Alexis Goldstein, a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau worker, is running for Maryland’s 6th congressional district on a pledge to ban data centers federally. In a phone interview, she tied her push to what she calls the fallout from Washington’s cryp
When Alexis Goldstein talks about the issue, she doesn’t start with policy language. She starts with a picture: a building that hums and smells. soaking up public support. absorbing money meant for something else. and leaving neighbors with noise. heat. and a sense that nobody in Washington is listening.
Goldstein, a Democrat running to challenge incumbent Rep. April McClain Delaney in Maryland’s 6th congressional district. is betting her campaign on a single. blunt promise: ban data centers federally. She is one of several Democrats trying to knock Delaney off in the party primary later this month. and one of several former federal workers returning to the political stage after what she describes as experiencing Donald Trump’s administration from the inside.
The candidate’s anger is personal as well as political. Goldstein says she was fired from her job at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau by job-cutters at Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Before she was removed, she worked on efforts to protect Americans from crypto scams. In Goldstein’s telling, that work is only more urgent now, in an era of artificial intelligence.
Her opening argument against data centers is not framed as a narrow zoning debate. She compares the buildout to the financial hype cycle she watched during the 2008 financial crisis. “All of the financial engineering that happened in 2008 feels like child’s play compared to the financial engineering that is backing the rise of data centers. ” she said. drawing a distinction between what she describes as the assets used to support securitizations then and the assets she says are powering the data center buildout now.
In her view, the comparison comes down to durability. In 2008. she said. “the asset that was behind all of the securitization was a house. ” while she argues that today’s financing is backed by graphics cards that age quickly. “The difference being that at the end of the day. in 2008 the asset that was behind all of the securitization was a house. and the asset that’s behind the securitization in all of the debt structures for data centers is a graphics card that ages like milk and is obsolete in two to three years.” She added that people assumed a house would always have value. and that turned out to be wrong—though she doubts a GPU will last either.
Goldstein’s campaign also traces its roots to a moment she says forced her attention back to Congress. She pointed to a 2025 vote in the House of Representatives on two bills—the Genius Act and the Clarity Act—both of which she said would loosen crypto rules and treat a “magic entity” as exempt from the same financial constraints as other financial products. Goldstein said Delaney, the incumbent, voted for both.
Goldstein said she was “frustrated with every Democrat that voted for it. ” but she singled out the contradiction she sees as most painful for voters: Delaney is representing a state that has lost the most federal jobs. In Goldstein’s account, the bills “couldn’t pass without Democratic support,” yet Democrats, she says, “demanded nothing for it.”.
That history connects to her present-day view of tech and regulatory credibility. She described her time during the Biden administration as a period of skepticism toward crypto and then. in her framing. resistance turning into favoritism. She said the SEC “threw down” and that the FDIC tried to keep crypto out of the banking system. but she argued that other parts of the administration were trying to “play footsie with crypto.”.
Goldstein went further, saying some bureaucrats were worried about being seen as uninformed about technology. She argued that people with influence believed claims she says were outlandish without asking basic questions “for fear of looking stupid.” She named Mark Andreessen as an example of a narrative she rejects—saying it is not true that the Biden administration was “out to get us. ” and that. in her view. officials were trying to be friendly.
She also said “The White House had calls with Sam Bankman-Fried on them.”
For Goldstein. the result is a lesson she wants to bring to Congress: “a healthy dose of skepticism.” Her plan includes what she describes as financial pressure points aimed at data centers specifically. She supports AOC and Bernie Sanders’ data center moratorium, but said she thinks it does not go far enough. Then she moved to numbers meant to frame the issue as a debt and risk problem rather than an infrastructure debate.
Goldstein said. “They spent $1.4 trillion on data centers. and they’ve only earned $600 billion industry-wide. not even half as much as they spent.” She argued that the buildout is being funded with debt. not with revenue. She cited Meta’s financing as a sign of what she sees as runaway momentum. saying Meta issued $25 billion in corporate bonds last year to raise money to build more data centers. calling it “the largest corporate bond issuance in history.”.
In her telling, the people backing the financing look like the ones who were involved in 2008. “And if you look at the sharks, and by that I mean, like, the hedge funds and the private equity funds that are financing this, it’s the same people as the 2008 financial crisis!”
