Trump-backed tax break a windfall for controversial industry

Sen. Josh Hawley is calling out opportunity zones for turning into a tax break pipeline for Big Tech’s next land grab: AI data centers. He’s not wrong to raise an eyebrow. A program sold as a boost for struggling neighborhoods shouldn’t quietly morph into a subsidy for companies that already have teams of accountants and lobbyists to bend the rules to their advantage. If the pitch is “revive communities,” the receipts should match.

But let’s also be honest about how we got here. Opportunity zones were championed in the Trump years because they aimed to pull private money into places Washington had ignored for decades. The idea wasn’t crazy. The problem is the details, and the details always get written by the people with the most lawyers. When a tech giant drops a fortress-sized data center into a zone, the neighborhood might get a few construction jobs and a bigger power bill, while the real payoff flows elsewhere. A tax break that mostly rewards the already-rich isn’t “investment,” it’s gaming the system.

Hawley calling it “corporate welfare” will make some Republicans flinch, mostly because the phrase gets thrown around carelessly. Still, there’s a real question here: are these projects actually lifting local wages, helping small businesses, and building housing, or are they just planting server racks where land is cheap and the tax treatment is sweet? Data centers can be legitimate development, but they are not automatically community development. Show the jobs, show the local contracts, show the long-term benefit.

If this is going to be cleaned up, we’d rather see a scalpel than a sledgehammer. Tighten the rules so opportunity zone benefits track to outcomes: local hiring, real community partnerships, and proof that the project adds more than it extracts from the grid and the tax base. Keep the pro-growth spirit, stop the loophole tourism. The left will use this story to argue every Trump-era reform was a giveaway. That’s lazy. The smarter move is fixing what’s being abused and making the program deliver what it promised.