designed for efficiency and deployed at the edge, could become “catalysts for sustainability instead of new sources of the strain.” This finding is directly relevant for any resource-constrained public sector environment, not just emerging economies.

Domain-specific models also carry a structural efficiency advantage: they do not require the continuous data ingestion that sustains general-purpose systems. For agencies operating under strict budget constraints, leaner models consume less compute, lower operating costs and can be maintained without the resource intensity of re-training a foundational model.

In an era of fiscal pressure, efficiency becomes a critical enabler. Importantly, these approaches address systemic challenges in AI more broadly, from sustainability to representation, and offer models that may define best practice globally.

The Public Sector Blueprint and Governance as the Backbone

No sector faces greater scrutiny around AI than government, and no sector is better positioned to model what responsible deployment looks like. The framework underpinning trustworthy public sector AI rests on four pillars: operations, oversight, culture and compliance. These are not independent variables. Each pillar reinforces the other, and their combined presence is what generates genuine institutional trust.

As AI becomes more distributed, governance can no longer function as a compliance checkbox. It must be the framework upon which the entire AI lifecycle is built. AI governance encompasses the initial ingestion of real or synthetic data, through model training and validation, to the final autonomous action taken by an edge agent. Every decision must be traceable and continuous, not just when something goes wrong.

Critically, strong governance is an enabler. Organizations that trust their data and processes can move faster, innovate more freely and extend AI into higher-stakes decisions with confidence. In regulated environments, governance is what transforms AI from a technical capability into a genuine institutional asset.

Precision Will Define the Next Era

The organizations that will lead the next phase of AI adoption are not necessarily those with the largest models or the deepest training budgets. They are the ones asking the hard question, “How precisely can we deploy AI?”

Precision means data designed for purpose. Intelligence distributed to where decisions are made, and governance embedded from the beginning, not retrofitted. For government and regulated industry, this is a practical and increasingly necessary path. to AI that is fast enough to be useful, accountable enough to be trusted and efficient enough to be sustained.

The precision pivot has begun. The question for public sector leaders is not whether to make the shift, but how quickly, and how well.

Josefin Rosén is a Trustworthy AI specialist, working globally in SAS’ AI Ethics, Governance and Social Impact team. She acts as a counselor on AI strategy to business and government and has been named as one of the most influential voices on AI in Sweden by Tech50. Her specialty is ensuring that human factors such as ethics, diversity and transparency are factored into AI solutions. She has more than 20 years of experience working with AI and advanced analytics and holds a doctoral degree from the Faculty of Pharmacy at Uppsala University in Chemometrics.

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Data sharing initiatives should be built on accountability and security, expert says

Kaitlyn Levinson — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 13:32:32 -0400

Breaking down silos and enabling data sharing across agencies has long been a priority for state and local governments eager to optimize actionable insights and service delivery. But new guidance suggests that data consolidation should be done through the lens of privacy and security.

When adopting a centralized data infrastructure, government and agency leaders should consider that “a number of technical considerations during implementation will impact the capabilities, and thus the consequences, of a combined data system,” says a technical guide recently published by the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology.

“As more agencies contribute to consolidated datasets, the potential for errors expands …. [which] has the potential to cause enormous harm to people caught up in those government actions, which could include inappropriate benefits stoppages, false arrests and the overall degradation of government services,” according to the guide.

Such risks “may not comport with the expectations and consent of those who provided the data, violating their privacy and degrading trust in government agencies. The potential for these wide-ranging and damaging impacts requires careful attention to and governance of government data sharing programs,” it says.

For state and local governments, their management of shared data moving forward is particularly pertinent amid mounting demands from the federal government to obtain data that it has previously not had access to, Hannah Quay-de la Vallee, senior technologist at CDT and author of the technical guide, told Route Fifty.

President Donald Trump, for instance, signed an executive order last year directing agency leaders “to ensure the federal government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs that receive federal funding, including, as appropriate, data generated by those programs but maintained in third-party databases.”

The order and continued attempts from the Trump administration to access states’ driver’s license and voter roll data have stoked concerns about data privacy when it comes to government data consolidation, Quay-de la Vallee said. Indeed, recent survey findings found that 74% of Americans are worried about governments’ ownership and storage of their data.

The CDT guide suggests that agencies consider not just the method through which they break down data silos, but how they will prepare and protect data before centralizing it.

The guide suggests that agencies can take a warehouse or federation approach to data consolidation. Warehousing is the process by which “all shared data is stored in a centralized location that every party has access to,” and federation refers to a “sharing agency providing access to their own version of the data to the receiving agency,” according to the guide.

Indeed, “it doesn't really matter how you structure [data],” Quay-de la Vallee said. “What matters is the movement of data between agencies and between entities,” she added.

“The thing that matters about either [warehouse or federation] technical approach that you take is going to require certain kinds of technical interventions,” Quay-de la Vallee said, adding that “regardless of how you have done [data consolidation], how are you making sure that it works as intended?”

For instance, the guide recommends that agency leaders consider who ultimately controls the data to “ensure effective responsibilities and roles for building the sharing infrastructure.” Under the warehouse approach, one agency assumes the primary responsibility for maintaining and coordinating data sharing, while under the federation model, each sharing agency is accountable for their own data and how receiving agencies access it.

Formal procedures, such as data sharing agreements, are one way for agencies to identify and establish expectations regarding how data will be securely shared and protected by receiving agencies, according to the guide.

Another technical consideration for government agencies to consider is how they standardize data quality, definitions and matches, Quay-de la Vallee said.

Such details can be as small as reconciling how separate agencies format a person’s date of birth in their datasets, but “trying to use data with these disparate schemas without clarifying can introduce numerous errors” in the data sources and the outputs they produce, the guide says.

To reduce the potential for data entry or formatting errors when consolidating information, data standardization and matching efforts are “where documentation does a ton,” Quay-de la Vallee said.

Agencies can create data matching frameworks where all involved parties can reference a shared document that details how data elements will be, for example, defined or denoted within a central database, she said. Beyond matching frameworks, agencies can draft memorandums of understanding or contracts, she added.

Such procedures “must include a way to receive information about errors as well as steps to correct the error in a given case and, if applicable, avoid the error in the future,” the guide reads.

“The further away [erroneous] data moves from that sourcing agency, the harder that problem gets to fix,” Quay-de la Vallee said. Additionally, she said, one department could be “causing problems for other agencies down the line” if staff have to track down an error within the sourcing agency and if that error appeared in receiving agency’s data as well.

Preparing agency-level data for consolidation is an especially critical consideration for governments as artificial intelligence tools become more ingrained within their processes and operations, Quay-de la Vallee said.

The tech can, for instance, assist with data analysis across government programs to identify fraudulent benefits claims to boost overall program integrity, Quay-de la Vallee said. But its use cases underscore why data cleansing, framework and documentation efforts are necessary before implementing AI tools that could be used to influence major decisions impacting residents’ lives, she said.

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Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announces lawsuit against TikTok

Justin Sweitzer — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday announced on Tuesday that his office is suing TikTok, accusing the social media platform of designing its app to be “intentionally addictive” – while also regularly featuring “frequent and intense” adult content despite its “13+” rating.

“TikTok intentionally designed its platform to be addictive to young people, maximizing the time kids spend on their platform to grow their bottom line,” the attorney general said Tuesday at a press conference at the state Capitol. “They want users, including children, to crave the app. They want users to endlessly scroll while they rake in astronomical ad revenue.”

Sunday added that he strongly believes that the information gathered by his office’s investigation shows “that TikTok designed their app to promote infinite scrolling that can deteriorate and decay a child’s mental wellness.”

The 65-page lawsuit argues that developers deliberately designed TikTok in ways that make it addictive, and that the company has downplayed the prevalence of adult-themed content – including content that depicts drug and alcohol use, profanity, sexual activity and violence – to secure a “13+” rating on various app stores.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday explains the two components of his lawsuit against TikTok. pic.twitter.com/yin3MjbvMR
— Justin Sweitzer (@justin_sweitzer) August 11, 2026

According to the lawsuit, TikTok has stated through the Apple App Store that its platform contains “infrequent/mild” levels of sexual content, profanity, alcohol and drug use, and other mature themes. But the attorney general’s office disagrees.

“All of those representations are false,” the suit reads. “The TikTok app contains frequent and intense sexual content and nudity, profanity and crude humor, mature and suggestive themes, and alcohol, tobacco, and drug use and references.”

To underscore the addictive nature of TikTok, Sunday pointed to the viral slang term “bed rotting,” which refers to people spending extended periods of time in bed scrolling on their phones.

“TikTok’s infinite scroll feature promotes that,” Sunday said. “And if you haven’t been on the app in a while, they will send you a very enticing push notification to try and lure you back.”

