Ohio politicians want voters to believe the state’s exploding data-center industry, its pension investments, Wall Street money and Republican political network are separate stories.
I don’t believe that anymore. Follow the money and they increasingly look like one story.
Start with U.S. Sen. Jon Husted. As lieutenant governor, Husted helped sell Ohio as a data-center destination, celebrating multibillion-dollar expansions by Amazon Web Services and others. Now that voters are discovering that giant data centers can mean enormous electricity demand, infrastructure costs and tax subsidies, Husted has reinvented himself as a ratepayer protector.
That’s convenient.
It gets more interesting when you follow Wall Street’s money. Employees identifying Blackstone and KKR as their employers have contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Husted’s federal campaign, and Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman personally contributed the federal maximum. Those are individual contributions, not corporate donations—but they matter because Blackstone and KKR are becoming financial giants of the AI/data-center boom.
Blackstone, KKR and Apollo are pouring staggering amounts of capital into AI computing, data centers and the power infrastructure needed to run them. Carlyle-backed Ark Data Centers already operates facilities in Ohio. Ohio pension systems simultaneously invest billions through private equity, private credit, real estate and other alternative-investment structures involving this same Wall Street universe.
Ohio taxpayers subsidize the data centers. Ohio ratepayers help build the electrical infrastructure. Ohio pensioners provide Wall Street capital. Wall Street collects the fees. And Wall Street executives and employees contribute to politicians.
Maybe every piece of that is perfectly legitimate.
That’s why we have auditors.
Unfortunately, Ohio’s Auditor Just Joined SFOF
Ohio Auditor Keith Faber should be the obvious person to follow this money.
Instead, in 2026 Faber joined the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF).
Ohio Treasurer Robert Sprague was already there.
SFOF is particularly interesting because historically it didn’t merely bring Republican financial officials together to complain about ESG. It took sponsorship money from financial companies—including Fidelity, Invesco, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan and, historically, KKR—while providing its financial supporters access to state treasurers and other officials.
That’s quite a business model.
And Ohio is deeply embedded in the SFOF story.
Former Ohio Deputy Treasurer Seth Metcalf became president of SFOF’s board. Metcalf later became the QED figure at the center of Ohio’s bizarre STRS controversy.
And who did SFOF prominently feature and honor while Metcalf headed its board?
Vivek Ramaswamy.
Ramaswamy subsequently launched Strive Asset Management and became one of America’s loudest anti-ESG investment crusaders.
Now he wants to be governor of Ohio.
Metcalf. Sprague. Ramaswamy. Faber.
At some point, SFOF stops looking like a footnote.
Ohio Investigated the People Who Questioned STRS
The irony is almost too perfect.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost aggressively pursued STRS reform trustees Wade Steen and Rudy Fichtenbaum over their relationship with Metcalf and QED.
How much STRS money did QED ultimately receive?
Zero.
Meanwhile STRS continued putting billions of dollars into its existing investment structure and paying substantial investment-staff bonuses.
That’s where Ohio’s investigative enthusiasm suddenly became much less impressive.
Faber himself audited STRS in 2022. Even that audit raised concerns about investment bonuses and secrecy. More recent academic research raises an even more disturbing question: Did STRS have two performance numbers and use the more favorable one when calculating bonuses?
That deserves investigation.
Instead, Ohio spent years attacking the reform trustees who questioned STRS.
Now Faber wants Yost’s job.
He is running for Ohio Attorney General.
Meet the New Boss?
That’s what should concern Ohio teachers.
Yost demonstrated just how aggressively an Ohio Attorney General can use the power of his office against pension reformers.
What evidence is there that Faber would change direction?
He audited STRS without fundamentally disrupting its investment establishment. He has now joined SFOF, an organization intertwined with the same Ohio political-financial network he should be scrutinizing. And I have yet to see anything suggesting that Attorney General Faber would turn Ohio’s investigative machinery away from pension reformers and toward the people actually receiving billions of dollars of pension and infrastructure money.
I hope he proves me wrong.
Because Ohio has a spectacular forensic audit sitting in plain sight.
Follow Husted’s campaign money.
Follow Ramaswamy and SFOF.
Follow Sprague and Ohio’s public money.
Follow STRS and the private-market managers.
Follow Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Carlyle and Blue Owl.
Follow the data centers, power plants, tax exemptions and electric bills.
And follow the investment bonuses.
Ohio already knows how to investigate pension trustees who challenge the establishment.
Now let’s see Keith Faber investigate the establishment.
Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball has apparently found something more important to audit than Kentucky’s exploding data-center gold rush.
Woke investments.