Goldstein said the public seems to understand the core of the problem while leaders lag behind. “I feel like this is an issue where the public gets it, and our leaders and Congress don’t,” she said.
On the ground in Maryland’s 6th. she says the resistance is already visible—and not confined to one political wing. She described the reaction she hears from voters as immediate: “They hate data centers.” When people learn that one of her platforms is banning data centers federally. she said. “they’re thrilled.”.
She pointed to the district’s five counties and the incumbent’s 2024 primary path. Delaney won the Democratic primary in 2024 with about 24,000 votes across five counties. Goldstein then described a separate local pushback: in Frederick County. she said. there was a citizen-led ballot referendum to roll back local elected approval of a data center. She said 22,000 people in a single county signed the petition.
In Goldstein’s framing, that number matters because she compared it to the earlier primary turnout. “The same amount of people who voted for the current incumbent in the last primary, across the whole district, signed a petition opposing data centers in one county,” she said.
She also said her campaign reflects another issue unfolding in the district—one tied to federal policy and enforcement. Goldstein described an emergency involving a DHS warehouse purchased in Washington County. She said everyone she hears about opposes the warehouse. but she argues the debate can’t be separated from how detention and surveillance work. “I’m like, well how do you think they put people in the detention center, they use the surveillance dragnet. These things are connected,” she said.
Goldstein’s opposition to “tech” is also more targeted than her opponents might assume. She said she does not mean data centers filled with server racks in general, and she clarified she is focused on what she calls AI data centers filled “with nothing but these graphics cards.”
That focus shapes her policy view as well. She argues the federal government should enforce existing law rather than invent new rules. She said the powerful should be bound by the rules that already exist, pointing to the crypto situation as a parallel case.
On Big Tech, she said the Equal Credit Opportunity Act already bars discrimination based on protected characteristics, and that she believes algorithms used by companies such as Facebook can violate that law. “So why don’t we just enforce the laws we already have against these entities?” she asked.
In her view, the playbook from tech is familiar: argue that they are different, that they are special, and then ask for exceptions. She said she believes Congress can do more simply by rejecting that argument.
Goldstein also described what she thinks ordinary residents can do. Her remarks emphasized civic friction rather than waiting for Washington to act. She said people attend hearings, organize ballot referendums like they did in Frederick County, and write letters to the editor. “People are organizing ballot referendums, like they did in Frederick County,” she said. She added that friends are organizing across the country.
Still, she said she wishes she had one extra piece of information: “OK, this is the exact amount of money you want to give for the data center. This is what we want to do with that X billion dollars instead.”
That question led her directly to what she wants her district to gain if funds currently supporting data centers were redirected. She said she wants more funding for overcrowded schools. She said she wants more funding for libraries. describing them as “beautiful centers of resistance and gathering” and pointing to immigration clinics in Maryland. She also cited access she said people can get through local libraries: free Narcan in Frederick County and in Washington County. She added that recreation centers come up often in conversations. especially because many people she hears from work two jobs and would like kids to have a place “other than the library or in addition to the library.”.
Goldstein said the broader frustration is straightforward: money used for tax breaks for Big Tech building data centers should be spent on things that “make our lives better.” She also tied the spending choice to what she called “waging war in Iran. ” arguing that putting public money into data center tax breaks and military priorities reflects a misalignment with what communities are asking for.
Near the end of the interview. Goldstein said federal workers have been close to elected officials in the last 18 months and pointed to a nonprofit called the Federal Unionist Network. She said it is represented by federal workers in unions that are trying to radicalize local unions and push for more radical change. and she said a number of people—“a whole bunch of us”—are running for office.
But she framed her own run less as a protest slogan and more as a response to multiple crises. “I guess what I see running for office is more about how do we address the crises we face? It’s just one way to grab the mic,” she said.
Alexis Goldstein April McClain Delaney Maryland 6th congressional district data centers ban data centers Consumer Financial Protection Bureau CFPB Elon Musk Department of Government Efficiency crypto scams Genius Act Clarity Act AOC moratorium Bernie Sanders Meta bond issuance Sam Bankman-Fried DHS warehouse Frederick County referendum Equal Credit Opportunity Act