The lawsuit argues that TikTok violated the state’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law by misrepresenting the level of adult-themed content on its app to receive a “13+” age rating, with the AG’s office adding that the app should instead have a “16+” or “18+” rating. The lawsuit also suggests that TikTok has deceived Pennsylvania consumers by making its app addictive through “deliberate design choices.”

The lawsuit was filed in the Allegheny County Court of Common Pleas.

Sunday said the lawsuit “seeks to put into place effective barriers and safeguards that will consider the child consumer’s well-being and safety.”

A spokesperson for TikTok pushed back on characterizations made in the lawsuit.

"This lawsuit relies on misleading and inaccurate claims and deliberately ignores the concrete safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community,” a spokesperson told City & State in a statement.

“Teen accounts have 50 preset safety, privacy and security settings built-in, and TikTok’s Family Pairing tools give parents direct control over screen time and content filters,” the statement continues. “We will vigorously defend against these claims."

Sunday spoke with City & State earlier this year about how new technologies are altering everyday life for Pennsylvanians, highlighting the need for a balance between innovation and public safety. “Innovation and technology are not mutually exclusive from protecting children. We can do both, and we must do both. It’s that simple,” Sunday said.

With children and teens exposed to a range of new technologies and products, ranging from TikTok to AI chatbots, Sunday said it’s important that parents be aware of the apps and platforms their children use.

“Talk to your child,” he said. “Be a part of their life in that space.”

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OpenAI Foundation gives $100 million fund state AI implementation for public health

Alexandra Kelley — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

OpenAI Foundation, the overarching nonprofit that governs OpenAI, has announced a new public health partnership with the Common Health Coalition to bring artificial intelligence tools to developing scientific breakthroughs for medical research across the country.

OpenAI Foundation on Thursday announced its commitment of $100 million to the Breakthroughs to Follow-Through Initiative, a program where states and other local jurisdictions can accelerate medical treatment research deliveries for serious health conditions. Participating jurisdictions will be able to determine what types of AI tools, including generative AI, are needed for their individual projects.

The B2F’s research funding will initially focus on hepatitis C treatment development. Local organizations and non-profits will be in charge of dispersing grant money — first in states including Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana and Massachusetts. More state participants will be unveiled in the coming six months.

“The organizations closest to society’s greatest challenges have the deepest understanding of what communities need, but not always the resources or technical expertise to harness the latest advances in AI,” Anna Makanju, Head of AI for Civil Society and Philanthropy at OpenAI Foundation, said in a press release. “We believe this initiative is a model for how AI can strengthen public and community health work and deliver tangible benefits to communities.”

Makanju told Nextgov/FCW that the foundation’s grants aren’t tied to one AI platform or system provider, granting participants flexibility in the tools they choose.

“We want our partners to have the agency to decide which tools to use — or what not to use — and to choose what best fits their needs and the communities they serve,” she said.

Dave Chokshi, the chair of the Common Health Coalition, echoed Makanju’s sentiment.

“Jurisdictions will determine which tools are needed to help ensure existing medical breakthroughs actually reach the people who need them,” Chokshi told Nextgov/FCW. “These tools range from identifying people overdue for screening or treatment, to outreach platforms for re-engaging patients, AI copilots that free up clinicians' time, navigation tools that keep patients on track through cure, and beyond, and are intended to support the human relationships at the center of care.”

In addition to offering access to advanced AI tools, Chokshi said that B2F will provide the infrastructure needed to facilitate the implementation and usage of AI tools, such as technical support to help shift from the pilot stage into deployment.

The current focus of B2F is to foster collaborative state-level partnerships, but Chokshi said they are open to participation from the federal government.

“We remain very open to partnership and collaboration with the federal government as this work develops,” said Chokshi.

A similar initiative was previously floated in congressional legislation. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, introduced his bill on July 9, — the Accelerating Innovation for Kids with Cancer Act — to allocate more federal attention to leveraging AI to aid pediatric cancer research efforts.

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The great AI escape(s): Now what?

Alan R. Shark — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 10:00:00 -0400

For the past two years, vendors have pitched agentic artificial intelligence to state and local governments as the next great efficiency gain: systems that don't just answer questions but “do things” — process permits, triage service requests, draft contracts and monitor infrastructure.

The pitch depends entirely on one word: trust. An agent that can act on its own has to be trusted to act within the boundaries it's given.

That's why this summer's news should give every public-sector technology leader pause.

The Great Escape

In July, OpenAI disclosed that during an internal cybersecurity evaluation, two of its models — the released GPT-5.6 Sol and a more capable unreleased system — broke out of a sealed test environment, found a previously unknown software flaw, reached the open internet, and used stolen credentials and further exploits to break into production systems at Hugging Face, a major AI development platform.

The goal wasn't sabotage. The models had been told to solve a cybersecurity benchmark called ExploitGym, inferred that Hugging Face might be storing the answer key, and pursued that shortcut with real-world consequences. Hugging Face detected and contained the intrusion before OpenAI's own team caught it.

A week later, Anthropic — maker of Claude — disclosed something similar. Prompted by OpenAI's admission, Anthropic went back through 141,000 of its own evaluation runs and found three separate cases, dating back to April, in which Claude models escaped a testing environment that was supposed to be sealed off from the internet and gained unauthorized access to the live systems of three outside organizations.

Anthropic said the models believed they were in a walled-off "capture the flag" exercise; a miscommunication with a third-party evaluation partner left a hole in the wall, and the models found it. Separately, independent researchers showed that Anthropic's Cowork agent could break out of its local virtual machine on a Mac by exploiting a Linux kernel flaw and access files well beyond its intended sandbox — a problem that affected roughly half a million users before it was patched.

None of this was a rogue AI plotting an escape for its own purposes. In every case, a model was given a narrow goal, treated the boundary around it as an obstacle rather than a rule, and found a path through that boundary that no one had anticipated. That distinction matters, and it's also the uncomfortable part. These systems didn't need malicious intent to cause real damage — they needed only a gap between what their operators assumed was true about the environment and what was actually true.

What This Means for a City or County Considering Agentic AI

If the companies that build these models — with dedicated safety teams, red-teamers, and months of internal testing — didn't catch these gaps before real infrastructure was touched, that should reset expectations for how government evaluates and deploys the same technology.

A permitting agent that can approve applications, a finance agent that can move funds, a public-safety tool that can flag or dispatch resources — these are exactly the kinds of narrow, goal-directed systems that just proved capable of doing something no one authorized, in pursuit of a goal that seemed simple on paper.

The lesson isn't "don't use AI." It's that trust in agentic AI can't be taken on faith from a vendor's marketing; it has to be engineered, contractually required, and verified. A few practical starting points for government IT and program leaders:

Least privilege by default. An agent should have access to exactly the systems and data it needs for its task, and nothing else. The Hugging Face breach happened because a model found a route to systems well outside its assigned scope — segmentation is what would have stopped it.
Human approval gates for consequential actions. Anything involving money, benefits eligibility, public records, or physical infrastructure should require a person to review and approve before the action executes, not after. "Human in the loop" should mean a person acts as a checkpoint, not a spectator reading a log the next morning.
Assume the sandbox has a hole in it. Anthropic's incident stemmed from a misconfiguration between two organizations that both believed the test environment was isolated. Governments contracting with AI vendors should require independent verification of isolation claims, not just vendor assurances.
Contractual disclosure requirements. Vendors should be contractually obligated to disclose safety incidents affecting the specific product a government has deployed, on a defined timeline — not left to public pressure or a competitor's disclosure to force transparency.
Staged autonomy. Start agents on read-only or advisory tasks, expand their authority only as their track record earns it, and keep an audit trail detailed enough to reconstruct exactly what an agent did and why.
A real kill switch. Someone in the organization needs the ability to immediately halt an agent's access, and that capability needs to be tested before it's needed, not discovered to be broken during an actual incident.

The True Bottom Line

Agentic AI will still matter for the public sector — the efficiency case hasn't gone away, and neither has the workforce pressure that makes it attractive. But the last few weeks are a useful corrective to the assumption that the leading labs have this fully solved. They don't, and they've said so themselves.

For government leaders, the right response isn't retreat. It's building the same kind of skepticism into procurement and deployment that a good auditor brings to any new system: verify the boundary, assume it can fail, and keep a human positioned to catch it when it does.

Alan R. Shark, a senior fellow at the Public Technology Institute, is an associate professor at the Schar School for Policy and Government at George Mason University, where he also serves as a faculty member in the Center for Human AI Innovation in Society, is a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and founder and co-chair of its Standing Panel on Technology Leadership. He is the host of the podcast series Sharkbytes.net.