Ball’s office is paying $285,000 to Prinse LLC, doing business as Prospr Aligned, in a no-bid contract to conduct a special examination of Kentucky public pension investments involving so-called “restricted financial companies.”
Meanwhile, Kentucky is handing enormous advantages to data centers—tax breaks, infrastructure, electricity, water and secrecy—and Ball isn’t conducting the comprehensive data-center audit Kentucky taxpayers desperately need.
Kreifels isn’t some independent auditor who wandered into Kentucky.
He co-founded and spent years running the State Financial Officers Foundation—SFOF, the national organization that helped turn opposition to ESG into a Republican political movement.
Allison Ball herself rose through SFOF.
Her former Kentucky Treasury aide O.J. Oleka now runs SFOF.
Kreifels left SFOF’s CEO job, created Prospr, and remains part of the SFOF network.
Then Allison Ball’s Auditor’s office hired Kreifels’s company.
For $285,000.
Apparently government spending isn’t always bad.
Prospr Isn’t Neutral About Data Centers
Here’s where this gets especially interesting.
Prospr has promoted AI data centers and high-performance computing as an economic-development opportunity.
It specifically points to abundant energy—including natural gas—as an advantage for powering them.
That fits neatly with SFOF’s longstanding campaign against climate-oriented investment restrictions, decarbonization pressure and restrictions on fossil fuels.
So Ball isn’t paying an ordinary accounting firm $285,000 to examine Kentucky pension investments.
She is paying a firm embedded in the very political network that has been fighting environmental and climate constraints while promoting the energy infrastructure needed for the AI boom.
Kentucky’s Auditor Could Be Auditing Data Centers
I recently pointed out something Kentucky politicians don’t seem anxious to advertise:
Firms including KKR are deeply involved in financing the data-center and energy-infrastructure boom.
While Ball was Kentucky Treasurer and a Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System trustee, Teachers approved substantial additional commitments to KKR funds.
KKR had ESG policies.
That apparently wasn’t the problem.
Now Ball’s office is paying an anti-ESG consultant to examine whether Kentucky pension investments conflict with Kentucky’s interests.
Maybe somebody should examine whether Kentucky’s pensions are financing the data-center interests receiving favorable treatment from Kentucky government.
The Taxpayer Can Pay Twice
This is the part of the data-center story almost nobody wants to discuss.
Kentucky taxpayers can subsidize data centers through:
tax incentives, infrastructure, water, electricity and economic-development programs.
Then Kentucky public employees’ retirement money can be invested with Wall Street managers financing:
data centers, natural-gas generation, transmission, pipelines and digital infrastructure.
The Kentucky citizen can therefore be financing the same data-center boom from both pockets.
That’s exactly the kind of financial ecosystem an independent Auditor should investigate.
Instead Ball is spending $285,000 investigating whether the pension funds are sufficiently anti-ESG.
Follow the Money—In Both Directions
Ball says ESG can cause fiduciaries to put politics ahead of financial interests.
Fine.
Apply that principle consistently.
If environmental politics shouldn’t determine pension investments, neither should anti-environmental politics.
If BlackRock shouldn’t use pension money to advance climate policy, Kentucky politicians shouldn’t use pension money to advance their energy policy.
And if Allison Ball really wants to protect Kentucky taxpayers from politically connected Wall Street interests, there is an enormous audit waiting for her:
Audit Kentucky’s data-center gold rush.
Follow the tax breaks.
Follow the utility infrastructure.
Follow the water.
Follow the NDAs.
Follow the private-equity money.
Follow the pension money.
And follow the political relationships.
Kentucky Doesn’t Need a $285,000 Anti-Woke Audit
It needs an Auditor.
Zeteo has already started following the Prospr/SFOF money.
Kentucky taxpayers should now ask why their own Auditor isn’t following the much larger pile of money sitting right in front of her.
Allison Ball has the authority to investigate Kentucky’s data-center boom.
Instead she’s paying an SFOF-connected anti-ESG consultant $285,000 to investigate Kentucky pensions.
Maybe the problem isn’t that Kentucky doesn’t have a data-center watchdog.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has suddenly discovered that data centers can be a problem.
They can raise electric-system costs.
They can consume enormous amounts of water.
They can overwhelm rural communities.
They can depend on tax incentives.
Their ownership can be difficult to trace.
And hundreds of proposed projects can threaten the stability of the Texas electric grid.
So on August 3, Abbott ordered the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to conduct what he called a “comprehensive verification and audit” of data centers seeking to connect to the Texas grid.
No project is supposed to move forward until the review is completed.
That sounds tough.
It also raises a very simple question:
Where was Greg Abbott before the data-center boom became politically toxic?
Because Abbott isn’t an outsider arriving to clean up somebody else’s mess.