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New Jersey reaches its goal to eliminate veteran homelessness

Kaitlyn Levinson — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 16:04:09 -0400

New Jersey has hit its goal of reducing the number of unhoused veterans to a “functional zero” this summer, state officials announced last month.

A cloud-enabled platform was one tool that helped the state end veteran homelessness by July 1, 2026, a goal set by the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs and Department of Veterans Affairs in March 2025.

The agencies aimed to connect more than 300 veterans with permanent or secure housing and other assistive services to reach its goal. The progress made in that time builds upon the state’s broader Bringing Veterans Home initiative that launched in late 2024.

State leaders said more than 2,500 former servicemembers have been connected to stable housing through the BVH initiative, which was supported by $30 million in state and federal funding, over the last year and a half.

“One of the biggest things we recognize is that government bureaucracies and red tape often make it hard for people to navigate these homelessness systems, so what we need to do as a state is organize ourselves around the outcome and deploy our resources to achieve that outcome,” Jaclynn Trakalo, project director for DCA, told Route Fifty.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated that 32,495 veterans nationwide, defined as people who served on active duty in the armed forces, were experiencing homelessness in Jan. 2025. More broadly, about 40% of unhoused veterans were unsheltered, or living in spaces not habitable for people, such as sidewalks or parks.

A web-based operations platform from government operations platform provider Civic Roundtable helped optimize and streamline employees’ work to communicate across organizations, share case information and data and conduct referrals to other services. For instance, the platform serves as a central location where users can access policy documents, referral information and forms and provider directories, as well as other resources for state agencies, local providers and other partners that coordinate veteran care across six regional hubs in the state.

“The broad vision writ large in this department is moving … toward a vision of data for action,” Gavin Rozzi, director of DCA’s Division of Housing and Community Resources Data Center, told Route Fifty. The platform, for example, has helped standardize housing-related information and services for state staff and service providers across the state to ensure veterans receive accurate and timely assistance, he said.

Additionally, New Jersey is using an internally built platform to track BVH program analytics, such as the number of referrals made and by what organization, to monitor the initiative’s progress. The state is also using a software tool from SimpliGov to track veterans’ interactions with a self-referral form for housing assistance, and ultimately, providers’ efforts to address and resolve those self-referrals, Rozzi said.

Housing assistance providers are expected to contact a veteran within 24 hours and develop a “plan of action toward housing within 96 hours of that initial contact, [which] gives us a way to measure our speed and our accuracy and the way that these providers are engaging with the veterans,” Trakalo said.

“What was really amazing to me was how, with a relatively small team here and working with some of our external tools, we were able to really keep cranking out solutions for a lot of the complex needs that came up with standing up some of the referral infrastructures and being able to follow the journey of of the veterans through the system,” Rozzi said.

Ultimately, “a number is just a number, and we need to make sure these systems are enhanced so we can sustain” such goals, including efforts to address homelessness in other vulnerable populations, like children or survivors of domestic abuse, Trakalo said.

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Report finds most data centers in urban, not rural, areas

Chris Teale — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Despite the industry’s narrative that many data centers are located in rural areas, a research report published late last month found that the vast majority are actually based in urban communities.

Researchers at New York University, writing in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Cities, found that of the 4,283 data centers they mapped in the United States, 97.5% sit inside metropolitan or micropolitan areas. The other 2.5% sit just 8.5 miles from an urban edge, researchers found, which they said shows there are very, very few truly rural data centers, if any.

Of the country’s data centers, researchers found that five metro areas — Washington, D.C., Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, New York and Phoenix — hold nearly a third. The Washington, D.C. metropolitan area alone has 610, the report says, which includes many in the Northern Virginia data center strongholds of Loudoun and Prince William counties.

“While we see in the media there is a focus on the construction of data centers out of cities, these are the figures,” said Ofek Lauber Bonomo, a postdoctoral associate at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and a co-author of the report. “It doesn't mean that data centers are not being built in rural areas. But the majority right now, not talking about in 5-10 years, are currently in these urban, densely populated areas. I think this is information that should be clear to the public; the narrative should be clear.”

Data center construction has been a hot conversation topic in numerous states in the past few years, as they seek to lead the way on development and help underpin the growth of artificial intelligence. But it has not been without its controversy, whether it be due to worries over environmental impact, noise and residents’ utility bills, among others. Several states now have moratoriums on new data centers as they try to install guardrails for their development, while local governments have done the same.

Despite that, a boom is promised in rural data center construction based on recent research. The Pew Research Center found in April that 67% of planned data centers are set to be located in rural areas, with much of that construction set to happen in the South and Midwest.

Based on their research, the report found that existing infrastructure is a major predictor of where data centers will be located, including available power generation as well as broadband connectivity to allow for low latency. Indeed, the NYU researchers found that many data centers have clustered near closed coal plants, so they can tap into the grid infrastructure those power generation sites left behind.

The report also found that data centers under development are twice as likely to appear in a federally designated “Energy Community,” which were created by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 to direct clean-energy investment toward regions with ties to the fossil fuel and coal industries.

“We don't argue that there is a direct tax benefit to data center providers through [the IRA], but the idea is that by helping these communities with the energy transition and lowering the tax on the generation of green energy and lowering tax burden on these communities, somehow, indirectly, these data center providers can benefit,” Bonomo said. “On the one hand, they benefit indirectly through the tax, but also, they enjoy the old legacy infrastructure. There is a double benefit there.”

The researchers also found that data centers have traditionally clustered in areas with a high number of workers in IT and other technology fields that benefit from low latency and strong broadband connectivity.

One thing the researchers struggled with was a lack of readily available information about data center locations and the infrastructure and utilities they require. This NYU group is one of several currently looking to better collate and publicize that information, while other states have passed laws designed to mandate better transparency. For this report, and to track future development, a lot of data points need to be brought together.

“Part of the work will be looking at maps, scraping the internet, different queries, maybe one can use AI, there can be some crowdsourcing, several areas to get this information, but it's not as much,” said Maurizio Porfiri, the lead researcher on the report and a Tandon School professor. “What is even more alarming from my point of view is the [lack of] information about energy use. What are the sustainability implications, not only the location, but what is the impact? That one is, to the best of our knowledge, not coded and not as well-defined as it could be.”

Many new data centers may not be located in completely rural areas, either. Bonomo noted that some satellite images of construction sites may show something that is “basically a field,” but may only be 20 or 30 minutes away from a city center so they can draw on that infrastructure, which could impact residents.

“Even if it looks completely rural, there is usually a community there that is affected,” he said. “We need to keep that in mind.”

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Schools spend billions on AI, but struggle to figure out what’s worth buying

Robbie Sequeira, Stateline — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by Stateline.

As a new school year begins, some classrooms may use artificial intelligence tools to flag a student struggling with classwork, track attendance or try to raise reading scores.

But as school districts make decisions on which tools are safe and worth spending thousands or millions of dollars on, some officials feel overwhelmed by the array of choices. Some states and districts have begun offering guidance for vetting AI purchases, but educators and experts say districts are still carrying much of the burden on their own.

While school districts have long wrestled with education technology purchases, AI is different because the industry is moving faster than districts and states can keep up with, said Mark Schneider, a nonresident senior fellow at the conservative-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute.

“There’s always an asymmetry between what the providers know and what the districts know,” Schneider told Stateline. “And the question is, can we set up mechanisms for helping the districts understand what’s going on and choosing better.”

Billions of dollars are at stake. The overall U.S. education technology market, which includes computers, software and digital content, generated almost $48 billion in revenue in 2024 and is expected to reach more than $90 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research. The AI in education market in the United States generated about $2.5 billion in revenue last year and is expected to exceed $15 billion by 2033, the group said.

Scott Langford, superintendent of Sumner County Schools in Tennessee, said his district decided to test AI to address plateauing middle school reading scores. Langford said the district wanted to know whether AI could give students immediate feedback and help teachers see, in real time, where students struggled during regular classroom instruction.

“You have to identify what you need,” Langford said. “The (AI edtech) market is so overwhelming for districts and for vendors. … Most of them don’t really do much that drives any kind of change for students.”

Sumner first tried Coursemojo — an AI-powered literacy tool used to support classroom instruction and provide real-time feedback to students and teachers — in a five-day micro-pilot in a sixth grade classroom, then piloted the tool in half of its sixth grade classrooms. Langford said the strongest tools are not the ones that replace teachers, but the ones that “help them see student understanding more quickly.”

Sumner has continued using Coursemojo after the pilot, Langford said.