He helped build the Texas data-center gold rush.
Abbott Loved the Boom Before Voters Hated It
For years, Abbott sold Texas as the place where technology, private capital, energy and lightly regulated economic development could flourish.
He celebrated enormous technology investments.
He welcomed private-equity giant Apollo to Austin and declared:
“Texas is the new financial capital of America.”
He championed AI growth and massive technology investments.
Texas offered one of the most generous data-center tax structures in the country.
Then the bills started arriving.
Electric demand exploded.
Water became a local issue.
Rural landowners began organizing.
Communities complained about noise, infrastructure and loss of control.
And ERCOT’s interconnection queue became almost absurd.
By August 2026, ERCOT was dealing with approximately 474 gigawatts of proposed new electricity demand.
Abbott’s office says roughly 90% of those requests are data centers.
For perspective, that proposed demand is more than five times Texas’ record ERCOT peak load.
This isn’t ordinary economic development anymore.
It is potentially a restructuring of the Texas electric system.
And somebody has to pay for it.
Now Abbott Says: Data Centers Must “Pay Their Own Way”
On June 10, Abbott ordered the PUC and ERCOT to ensure that data centers pay the electric-infrastructure costs necessary to serve them rather than shifting those costs onto residential customers.
Good.
That principle should have existed from Day One.
Abbott also called for:
data centers to add generation rather than merely adding demand;
water-efficient cooling;
annual electricity and water reporting;
community protections;
and repeal of outdated data-center tax incentives.
Again:
Good ideas.
But this isn’t a new governor taking office and cleaning up an inherited policy.
This is the same governor who presided over the expansion.
The question is therefore not merely:
Are Abbott’s new rules reasonable?
The harder question is:
Why weren’t these protections required before Texas invited hundreds of enormous electricity consumers onto the grid?
Abbott Is Now Auditing His Own Boom
The August 3 directive goes even further.
Abbott ordered regulators to obtain from every data-center project information showing:
Public subsidies.
All state and local tax incentives, grants, abatements and other government financial assistance.
Electricity demand.
Projected annual and peak consumption and plans for on-site generation.
Water demand.
Projected consumption, water sources and cooling technology.
Community effects.
Noise, lighting, traffic, setbacks and emergency-response issues.
And perhaps most interestingly:
Ownership and controlling interests.
That last item is exceptionally important.
Private equity, infrastructure funds, developers, private-credit vehicles and special-purpose entities can make the ultimate economic ownership of a project extraordinarily difficult for ordinary citizens to determine.
Abbott now apparently agrees that Texas needs to know who actually owns these projects.
So do I.
But why only now?
Follow Abbott’s Money Too
The data-center audit should not stop with developers.
It should include the political system that welcomed them.
Transparency USA reports approximately $71.4 million in Abbott campaign contributions during the current 2026 election cycle.
Some of Abbott’s largest donors operate in businesses positioned to benefit directly or indirectly from Texas’ enormous buildout of data centers, electricity generation, natural-gas infrastructure, real estate and AI.
Among them:
Edward Roski Jr. — approximately $2 million.
Roski chairs Majestic Realty.
Majestic’s industrial real-estate network has connections to facilities leased to major technology companies.
Kelcy Warren — approximately $1.5 million this cycle.
Warren controls Energy Transfer, whose natural-gas pipeline infrastructure sits squarely inside the economic ecosystem that can supply enormous new power demand.
Black Mountain interests — approximately $1 million through identified contributions from the company/founder.
Black Mountain has direct Texas data-center and power-development interests.
Elon Musk — $500,000.
Musk sits at the intersection of AI, enormous computing requirements and electricity-intensive infrastructure.
Harlan Crow — identified campaign contributor.
Crow Holdings has announced data-center development activity.
Ray Hunt interests — Abbott donor connections.
Hunt interests span energy, real estate and power infrastructure.
None of those contributions proves that Abbott made a policy decision because someone gave him money.
That isn’t the point.
The point is disclosure.
When a governor receives enormous campaign contributions from people whose businesses can profit from the same economic boom his administration is promoting, citizens deserve to be able to follow the money.
Abbott’s Own Opponent Is Making This an Election Issue
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Gina Hinojosa has made Abbott’s campaign financing part of her attack.
Her campaign alleges that donors with substantial interests in the data-center economy have contributed more than $20 million to Abbott over time.
That aggregate figure is a campaign claim and should be independently reconstructed before being treated as a definitive number.
But several individual connections are independently visible in campaign-finance records.
Hinojosa specifically points to recent contributions from Roski, Warren, Black Mountain’s Rhett Bennett, Elon Musk, Harlan Crow and Hunt-related interests.
The existence of those individual contributions is much easier to document than a sweeping corruption allegation.
The proper question is therefore:
Who gave Abbott money, what do they own, and how do their businesses intersect with Texas’ data-center, electricity and infrastructure policies?
Put that in a public database.
The Pension Money Makes Texas Different
Texas has another enormous source of capital sitting quietly in the background:
Public pensions.
The Teacher Retirement System of Texas alone had approximately $225 billion of investment assets as of August 31, 2025.
Its private-market exposure is enormous.
TRS reported roughly:
$34.5 billion in private equity.
$30.2 billion in real estate.
$15.5 billion in energy, natural resources and infrastructure.
That’s roughly $80 billion in those three categories alone.
TRS says its long-term target for private markets is approximately one-third of the entire trust.
Its manager roster reads like a Who’s Who of the private-capital industry:
Apollo.
Blackstone.
Blue Owl.
BlackRock.
DigitalBridge.
Antin Infrastructure.
EIG.
I Squared.
ECP.
KKR-related managers.
And many others.
Those firms increasingly invest in:
data centers;
digital infrastructure;
private credit;
natural gas;
power plants;
transmission;
real estate;
and AI infrastructure.
That does not mean Texas teachers financed every Texas data center.
It means Texas has an enormous look-through problem.
Abbott Welcomes Apollo While Texas Teachers Invest With Apollo
Apollo illustrates the circularity.
TRS has invested substantial sums with Apollo, including a reported $400 million commitment to Apollo Investment Fund X.
Then in August, Abbott welcomed Apollo’s new strategic hub in Austin.
Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with a Texas pension investing with Apollo or Apollo opening an office in Austin.
But put the pieces together:
Texas politicians want private capital in Texas.
Texas pension systems supply private capital with billions of dollars.
Private capital finances energy, infrastructure and data centers.
Texas grants tax incentives and builds an economic environment designed to attract those projects.
Data centers create enormous electricity demand.
Energy and infrastructure investors profit from serving that demand.
Some people involved in those industries contribute heavily to Texas politicians.
That isn’t proof of corruption.
It is precisely the kind of circular financial system that demands transparency.
Texas Teachers Can Be on Both Sides of the Trade
A Texas teacher might reasonably believe her retirement contribution has one purpose:
Pay her pension.
Follow that dollar through modern private markets and it can become much more complicated.
Teacher contribution
→ TRS
→ private-equity/infrastructure manager
→ power project
→ private-credit financing
→ digital infrastructure
→ data-center ecosystem.
Meanwhile, the same teacher pays an electric bill.
Her community may finance infrastructure.
Her local government may grant incentives.
And the governor may celebrate the economic-development project.
Wall Street potentially earns fees at several different stages.
This is why simply categorizing an investment as “private equity,” “real estate” or “infrastructure” is no longer enough.
Texas retirees should be able to see the underlying economic exposure.
Abbott Has Appointed Wall Street Directly Into Pension Governance
The pension issue isn’t entirely separate from Abbott’s political network.
Abbott controls appointments to important Texas boards.
In June 2026, Abbott appointed Dan West of SCF Partners, an energy-focused private-equity professional, to the TRS Board of Trustees.
Again, private-equity experience can be useful on an investment board.
But Texas already has an enormous private-market allocation.
The governance question should therefore be:
Who represents skepticism?
Who on the TRS board challenges private-equity fees?
Who challenges private valuations?
Who demands LPAs?
Who examines private-credit risk?
Who independently challenges benchmarks?
Who asks whether Texas pension capital is financing an economic-development ecosystem favored by the same political establishment appointing the board?
Texas appears very good at bringing investment professionals into pension governance.
It should be equally good at bringing independent fiduciary skepticism into the room.
The Tax Breaks Were Built Before the Backlash
Texas Tax Code §§151.359 and 151.3595 created substantial sales-and-use-tax exemptions for qualifying data centers.
For ordinary qualifying facilities, the law historically required at least a $200 million investment and 20 qualifying jobs.
Large projects can qualify with at least a $500 million investment and 40 jobs.
For certain qualifying large projects, the exemption can last as long as 20 years.
Twenty years is a long time.
Especially for an industry evolving as quickly as AI.
Abbott now calls some of those incentives outdated and says Texas should repeal unnecessary data-center subsidies.
That is an important admission.
Because if an incentive has become outdated, taxpayers deserve to know:
How much has it already cost?
Which companies received it?
For how many years?
How many jobs were created?
What infrastructure did the public finance?
What electricity costs were shifted elsewhere?
And what return did Texans receive?