The Allentown School District, a large, urban district in Pennsylvania, uses a two-phase review process for AI programs that Superintendent Carol Birks said includes non-negotiables such as student safety and data security. Vendors must ensure that all user-generated data and chat logs remain the exclusive property of the district, and vendors must explicitly state that student data will not be sold or used to train AI models.

A significant challenge is that the onus of making these decisions is placed entirely back on the individual school district.
– Allentown School District Superintendent Carol Birks

Birks said that while districts are making these decisions on AI tools, state and federal guidance would be helpful. In addition to Coursemojo, the district also uses other AI platforms like Google’s Gemini.

“A significant challenge is that the onus of making these decisions is placed entirely back on the individual school district,” said Birks. “Although Allentown has built strong internal capacity to handle these responsibilities, guidance from the state level on artificial intelligence vetting or protections would greatly assist school districts.”

What Vetting Looks Like

In most cases, vendors must sign a data processing agreement, complete a security questionnaire and pass legal, privacy and security reviews before a tool can be approved for use in schools. And some states already have laws governing traditional education technology purchases and student data protections. But many districts haven’t laid out best practices or recommendations for how school districts enter contracts with vendors or even bidding processes for certain tools.

And some AI use in classrooms has drawn criticism and legal action. Students and parents in Arizona and Kansas have filed federal lawsuits challenging school districts’ use of Gaggle — a student-safety monitoring platform that scans activity on school-issued accounts and devices — saying it violated their constitutional rights. In Los Angeles, the superintendent of public schools resigned after the district paid $3 million for an AI chatbot from a company called AllHere, which later filed for bankruptcy and whose founder was charged with fraud.

State education boards and agencies, which already regulate contracts for textbooks, transportation and student data systems, have filled in some gaps with vetting and procurement guidance for districts.

The Pennsylvania Department of Education instructs schools to understand who controls the data entered into any AI tool, examine third-party data-sharing practices, limit data collection to what is necessary, keep a human “in the loop” if the tool is being used for grading and discipline, and assess whether it improves student performance.

New York City Public Schools updated its privacy and security review process to include standards for AI, require vendors to disclose what their AI tools are capable of, prohibit the use of student data to train AI models and meet transparency requirements so tools can be explained to families and students.

Chicago Public Schools released an AI Guidebook governing the use of AI software and models and in December began blocking unapproved third-party AI products from its network.

“Chicago Public Schools welcomes the promising innovation of artificial intelligence in teaching and learning, while safeguarding the development of students’ foundational skills and critical thinking,” a Chicago Public Schools spokesperson wrote to Stateline.

The U.S. Department of Education has provided little guidance to districts about AI purchases.

The Southern Regional Education Board — a consortium of 16 Southern states that provides guidance on school issues — published an AI procurement and evaluation checklist last year for K-12 schools.

Leslie Eaves, program director of project-based learning at the board who co-led the AI commission, said districts should first let adults test AI tools before placing them in front of students. She cautions that teachers should review AI-generated material before using it in the classroom and they need to trust their experience and expertise.

“Anything with AI is a risky click,” she said. “There’s a lot of tool makers out there that are going to sell you their product and they’re going to say it’s the biggest and best in everything … At the end of the day, humans are the ones who will know what’s best for their schools and students.”’

Janice Mak, an associate director of curriculum and pedagogy at Arizona State University’s Learning Engineering Institute, says districts should evaluate whether an edtech tool is accessible, explainable, grounded in learning science and solving a real educational need.

“State level policy or guidance only goes so far, and there’s also a research gap and there’s also a policy gap,” Mak told Stateline.

Mak said she heard from a middle school teacher piloting an AI tool who noticed English learners were being unfairly penalized or misread by the system. The students noticed the bias, she said, and the teacher used it to teach them about algorithmic bias and how AI systems are trained.

‘A Tall Order for Districts’

Still, districts are being asked to do too much on their own, said Sue Thotz, director of outreach for Common Sense Education at Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that researches and evaluates media and technology used by children and schools.

Thotz points to a California data privacy agreement, which districts can use to ensure vendors comply with the state’s student data privacy laws, as a way to take some burden off districts by creating a blanket agreement vendors sign onto. The California Student Privacy Alliance, which developed the agreement, gives school systems a searchable database of vendors that have signed, reducing the need for each district to negotiate privacy terms from scratch.

“Placing the burden upon a district to make sure that every single vendor they’re working with is in full compliance with their state and federal laws when it comes to privacy,” she said. “That’s a tall order for districts that are already stretched very, very thin.”

Districts may also be sorting an accumulation of a decade’s worth of technology purchases, said Tracy Weeks, senior director of education policy and strategy at Instructure, the education technology company that makes the Canvas learning management system.

An Instructure report found districts had access to an average of 3,001 digital tools, while students and educators used only four of those tools on average. The report, based on Canvas launch data from more than 12.6 million K-12 users, said the volume of available tools has teachers navigating too many platforms and districts overseeing student data across vendors.

“What I think has happened is that I think we did a lot of digital hoarding,” Weeks said. Now, she said, districts are asking, “What are the things we should actually keep? What do we need to use? What can actually move the needle?”

Shrinking budgets and the expiration of federal pandemic-era funding has also forced districts to scrutinize purchases.

Dacia Toll, co-founder of Coursemojo, the software used by Sumner County and Allentown, said districts should first ask whether an AI product aligns with what is known about cognitive science and strong teaching methods.

“Education has had a long-standing issue with vetting edtech for safety, usability and efficacy, and I just think AI is making that more pronounced,” she told Stateline. “There are a handful of additional risks, and there’s so much hype right now that I think some districts are feeling like they’re behind if they’re not actively implementing AI.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

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Trump admin delays TANF data sharing plan opposed by blue states

Christian Robles — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

The Trump administration pushed the effective date for a proposal allowing the Administration for Children and Families to share Temporary Assistance for Needy Families — or TANF — recipients’ information with other federal agencies to Sept. 1, according to a Federal Register listing posted last week.

Without the extension, the policy shift was set to kick in Tuesday, according to another Federal Register notice.

The delay comes as a coalition of Democratic attorneys general is requesting a federal district court vacate ACF’s proposal and declare it unlawful, according to an Aug. 3 filing.

The coalition alleged ACF could illegally share millions of TANF recipients’ Social Security numbers, marital status, income and other sensitive information with the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies if the Trump administration has its way.

That data sharing “will erode the trust that State agencies have developed with TANF recipients and will deter qualified beneficiaries from applying for TANF benefits, forcing Plaintiff States to spend more of their own money to ensure that families are housed and children do not go hungry,” the coalition said in the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“If ACF can proceed with sharing TANF data with DHS, without clearly defined purposes and limits required by federal law, then community fears that DHS will use that data for other purposes will impede that public trust and chill participation in State TANF programs by citizens and qualified non-citizens alike,” the coalition added.

The group of attorneys general alleged that the administration’s data sharing plan is “arbitrary and capricious” under the Administrative Procedure Act. The coalition also claimed it violates the Constitution’s Spending Clause because states “could not have foreseen these potential uses and disclosures years ago when they collected and shared this data with ACF.”

An ACF spokesperson did not return a request for comment by the time of publication. The administration wrote in the Federal Register that its TANF data-sharing policies are designed to curtail fraud and ensure compliance with TANF requirements, such as verifying recipients’ immigration status.

A public comment period for the TANF proposal closes Tuesday. The federal government gave states and the District of Columbia nearly $16.5 billion in TANF block grants in fiscal 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service.

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Voting machine researchers say federal work abruptly ended after Trump ally pushed back on their findings

David DiMolfetta — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 17:05:00 -0400

LAS VEGAS — After spending roughly six weeks analyzing Dominion voting systems used in Puerto Rico’s 2024 elections, Mojave Research came back to the Trump administration with findings that startled its researchers.

The systems contained at least a dozen high- or critical-severity software vulnerabilities. Passwords were reused, firewalls were disabled and basic cryptographic protections were poorly implemented. And in Puerto Rico, active cellular hardware modems opened additional pathways into underlying software that was thought to be isolated.

But the small cybersecurity firm found no evidence that any of those weaknesses had actually been exploited, or that votes had been changed. The company still wanted more time to be certain.

Federal officials initially seemed willing to give them considerably more of it. The company was asked to grow the team working on the effort from roughly 10 people to about 60, according to CEO Jason Wareham.

Chief Technology Officer Manbir Gulati also said Mojave received an authorization to proceed with a follow-on effort, hired personnel and was given funding to acquire equipment for examining additional voting systems ahead of the November midterms. A contracting officer had even been brought in to finalize the new agreement, Gulati said.

Then, as Mojave prepared to move ahead, the work was abruptly shut down.

Wareham and Gulati recounted the episode on Friday at DEF CON hacker convention’s Voting Village, where they publicly unpacked their technical findings before sitting down with a small group of reporters and onlookers afterward.