Don’t Just Repeal the Incentives—Audit Them
This is where Abbott’s new “audit” doesn’t go far enough.
ERCOT’s immediate problem is grid reliability.
But Texas needs a financial audit too.
For every qualifying data center, publish:
Developer and ultimate owner.
Private-equity/infrastructure sponsor.
Lenders.
State tax exemptions.
Local tax abatements.
Public infrastructure assistance.
Electricity demand.
Water demand.
Permanent jobs promised.
Permanent jobs delivered.
Capital investment promised.
Capital investment delivered.
Political contributions from owners and executives.
Texas public-pension investments with the owners/managers.
And then calculate:
Public subsidy per permanent job.
That would tell Texans far more than another ribbon cutting.
The Electric Grid Is the Real Subsidy Risk
The largest public cost may eventually have very little to do with formal tax abatements.
It may be electricity infrastructure.
ERCOT has already begun a new batch process for connecting large loads of 75 megawatts and above because the ordinary project-by-project system couldn’t handle the scale of the requests.
Texas is also spending enormous sums to expand electric infrastructure.
Abbott has championed the Texas Energy Fund.
In June alone he announced a $200 million grant for electric-system improvements in Northeast Texas and a Texas Energy Fund loan supporting 860 MW of new natural-gas generation in West Texas.
Those individual projects may serve much broader reliability needs and should not automatically be labeled data-center subsidies.
But Texas now has to answer the allocation question:
When new infrastructure is required substantially because of massive new data-center demand, who pays for it?
Abbott now says the data centers should.
Good.
Enforce it.
And publish the accounting.
Abbott’s Sudden Conversion Is the Political Story
By August, the politics had changed so dramatically that Abbott was openly saying data-center developers had essentially “dug their own grave” with the public.
That’s remarkable.
This is the governor who previously celebrated Texas becoming an AI and technology capital.
Now he is criticizing the industry’s political judgment.
What changed?
Not the physics.
Data centers required huge amounts of electricity before this summer.
They required water before this summer.
Tax exemptions existed before this summer.
Private capital was financing the boom before this summer.
What changed was public opinion.
Data centers became politically dangerous.
Rural Texas started pushing back.
The issue entered the governor’s race.
And suddenly Austin discovered “guardrails.”
That doesn’t make the guardrails bad.
It makes them late.
Give Abbott Credit for One Thing
There is one aspect of Abbott’s August order that deserves real credit.
He isn’t merely asking whether data centers can technically connect.
He is asking:
Who owns them?
Who subsidizes them?
Where does their electricity come from?
Where does their water come from?
What happens to neighboring communities?
Those are exactly the questions Texas should be asking.
So expand the inquiry.
Add:
Who finances them?
Which private-equity funds own them?
Which private-credit firms lend to them?
Which Texas pensions invest with those firms?
What fees are the pension systems paying?
Which political donors benefit?
Which gubernatorial appointees have financial relationships with the managers?
Which tax incentives have already been granted?
That’s the actual Texas money map.
Don’t Let Abbott Audit Only the Last Mile
Right now, Abbott’s audit starts with the data center seeking an ERCOT connection.
That’s too late.
Follow the money backward.
Data center
← developer
← private-equity/infrastructure fund
← private credit
← institutional investors
← Texas public pensions.
Then follow the public side:
Data center
← tax exemption
← local incentive
← public infrastructure
← transmission
← generation
← ratepayers and taxpayers.
Then follow the political side:
Developer / energy company / financier
→ campaign contribution
→ political appointment
→ public policy.
Those three maps should be laid on top of one another.
That is how Texans discover whether there are conflicts.
The Texas Data Center Accountability Test
Abbott says data centers must pay their own way.
Fine.
Then Texas should require:
No hidden subsidies.
No undisclosed ownership.
No infrastructure-cost shifting.
No secret local deals involving public money.
No pension investments hidden behind generic private-market labels.
No political appointments without full conflict disclosure.
No incentive without an independently measurable public return.
And no politician—Republican or Democrat—should get to call a project “economic development” without showing taxpayers the complete economics.
Follow the Abbott Money
Texas has assembled nearly every ingredient required for a private-capital gold rush:
Enormous pension funds.
Private equity.
Private credit.
Cheap land.
Natural gas.
Tax incentives.
Data centers.
AI.
Massive electricity demand.
Political contributions.
And politicians eager to proclaim that Texas is open for business.
Now Greg Abbott wants to become the sheriff.
Better late than never.
But a sheriff investigating a gold rush he helped create shouldn’t be allowed to stop at the town limits.
Follow the developer.
Follow the tax break.
Follow the power plant.
Follow the pension dollar.
Follow the private-equity fund.
Follow the campaign contribution.
And finally:
Follow Greg Abbott.
His own new data-center audit proves the fundamental point.
Texas waited too long to ask who pays, who owns, who profits and who carries the risk.
Now that Abbott has finally asked those questions of the data centers, Texans should ask the same questions of the political and financial system that brought them here
Annuities can play a useful role in 401(k) plans. Retirees face a real problem converting a retirement account into income they cannot outlive, and insurance companies are uniquely positioned to provide that guarantee. The challenge is making sure that a decision that looks prudent when an annuity is purchased remains prudent 10, 20 or 30 years later.
One relatively simple improvement is a downgrade clause. A fiduciary may select an insurance company partly because it has strong financial ratings—perhaps AA or better. But ratings change. If that insurer later falls below the credit standard that justified its selection, the plan should have a contractual right to transfer the guarantee or assets to another financially strong insurer without a surrender charge, market-value adjustment or other participant penalty. As I argued in my earlier article, if the insurer’s credit quality was important enough to justify buying the annuity, deterioration in that credit quality should give the fiduciary a meaningful ability to act.
There is precedent for this approach. Stable-value products have long used multiple insurance counterparties to diversify risk, and multi-insurer lifetime-income structures have also been developed. A well-designed 401(k) annuity could combine those concepts: diversify guarantees among several strong insurers and provide a mechanism to replace an insurer that falls below predetermined financial-strength standards. That would allow fiduciaries to monitor credit risk rather than simply accept it for decades.
A downgrade provision could also improve competition. An insurer would know that maintaining the plan’s business depends not merely on winning the initial contract, but on continuing to meet the plan’s financial-strength requirements. Fiduciaries could supplement ratings with monitoring of capital strength, bond spreads, CDS spreads and other indicators of deterioration. The objective isn’t to predict an insurance-company failure. It is to give the fiduciary the ability to respond before a serious credit problem becomes a participant problem.
Lifetime-income annuities therefore don’t have to be an all-or-nothing proposition for 401(k) plans. Better contracts can make them safer. Strong initial credit standards, ongoing monitoring, multiple insurers where practical, and a penalty-free downgrade clause could preserve the valuable lifetime-income feature while substantially improving fiduciary control over long-term insurer risk. The goal should be straightforward: give participants the benefit of an insurance guarantee while giving their fiduciaries a reasonable exit if the financial strength behind that guarantee materially deteriorates.
Ohio politicians are treating the data-center boom as though the state faces a binary choice.
Embrace AI, data centers and billions of dollars of promised investment.
Or stand in the way of progress.
There is a third choice:
Audit the deals.
Ohio already has an independently elected official with extensive authority to audit state and local government, investigate misuse of public money and issue findings for recovery when public funds have been misspent.
His name is Keith Faber, Ohio Auditor of State.
And the extraordinary amount of public money now intertwined with Ohio’s data-center boom makes this an obvious subject for aggressive public auditing.
The Auditor doesn’t need to decide whether AI is good.
He doesn’t need to decide whether data centers are bad.
He doesn’t need to become Ohio’s zoning board or utility regulator.
He needs to do something much simpler:
Follow the public money.
Start With $1.6 Billion
Ohio’s data-center boom is not simply a private-sector construction boom.
Ohio’s own economic-development materials say the state’s Data Center Tax Exemption can exempt eligible equipment from state, county and transit sales and use taxes.
According to JobsOhio’s 2026 data-center guide, the Ohio Department of Development reported approximately $555 million in foregone tax on $9.6 billion of capital investment in 2024.
Then look at 2025:
Approximately $1.6 billion in foregone tax on $27.2 billion of investment.
That is an enormous amount of foregone public revenue.
Call it an exemption rather than an expenditure if you want.
But from the taxpayer’s perspective, the fundamental question is the same:
What did Ohio give up, and what did Ohio get in return?
That is an audit question.
Faber Has Already Asked Exactly That Question
This isn’t some radical expansion of the Auditor’s role.
Keith Faber’s office is already auditing economic-development incentive compliance.
In December 2025, the Auditor reported that a majority of companies examined that had received state loans or tax credits had failed to meet job-creation and/or payroll commitments.
Thirty-nine of 60 companies with job-creation commitments were listed as noncompliant.
Even more troubling, the Auditor found that no action had been taken against many companies deemed noncompliant with economic-incentive agreements since 2021.
Faber’s response was exactly right.
If Ohio isn’t going to hold companies accountable for their commitments, then the agreements simply deprive Ohioans of financial resources that could have been used elsewhere.
Now apply that same philosophy to data centers.
Audit the Data-Center Bargain
Data centers are particularly appropriate for performance auditing because the public-policy bargain is unusually complicated.