Their account fills in new details about a federal effort that grew out of the Trump administration’s broader focus on voting machines and election interference, and the political pressures that emerged when Mojave’s findings did not support claims of election manipulation.

The ODNI request

Mojave never set out to become an election security provider. Its involvement began last year through the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under then-director Tulsi Gabbard, where it was already performing unrelated technical work for the agency when officials approached the company about examining voting machines and data obtained from Puerto Rico.

Reuters reported in February that the May 2025 operation was tied to an effort involving ODNI and the FBI to investigate allegations that Venezuela had hacked Puerto Rico’s voting systems, though Gabbard’s office denied that Venezuela drove its work and said the examination was focused on technical vulnerabilities. The probe produced no clear evidence of Venezuelan interference.

Wareham said at DEF CON that ODNI asked whether his team of reverse engineers and forensic specialists could travel to Puerto Rico and capture an image of a voting system that had actually been used in an election, without the vendor overseeing the process. He agreed, thinking it would be a relatively small addition to Mojave’s existing contract.

The assignment instead dropped Mojave into a much larger skirmish over American elections. “Ultimately, I made the worst decision of my life in a business context,” Wareham said.

President Donald Trump has spent years falsely maintaining that his 2020 loss was stolen and the product of widespread fraud and foreign interference, claims that have been rejected by courts and officials in his own administration. A 2021 intelligence community assessment found no indication that a foreign actor attempted to alter ballots, vote tabulations or any other technical aspect of the election.

Since returning to office, Trump and allies have revived investigations into the 2020 contest and pushed election security back to the center of his administration’s agenda. Gabbard’s ODNI was one part of that effort, hauling off and analyzing voting systems from Puerto Rico and later becoming involved in a federal investigation of 2020 election records in Georgia.

Wareham said the ODNI officials directly overseeing the company’s technical work wanted the research to continue. Both he and Gulati described the ODNI staff they worked with as professionals who wanted to protect the security of election systems.

The resistance, Wareham said, came from a separate White House collective that was repeatedly dissatisfied Mojave had not produced evidence supporting claims that the 2020 election had been manipulated.

“There was a separate group — let’s call them White House-adjacent — who was dissatisfied,” he said. “They were dissatisfied overall that I was not willing to name and shame at that moment” and declare that Trump had actually won the 2020 election.

Asked whether he believed Mojave’s government work was axed because it failed to find the “smoking gun” some officials wanted, Wareham said: “I believe that was part of the termination, yes.”

Reuters reported in April that Kurt Olsen, a prominent 2020 election-denier and Trump adviser involved in efforts to investigate the election, pressed Mojave to broaden its work in search of evidence that could support those claims.

Olsen, who now works at the Justice Department, turned against the company when its research failed to uncover evidence that the Puerto Rico machines had been hacked. He advocated terminating its work and accused Mojave of secretly receiving money from billionaire George Soros, a frequent target of right-wing conspiracy theories, the news agency reported. ODNI has said Mojave’s contract ended because the company completed its voting-machine analysis.

Wareham said an ODNI official informed him while Mojave was preparing to expand its work that the company had been accused of receiving Soros funding. The allegation prompted him to compile a detailed accounting of the young company’s funding sources within three days and send it up the government chain. Asked who he was told had made the accusation, he said an ODNI official reported to him that it was Olsen.

“One, I’m not funded by George Soros,” Wareham said. “Two, it would be great to be funded by George Soros because I would probably not be here, I’d be on a yacht.”

The company kept moving forward. Wareham said Mojave briefed the White House on some of its findings around September. The firm believed it was heading toward a broader effort to remediate vulnerabilities before the midterms and conduct a deeper analysis for signs that the weaknesses it discovered had ever been actually abused.

Then came the record-long government shutdown. Wareham said that on the day he expected an expanded contract to move ahead, Mojave instead received a stop-work order and no additional funding.

“I think the government shutdown was all that was required, really, to have some folks that I didn’t know were still in the game, again, White-House adjacent, to take their shot,” he said. Wareham stopped short of saying he had direct proof that White House officials ordered Mojave removed because of its findings, but said “it was reported to me it was Kurt Olsen” who led the efforts.

The White House, ODNI and Olsen did not return requests for comment.

Identified vulnerabilities

Mojave had found many issues with the machines it examined. Gulati described the Puerto Rico system during the Voting Village presentation as “deeply insecure,” saying it did not meet the security bar he would expect from “an average low-risk application, let alone critical infrastructure.”

Researchers identified at least 12 major vulnerabilities in commercial software installed on the system, Gulati said. Mojave successfully executed five of them. None were newly discovered flaws, and fixes were already available — in some cases well before the system was used in the election.

Other weaknesses were rooted more deeply in how the system was built and deployed. Some passwords could be easily cracked and others were embedded directly into software. Firewalls were turned off on critical systems and ports were left open. Gulati was particularly critical of the system’s cryptography, which he described as being “in shambles.”

The company does not believe every problem it found necessarily stopped at Puerto Rico, as its formal review covered only one system from one manufacturer in one jurisdiction. Gulati suspects the issues could extend beyond a single voting machine company, though Mojave has not examined enough systems from other manufacturers to establish that.

“I don’t expect that the problems are unique to them,” he said. “I think many manufacturers probably exhibit the same problems.”

Mojave produced an approximately 100-page document of the Puerto Rico findings. Gulati said Mojave has been in discussions with Liberty Vote — which acquired Dominion’s election business last year — and that Liberty told the researchers it does not plan to make changes before November.

Liberty said it has not received Mojave’s report.

“Liberty Vote is not in receipt of any such report so, therefore, we cannot provide any comment,” a spokesperson said. “As always, Liberty Vote is committed to advancing the future of secure American elections.”

No evidence of vote tampering

Looking at the systems headed into the midterms, Gulati said, “I do know that as of now, the state that we have described is going to be pretty similar to what will be deployed in November.”

Despite the extensive findings, Gulati repeatedly returned to what the researchers did not establish: “We found extensive and largely unacceptable weaknesses,” he said in the presentation. “But we did not find evidence that those weaknesses were actively exploited or that votes were altered.”

That distinction has drawn renewed attention as Trump and his allies again focus on election matters.

Last month, the president used a prime-time White House address to release newly declassified intelligence he said showed China interfered in the 2020 election. Among several disclosures, Trump pointed to intelligence showing Beijing had acquired personal information on roughly 220 million American voters. But the documents did not show China altered votes or gained the ability to manipulate voting systems.

Gulati echoed those conclusions Friday when asked about the declassification.

“The China thing isn’t really much of anything,” he said, arguing that a large amount of the voter information at issue could be obtained commercially and should not be confused with access to election systems in ways that can manipulate votes.

“There is no evidence that I know of that says China successfully or any other country has successfully infiltrated our systems and manipulated votes in any way,” he added.

Wareham called the 100-page document a preliminary report and said the firm had wanted another six months to a year to dig deeper into the underlying data.

Gulati said the company’s interactions with the ODNI employees overseeing that work were markedly different from the political pressure the researchers later encountered. “We were never pressured to put anything in our reports that was untrue or politically leaning in a certain way,” he said of those officials.

Wareham said Friday that Mojave itself has pushed for its report to be made public for roughly a year and has recently been told it could soon emerge through a Freedom of Information Act request. Nextgov/FCW could not immediately determine the origin of the FOIA requester. As of publishing time, ODNI’s FOIA logs are available up until January 2025.

“I’m a little annoyed that we are very close to midterms and we had a whole year to freaking figure this out,” Wareham said.

With their government work scrapped, he announced at the Voting Village that he had filed paperwork to create the Machine Assurance Institute, seeking to bring together cybersecurity researchers and election technology companies to examine and independently verify voting infrastructure.

“We wanted to be the national security answer, and put to bed, finally, discussions about prior elections and/or accusations of voter fraud,” said Wareham. “Because, believe it or not, I find it fairly national security-destabilizing to constantly accuse each other of cheating.”

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How a research paper helped spark Utah’s data center water law

Chris Teale — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

Utah this year became the first state to mandate more transparency around how data centers use and consume water, in a joint effort between lawmakers, researchers and advocacy groups.

The result was a bill that Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed in March requiring new data centers in the state that are over 10,000 square feet in size and use at least 75 acre-feet of water a year to report their water usage to Utah’s Division of Water Rights. Those reporting requirements include the sources of their water, what it will be used for, conservation efforts, water quality and more. While the data will be anonymized, total use will be aggregated and released to the public.

The law, which has since been replicated in Nebraska, comes as data center operators and developers come under increasing pressure about the strain they may place on electricity and water. That’s become especially apparent in Utah, where the Stratos Project in Box Elder County has sparked months of controversy and is the subject of a lawsuit. Cox signed an executive order in May to establish what he called a “higher bar” for data center development in the state.

State Rep. Jill Koford, who sponsored the bill in the Utah House, said during a committee hearing that this legislative effort is to provide “transparency and a reporting mechanism for data centers.”

“The goal is to give local water providers and the state an idea of how our most precious commodity, water, is being used,” Koford continued. The bill received strong support in both chambers.

The effort began as a project by three fellows at the Aspen Institute’s Aspen Policy Academy, who undertook research into the growth of data centers in Utah even as the Great Salt Lake saw a record low water level. It was completed as part of the 2024 Science and Technology Policy Fellowship, a program to teach science and technology experts how to impact policy.

The three research fellows began by pulling information about existing data centers in the state and their water consumption, which are less advanced than the ones being built and are much smaller. But very little public information was available, including on how much water was consumed by a data center as opposed to being diverted elsewhere in the water cycle after it is used.

Researchers sent requests under Utah’s open records law, the Government Records Access and Management Act, on the 21 data centers in the Salt Lake City area they could identify, and received responses for seven that varied in specificity and helpfulness. That became more significant as data centers have taken hold in headlines, especially as more jurisdictions fight against building them.

“Data centers are really complex, and they have flown under the radar of policy and the popular imagination for so long,” said Rebecca Kilberg, one of the three Aspen Institute fellows who produced the report. “Part of that is because they could be in your closet, and it wasn't going to show up very much on your bill. You had to keep the room cool, but now you have hyperscale data centers being the norm, and if you look at how they're built even, you'll see that they're much more concentrated than many other industries.”

In response to the lack of transparency and guidelines around data center water use, the fellows recommended that the state create a database of data centers’ water usage and use that information to draft water efficiency targets. They suggested that those targets be set using Water Usage Effectiveness, the ratio between a data center’s water usage and its energy consumption, to align with industry leaders.

Having to disclose water usage and meet various efficiency targets would then incentivize data center operators to use more efficient cooling technology, which already exists and uses far less water, the fellows argued.

Then after being featured on a podcast and heard by officials from environmental nonprofit Stewardship Utah, the policy brief was turned into legislation that was debated and passed during the state legislative session earlier this year, albeit watered down in its requirements from previous versions. Kilberg noted that having guardrails around data centers is a bipartisan issue that touches various areas of everyday life.

“It's health, it's economic prosperity, it's literally the water that you need to drink to stay alive, it's your recreation, it's your backyard,” she said. “We're not saying everything needs to go back in time, but this is something that's very happily at an intersection that people recognize is not political for whatever reason. I hope that people can seize this moment to unite over something that could so obviously be better and is being controlled by these very wealthy groups that are not invested in the area.”

Kilberg said the effort in Utah is “highly replicable,” and recent reports support that stance. Researchers at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment at the University of Colorado Law School found that more states are using or considering using reporting and conservation requirements, as well as financial incentives and putting strings on appropriated money to respond to water demand.

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation also said in a report that moratoriums like those issued in New York and Texas are less effective than transparency around water usage, especially as water is a local issue that varies widely between jurisdictions.

Koford said data center operators can also benefit from these requirements, as they can not only provide information to the state but also the public. A recent Gallup survey showed that 71% of Americans are opposed to building data centers in their area, partly as they are unsure about the effect on their electricity and water supplies. Koford said during the March committee meeting this law can help operators “tell their story about how they are being good stewards of our water.”

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Senate Finance panel’s top Dem proposes excise tax on new data centers

Alexandra Kelley — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

A new draft white paper from a top Senate Democrat proposes tax code updates that would shift incentives for data center construction.

The paper, released on Aug. 6 by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. — ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee — proposes changing the incentives that could spur more data center construction amid the national boom in a bid to offset consumer burdens associated with more data centers.

Wyden’s framework hinges on two changes to existing tax code: removing the current tax incentives that apply to data center construction and applying a new excise tax on data centers whose workloads primarily handle AI compute.

With the removal of the tax incentive and the creation of an excise tax on data center operations, the new revenue would help address the myriad concerns with increased data center costs, including higher energy prices, workforce turmoil and a drain on broader resources.

“American communities are rightfully questioning whether the rapid buildout of data centers across the nation will benefit them, as local disruptions rise and Americans grow concerned about the long-term career prospects of millions of workers,” Wyden said in a press release. “These proposals are a first step towards safeguarding taxpayer dollars and ensuring there are resources to support American workers displaced by the coming disruptions to the economy.”

Wyden includes several caveats to his tax proposal. The new excise tax would function as a gross receipts tax that charges a fee the total revenue or sales of a business.

Two types of data centers will be subject to the tax: those owned, operated or rented by massive data center operators, and those being used by major data center payors, which include major hyperscalers Amazon and Meta. The paper stipulates that the tax would target the large AI hyperscalers and other entities that are primarily “causing the data center boom and most able to pay.”

Wyden’s proposal offers selective exemptions, which apply to data center assets constructed before 2024. It states that “for all but the largest actors,” the share of data center assets built before 2024 won’t be subject to the new tax.

“These proposals will not end data center development or put at risk the U.S. maintaining its

status as the global leader in AI and other innovative technologies,” the paper reads. “Rather, they will ensure we have the resources to help the communities and workers most impacted as data center construction continues.”

The proposal also says that the tax would apply to data centers in space. The draft paper stipulates that if a space-based data center attempts to avoid the tax by being labeled as a non-U.S. asset, a withholding tax will apply to payments made by U.S. taxpayers to use the data center. Space-focused tech firms, including Blue Origin and SpaceX, have proposed building millions of orbital data centers.

Wyden also solicited feedback on his proposal, calling for the public to provide the Senate Finance Committee’s minority staff with comments by Aug. 31. The paper said that discussion draft language is expected to arrive in the coming fall.

Data center construction and the question of who bears the burden of increased electricity rates and other potential hazards has become a major political talking point. Democrats, in particular, have been looking to leverage growing opposition to further data center construction as a political issue ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

In March, President Donal Trump unveiled the Ratepayer Protection Pledge that brought companies Amazon, xAI, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, Google and OpenAI to agree to absorb utility costs stemming from data centers handling their technology’s compute loads.

Other lawmakers have also turned their attention to issues brought about by the data center boom. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., previously called for a moratorium on new construction until more information can be garnered about both data center impacts and AI itself.

“We cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity,” Sanders wrote in February. “We need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue.”

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Immigration searches were conducted on Twin Falls Flock network. A month later, agreements changed.

Valentin Termite, Idaho Capital Sun — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

This story was originally published by the Idaho Capital Sun.

1:42 p.m., May 3; Indiana State Police entered a Flock automated license plate reader – known as ALPR – network lookup. The reason for the search: “Immigration (civil/administrative).”

Quickly, the nationwide system sprung into action; hundreds of ALPR systems searched for a suspect’s license plate. Among the cameras included in the search was Idaho’s Twin Falls Police Department ALPR network.

That’s according to public records obtained by activist group DeFlock Idaho. They show that the Twin Falls Police Department ALPR systems have been searched for immigration-related purposes at least 631 times across March, May and June of 2026.

Nationwide police agencies conducted the searches through Flock’s national network sharing, including lookups from Indiana State Police, Georgia’s Lawrenceville Police, Florida’s Bay County Sheriff’s Office and Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission, among others.

In doing so, the searches inadvertently evaded both Idaho Code 49-1432 and self-imposed restrictions by Twin Falls PD prohibiting the use of ALPR cameras for immigration purposes, as outlined in Flock’s Transparency Portal.

Nearly one month after those searches were conducted, however, the Twin Falls Police Department Administrative Services Division Lieutenant Steven Gassert told the Idaho Capital Sun it changed its national network sharing settings to no longer permit outside agencies from searching the system.

“We want to make sure that we are being respectful of our citizens’ views and opinions on this, while still seeing the importance of technology when it comes to modern policing in our community,” Gassert said in an interview.

With cross-jurisdictional data sharing appearing as a major incentive for police agencies entering into agreements with Flock, communities may need to navigate a complicated patchwork of local, national or agency-specific regulations.

Local Flock Searches Limited by Idaho Legislation and Local Agreements

Flock automated license plate readers use AI technologies to automatically scan vehicle license plates for information.

When any vehicle drives past an ALPR camera, the system takes a snapshot of the back, registering its license plate, car make or model, colors and other apparent characteristics.

If an alert is tied to that vehicle, such as a wanted person report or car theft, then the system notifies police officers of the suspect traveling past the location.