The headline number is always enormous:
$1 billion investment.
$5 billion investment.
$10 billion investment.
But investment isn’t the same thing as public benefit.
How many permanent jobs are created?
What are their salaries?
How much tax revenue is actually generated?
How much tax revenue is surrendered?
How much public infrastructure is required?
Who pays for roads?
Who pays for water?
Who pays for sewer expansion?
Who pays for transmission?
Who pays for electric generation?
What happens if projected investment never occurs?
What happens if ownership changes?
What happens if the data center closes?
Those aren’t anti-business questions.
They are the questions anyone investing his own money would ask.
Ohio taxpayers deserve the same due diligence.
Ohio’s Local Deals Are Even More Complicated
The state tax exemption is only the beginning.
Ohio’s own data-center economic-development materials describe an entire menu of local arrangements.
Communities can use Community Reinvestment Areas to provide property-tax abatements.
They can establish Enterprise Zones.
They can use Tax Increment Financing.
They can negotiate PILOTs—payments in lieu of taxes.
They can enter development agreements and host-community agreements involving infrastructure costs, roads and other obligations.
And school districts can become part of the negotiations because property-tax abatements directly affect the tax base supporting public education.
That means a supposedly private data-center project can quickly become an extraordinarily complicated web of:
state tax exemptions + local property-tax abatements + PILOTs + TIFs + school compensation + roads + water + sewer + electric infrastructure + development agreements.
That is exactly the kind of financial complexity in which public obligations can disappear from public view.
Follow the Schools
Ohio’s own data-center guide identifies school compensation as a central issue.
Why?
Because when a local government abates property taxes, schools can lose the tax revenue they otherwise would have received.
Ohio communities have attempted to compensate for that through individually negotiated arrangements.
Sidney reportedly directs part of its PILOT revenue toward schools.
Marysville uses specified annual payments.
Piqua uses another formula involving land value and payments for individual data-center buildings.
That’s three different approaches to essentially the same problem.
The Auditor should ask:
Which approach actually protects taxpayers and schools?
Create a statewide database.
For every major data-center project, calculate:
property taxes otherwise payable;
property taxes abated;
PILOT payments;
school compensation;
infrastructure expenditures;
permanent employment;
payroll;
and the net financial impact on the community.
Then let Ohio citizens compare the deals.
Follow the Water
Data centers can consume enormous amounts of water.
But the relevant Auditor question isn’t whether water consumption is environmentally good or bad.
It is:
Who paid for the infrastructure?
Did the municipality expand its water system?
Did it issue debt?
Did ordinary customers finance capacity primarily needed by the data center?
Was the developer charged the full incremental cost?
Were special water rates negotiated?
What happens if projected consumption changes?
Were taxpayers effectively financing infrastructure for a private developer?
That is public finance.
Audit it.
Follow the Electricity
The Auditor doesn’t set electric rates.
PUCO does.
But that doesn’t mean the Auditor should ignore public financial decisions connected to electric infrastructure.
Ohio’s exploding data-center demand could require enormous amounts of generation and transmission.
Someone will pay for it.
The appropriate public-accountability question is whether costs attributable to enormous private industrial users are being shifted toward ordinary Ohio families, schools, municipalities or other ratepayers.
Where state agencies, municipalities, counties or other auditable public entities participate financially, the Auditor should follow those dollars.
A company can have real trade secrets and commercially sensitive information.
But commercial confidentiality should never become a mechanism for hiding public financial obligations from public oversight.
Ohio’s own 2026 data-center negotiation guide recognizes “confidentiality and public records handling” as one of the negotiable issues in these transactions.
That alone should get the Auditor’s attention.
An NDA signed by a mayor, development official or other public entity shouldn’t be treated as a magic curtain behind which public financial obligations disappear.
The Auditor should examine every confidentiality provision connected with a major publicly assisted data-center project and determine whether it interfered with appropriate governmental oversight or concealed material public obligations.
And Ohio’s Auditor Has Real Investigative Muscle
The Auditor of State isn’t a newspaper columnist filing records requests.
The office audits thousands of Ohio state and local government agencies.
Ohio law gives the Auditor substantial authority to obtain information necessary to conduct audits.
And the office has a Special Investigations Unit specifically devoted to suspected fraud and misuse of public resources.
That unit doesn’t merely issue reports.
Its investigations can lead to criminal referrals, restitution and findings for recovery.
That last phrase is important.
Ohio Has Something Particularly Powerful: Findings for Recovery
Ohio’s system goes beyond embarrassing an official in an audit report.
When public money has been illegally expended or public property has been misappropriated, the Auditor can issue a finding for recovery.