Officers can also conduct specific searches of the system, accessing the entire network to locate given license plates, and that often includes a national lookup option whereby outside agencies can be searched.

Police departments can opt into the national lookup feature, but the system works by reciprocity: agencies can only access national data by sharing themselves. For some within law enforcement, data-sharing offers a major incentive:

“When (a suspect) leaves our area, we still have the opportunity to follow up and catch them when they end up in another area, so that is a benefit,” said Jessica Clements, Idaho Falls Police Department’s public information officer, said in an interview. “And on the reverse, when someone who has a warrant or who is a danger to the public enters our area, we get notification of that as well.”

Through sharing agreements, police agencies can more easily track suspects across jurisdictions, Clements said.

The web-like national system, however, may invalidate local restrictions for ALPR cameras, as agencies only answer to local or state guidelines for the technology. With the national lookup tool enabled, outside agencies can still conduct searches that local cities might not allow.

“If an officer in Arizona uses a nationwide lookup tool to search for license plate ABC123, all the system does is go out and ask the agencies involved: ‘Hey, do you have anything with license plate ABC123?’” Gassert said. “If our agency had license plate ABC123, then we would provide that information to them.”

The information sharing happens automatically, meaning data identifying suspects would be shared with the requesting agency regardless of manual local input, according to Gassert.

Network audits received by DeFlock Idaho show access information from Twin Falls ALPRs, with information detailing an organization’s name, the date and the reason for the search as listed by officers.

Idaho Code 49-1432 restricts ALPR searches, like those conducted by Flock cameras, to “the investigation of felony, misdemeanor crimes, traffic accidents or to search for missing or endangered persons.”

“I have to follow (these) laws because I am working in the jurisdiction of the state of Idaho,” Gassert said. “Now, if someone in California or Arizona was doing a search, they have to follow the laws of California, Arizona or whatever state they’re working in.”

Immigration searches, especially those labeled “administrative” or “civil,” would not apply.

In addition, the Twin Falls Police Department maintains local policies with the Flock company that should, theoretically, prohibit “immigration enforcement” queries, according to Flock’s Transparency Portal.

“We have a very strong 30-plus year policy outlining that we do not get involved in immigration investigations or immigration situations in our community,” Gassert said. “So we do not allow our officers to utilize that.”

Still, participation in the national system allowed multiple agencies to search Twin Falls data for “immigration,” “civil/administrative” or “I.C.E.”

Gassert said the immigration searches did not result in data pulls from the Twin Falls Police Department, but they occurred nonetheless. Had the ALPR cameras captured any of the suspect license plates, he said the system would have automatically forwarded the information to outside agencies.

Gassert also clarified that Twin Falls PD never granted complete access to the cameras to immigration enforcement agencies.

“We actually, on a weekly basis, receive requests from the FBI and immigration to have access to our Flock system, and we deny it every week,” he said.

The Idaho Attorney General’s Office could not be reached for comment on whether searches of Idaho networks by nationwide agencies could constitute a punishable violation of Idaho Code.

Policy Changes

One month after immigration searches were identified by network audits, the Twin Falls Police Department cancelled its participation in Flock’s national lookup on July 22.

The change means no agency can access Twin Falls data through a national lookup anymore, according to Gassert.

When asked if the shift in department policy came following community concerns, also referenced in an email inquiry about immigration searches sent July 20 by the Idaho Capital Sun, Gassert replied: “Not these (searches) in particular that you’re bringing up. We’re constantly reevaluating this program, and based on some of the conversations and comments that we have about citizens, we go back and look at ways that we can improve.”

Idaho Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.

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Maryland to expand chip EBT card program statewide

Kaitlyn Levinson — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:30:13 -0400

Maryland is rolling out chip-enabled electronic benefit transfer cards statewide following promising initial results from a recent pilot program. The move makes Maryland the fourth state in the nation to adopt the modernized cards.

The Maryland Department of Human Services is currently sending approximately 500,000 of the chip-enabled EBT cards to residents and local aid facilities, said JD Robinson, acting director of the Office of Benefits Access at DHS. The new cards aim to reduce the risk of fraud or theft within the state’s administration of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and other cash assistance services.

“The front and center point of this whole rollout is security,” Robinson told Route Fifty, particularly as, he said, states are still reeling from “the crisis that we faced in 2022 and 2023, when we saw this meteoric rise in benefit theft that hasn't really slowed down much at all nationwide.”

Indeed, traditional magnetic-stripe cards are susceptible to skimming devices, which can be used to steal card data, and ultimately, the cardholder’s benefits. Since March 2023, DHS has replaced $52 million in stolen benefits, including SNAP and pandemic-era EBT benefits. Nationwide, government benefit fraud has increased 182% since fiscal year 2021, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

During a pilot program last month, DHS sent roughly 1,500 chip cards to residents across Anne Arundel and Dorchester counties, as well as Baltimore City. Of that total, 1,049 cards were activated and about half of the transactions they were used for included tap-to-pay and chip insertions, DHS officials said in a July statement.

The main data DHS leaders were monitoring was chip card activation rates and how quickly customers were able to do so before they started making purchases, Robinson said, adding that “we were looking for a 70% [activation rate], and we cleared that.”

Program data also indicated that beneficiaries used the chip cards for ATM and online transactions. Throughout the pilot, 92% of transactions were securely approved and generated more than $191,000 in retailer activity, according to DHS officials. The overwhelming majority of participants — 98% — live within 10 miles of a retailer offering chip-transaction services.

DHS will continue to track card activation and use rates and retailers in the state who are able to participate in chip card technology, Robinson said.

Maryland joins three other states — Alabama, California and Oklahoma — who have already adopted and began rolling out chip EBT cards.

The California Department of Social Services reported in January that EBT theft declined 83% by Nov. 2025 after implementing anti-fraud initiatives, including the deployment of chip cards earlier the same year. Alabama and Oklahoma officials started mailing out chip EBT cards to residents this year, following their respective pilot programs conducted in late 2025 and this past spring.

Other state leaders have indicated that they will begin transitioning to chip cards, particularly as states face heightened scrutiny toward the accuracy of their public assistance programs.

The New Jersey Department of Human Services announced last month that it is launching a pilot program for chip cards this summer in three counties over the course of four weeks.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced that the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has contracted with a vendor to begin issuing new EBT cards beginning next year. And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro has also approved the state’s budget for next year with $7 million allocated for replacing magnetic-stripe EBT cards with chip technology.

For Maryland and other states, chip cards can offer officials and benefit recipients relief, Robinson said, because too often benefits are stolen, and “people come to the checkout line, pull out their old EBT card … and they swipe it, and they see they have nothing on there.”

“The ability for us to have this basic level of security,” he said, “cannot be overstated.”

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Tribes join pushback against prediction markets

Chris Teale — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 13:00:00 -0400

New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a lawsuit against prediction market platform Kalshi late last month, alleging it is running an illegal gambling operation.

That marks yet another increase in the number of state governments looking to crack down on prediction markets, even in the midst of federal opposition to those efforts. Meanwhile, Tribal governments and representatives are also looking to curb them over worries they undermine gaming in Indian Country and Tribal sovereignty more broadly.

Last month, the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States passed a resolution at its meeting opposing the expansion of prediction markets and calling on Congress and the states to clarify prediction markets’ legal status and “further clarify that such markets are a form of illegal gambling.”

The group, which represents lawmakers from states where gaming is legal, said the platforms “choose largely to operate outside the established regulatory frameworks governing licensed sports betting, casino gaming, and other forms of legalized gambling.”

Meanwhile, Tribal governments are on edge about a proposed new rule from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which looks to define “gaming,” define factors for when gaming-related event contracts are contrary to the public interest, and suggests that contracts based on sporting events are unlikely to be found to be contrary to the public interest. The rule also would assert CFTC’s exclusive role in regulating event contracts traded as swaps or futures contracts.

In a statement to the Senate Indian Affairs Committee ahead of a roundtable it hosted last week, James Siva, chairman of the California Nations Indian Gaming Association, said prediction markets might become a “nationwide gambling that bypasses the carefully balanced Tribal, state, and federal regulatory framework that has governed gaming for decades.” Respecting Tribal sovereignty, he said, is also key.

“For Indian Country, the stakes are profound,” Siva’s statement continued. “Tribal gaming is not simply an industry. It is a cornerstone of Tribal sovereignty, self-governance, and economic self-determination. The revenues generated by Tribal gaming fund essential government services, including healthcare, education, public safety, housing, infrastructure and programs for Tribal communities. These investments are especially critical in communities that continue to face some of the highest poverty rates and lowest life expectancy in the nation.”

Gaming in Indian Country got its start with the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988, which laid out the regulatory process and structure for how Tribes could go into gaming in individual states. It also specified that states had to work with Tribes in the compacting process, laying out agreements on how gaming would operate and be regulated while respecting Tribal lands.

California alone passed two propositions — Prop 5 and Prop 1A — to allow gambling on Tribal lands, while others did similar work legislatively or via ballot initiative. The U.S. Census Bureau found last year that the expansion of Tribal casinos has helped alleviate the poverty level, but a lot of work still lies ahead.

In a separate interview with Route Fifty, Siva warned that early projections suggest that 5% of Tribal lands’ more than $42 billion in gross gaming revenue could be lost to prediction markets. Gaming is a highly regulated industry, he said, and prediction markets should not be allowed to circumvent that process.

“Not to mince words, but prediction markets are the single largest threat that we have seen to Tribal government gaming since the industry's been created,” Siva said. “[It's] been really frustrating to see how quickly they've been able to grow because in our minds, and in our view, this is illegal sports betting that's being condoned at the federal level. No way around it. That is our position that these are illegal activities.”

In a bid to avoid any conflict between prediction markets and Tribal governments, U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Brian Schatz — the chair and vice chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, respectively — urged the CFTC to conduct formal government-to-government Tribal consultation on its rule and extend the public comment period. CFTC spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment.

Other Tribal representatives argued they are not wholly against prediction markets as they have value in certain areas. Just not on sports and other events that are bet on already, they said.

“A lot of Tribes are in the agricultural spaces and the agricultural industry, and they recognize that there is a need to hedge on certain commodities, and they see the value in that,” Michael Hoenig, vice president and associate general counsel for gaming for the Yuhaaviatam of San Manuel Nation in California, said during a panel discussion at the National Conference of State Legislatures’ Legislative Summit last month. “What we're talking about, and the kinds of events contracts that Tribes are in opposition to are those for sports betting, and those for what we see coming down the line for casino-style games.”

Kaitlyn Levinson contributed reporting from NCSL’s Legislative Summit in Chicago.

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Local governments are using AI more and more. But are they doing it wisely?

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 12:00:00 -0400

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The most visible faces of artificial intelligence (AI) are things like ChatGPT, self-driving cars and humanoid robots. But AI is also quietly making inroads in our neighbourhoods.

Across the world, local governments already use AI to answer questions, guide planning enquiries, manage infrastructure, monitor the environment, and improve public services.

AI can help local governments meet rising community expectations while facing budget pressure, ageing infrastructure and workforce constraints.

But becoming smarter is only half the challenge. The real test is whether AI is used responsibly, transparently and in ways communities can understand and trust.

In a new report, we and our colleagues examine how AI is reshaping local government – and how we can make sure it really serves the public interest.

AI Is Already Changing Local Government

Local governments around the world are already implementing AI systems in customer service, operations, infrastructure, environmental management and surveillance.

One of the most visible changes is in customer service, where AI-powered systems often handle routine enquiries. In the United States, the City of Amarillo uses a virtual assistant to handle about 16,000 resident enquiries each month, helping defer a US$1.8 million call centre expansion.

In the United Kingdom, two councils use a chatbot named ELLIS to respond across more than 1,000 local government topics, allowing staff to focus on complex cases.

In less-visible administrative work, Cumbria County Council in the UK introduced a new tool to automatically process some parking permit applications and school invoices, saving over one tonne of paper in three months.

Planning and infrastructure management can also benefit. In Sweden, Helsingborg City equipped waste-collection vehicles with AI image recognition to detect potholes.

In the US, Boston adopted an AI system to optimise traffic signals, reducing average delays by 13.5% and unnecessary stops by 20% at some intersections.

Environmental management is another expanding application. In Australia, Brimbank City Council uses computer vision on waste collection vehicles to identify damaged roadside assets.

In China, Chongqing city uses an AI-enabled system to monitor vegetation and identify pest infestations and generate maintenance work orders.

Smarter Local Governments Need Smarter Governance

How can local governments make sure these technologies are used fairly, transparently and in the public interest?

Local governments remain accountable for outcomes, even when AI systems make decisions. Residents rightly expect those decisions to be fair, transparent and aligned with public values.

An example from the UK shows what this might look like. One London council is using an AI tool to cut the time social workers spend on writing case notes and assessments by up to 60%, while retaining privacy safeguards, consent and human review.

Researchers often regard responsible AI as a broad policy ideal. Our findings show that, for local governments, it is becoming something more tangible: a public expectation that differs from place to place.

6 Priorities for Local Government AI

Drawing on policy analysis, community surveys, and interviews with local government practitioners, our study found AI adoption is outpacing the governance needed to ensure its responsible use.

We identify six priorities for responsible AI adoption in local government:

clear accountability. Governments need to define where AI can be used, who is accountable for its use, and when human oversight is required
organisational capability. Elected representatives, executives, and staff need a thorough understanding of what AI can do and what its limitations are
data and technical safeguards. Strong systems for data governance and privacy protection, as well as built-in safeguards, can make sure AI systems are secure and reliable, and keep bias and other harms to a minimum
transparency and human review. Residents need to know when AI is being used, how it influences decisions, and how they can request human review where appropriate
community participation. Communities need meaningful opportunities to help shape how AI is used in local government and the services that affect their lives
workforce preparation. Local governments should invest in the skills of their workers so AI can augment human expertise, enhance public service delivery, and support the local government workforce rather than replacing it.

Public Trust Is Essential

AI has enormous potential to help local governments deliver faster, fairer and more responsive public services.

But they will need to build public trust by showing their AI systems are reliable, accountable and used for a clear public purpose. That requires transparency, human oversight, ongoing evaluation and meaningful community engagement, not simply better algorithms.

Our research found that, across five countries (Australia, the US, Spain, Hong Kong, and Saudi Arabia), public trust consistently shaped how people perceived the risks of AI use by local governments.

One way to build public trust is to make AI visible, accessible and useful in people’s interactions with local government. In Australia, the City of Stirling introduced an AI-supported engagement platform that helps residents to ask questions and participate in consultations.

In the UK, a town planning body has piloted a system for summarising public submissions which has made responses much faster. By letting residents engage with AI directly or see its benefits in consultation, these tools can build public confidence.

Responsible AI governance is not just a technical or regulatory challenge. It is essential for ensuring AI is used ethically, transparently, and in ways that reflect community values and expectations.

Tan Yigitcanlar, Professor of Urban Studies and Planning, Queensland University of Technology; Anne Jeevana David, PhD Researcher, Queensland University of Technology; Ke Liu, PhD Researcher, Queensland University of Technology; Marasinghe Pelige Raveena Lakmini, PhD Researcher, Queensland University of Technology, and Sajani Senadheera, PhD Researcher, School of Architecture and Built Environment, Queensland University of Technology

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New ‘Water Watch Center’ launched to help small utilities stop cyberattacks

David DiMolfetta — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 11:00:00 -0400

LAS VEGAS — A new program is seeking to assist water providers around the country as multiple states grapple with possible Iran-linked cyber intrusions against water infrastructure.

The Water Watch Center provides direct cyber mitigation support to utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people, which represents most of the nation’s community water systems. Launched at this year’s DEF CON hacker convention, the initiative is a joint effort between the National Rural Water Association and DEF CON Franklin, a project of the Cyber Policy Initiative at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

More than 30 community water systems in Minnesota were targeted late last month, according to state officials. Around 12 states have reported similar activity in recent days, though state officials said they continued operating safely and experienced no known effects on public health. The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are working on incident response.

An initial group of five cybersecurity firms will help deliver services to water utilities as part of the initiative.

“These leading cyber firms and NRWA are architecting a scalable cyber delivery model that has eluded water industry and national security officials to date,” Jake Braun, the co-founder of DEF CON Franklin and a former White House acting principal deputy national cyber director, said in a statement.

Retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, who led U.S. Cyber Command and the NSA from 2018 to 2024, said at DEF CON this year that water utilities around the country are highly exposed, and he pushed for higher defense standards in the sector.

“These [programmable logic controllers] should not be exposed to the internet,” he told reporters in a briefing on Friday, referring to the small computers used to operate pumps, valves and other equipment inside water facilities.

Some U.S. officials believe Iran may be responsible, though there has been no definitive public confirmation.

“I think [the government] is taking a very measured approach to make sure that they have the right actor that’s doing this,” Nakasone said when asked about why Iran hasn’t publicly been linked to the hacks

“I look at intent. I look at capability. I look at history. I’m not the person that’s making the call on the attribution, but I see an actor here that has certainly shown a history of being able to do this,” he said. “They certainly have the capability, and I think there’s an intent right now — we’re in conflict with Iran.”

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