And there are consequences.
The public office’s legal counsel is authorized to pursue collection.
The Auditor notifies the Ohio Attorney General.
If appropriate legal action isn’t initiated within the statutory period, the Attorney General can pursue recovery.
An unresolved finding can also prevent a person or business from receiving certain public contracts.
Think about how dramatically that changes the accountability equation.
A bad data-center deal isn’t merely:
“The Auditor thinks taxpayers got a bad bargain.”
If an examination uncovers actual unlawful expenditures or recoverable public money, Ohio has a mechanism for identifying the money and pursuing its return.
The Auditor isn’t simply a critic.
He can help create the financial record upon which recovery occurs.
Faber Has Already Demonstrated the Model
Ohio doesn’t have to invent a hypothetical Auditor’s Office capable of doing this.
Faber’s Special Investigations Unit regularly conducts special audits of villages, schools, townships and other public entities.
Those investigations have produced findings for recovery involving unauthorized compensation, improper expenditures and misuse of public resources.
In other words:
The machinery already exists.
The question is whether Ohio will deploy that machinery against transactions measured in billions rather than merely thousands.
That is where this becomes interesting.
Don’t Just Audit the Little Guy
Auditors naturally catch fiscal officers who steal money.
They catch employees receiving improper compensation.
They identify credit-card abuse.
Good.
Keep doing it.
But consider the scale.
A $25,000 theft from a village matters.
So does a $100,000 improper payment.
But Ohio reported approximately $1.6 billion of foregone data-center taxes in a single year.
If the Auditor’s job is protecting public money, the largest financial transactions deserve at least as much scrutiny as the smallest.
The potential public exposure from a single poorly negotiated data-center agreement could dwarf dozens of ordinary findings for recovery.
Audit the Promises
Every publicly assisted data-center deal should receive a standardized performance audit.
The Auditor should compare:
Promised capital investment vs. actual investment.
Promised jobs vs. actual jobs.
Promised payroll vs. actual payroll.
Taxes theoretically generated vs. taxes actually collected.
Taxes theoretically owed vs. taxes abated.
Developer infrastructure commitments vs. taxpayer infrastructure costs.
School revenue lost vs. compensation received.
Projected water demand vs. actual water demand.
Projected public costs vs. actual public costs.
And perhaps most importantly:
Who bears the risk if the projections are wrong?
That last question is routinely ignored during economic-development celebrations.
Follow the Wall Street Money Too
This is where the data-center audit connects with the larger CommonSense story about Ohio pensions.
Ohio teachers contribute money to STRS.
STRS invests billions through public securities, private equity, private credit, real estate and infrastructure.
Many of the largest private-market managers are simultaneously financing the enormous AI and data-center buildout.
Carlyle says it manages approximately $1.5 billion for Ohio state teachers and public employees while Carlyle-backed Ark Data Centers has been expanding in Ohio.
STRS has a direct lending relationship through Blue Owl Credit SLF while Blue Owl has become a major digital-infrastructure investor.
Blackstone, Apollo and KKR-managed vehicles have participated in enormous power-generation investments that include Ohio projects.
STRS also has enormous public-equity exposure to Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and other companies driving AI computing demand.
That does not prove STRS money financed any particular Ohio data center.
It proves the opposite point:
Ohio’s financial relationships have become too complicated to rely upon labels.
Ohio needs look-through transparency.
Now Put Vivek Ramaswamy Into the Picture
That transparency becomes even more important as Ohio chooses its next governor.
Vivek Ramaswamy’s financial interests and political agenda intersect with technology, cryptocurrency and the broader digital economy.
A governor would influence an administration making decisions involving economic development, tax policy and appointments affecting infrastructure and utility regulation.
That doesn’t mean a governor personally approves every pension investment or data-center agreement.
It means Ohio needs institutional checks that don’t depend upon who occupies the governor’s office.
An independently elected Auditor is one of those checks.
Whether the governor is Republican or Democrat shouldn’t matter.
Whether the data-center developer is politically connected shouldn’t matter.
Whether the private-equity firm has billions invested in Ohio shouldn’t matter.
Follow the money anyway.
Create an Ohio Data Center Accountability Audit
Keith Faber could create an Ohio Data Center Accountability Audit covering every major project receiving material state or local public assistance.
For every project, the Auditor should identify:
State sales-and-use tax exemptions.
Local property-tax abatements.
CRA and Enterprise Zone benefits.
TIF arrangements.
PILOT agreements.
School compensation agreements.
Publicly financed roads and infrastructure.
Water and wastewater commitments.
Public debt issued in connection with the development.
Confidentiality and nondisclosure agreements involving public entities.
Promised and actual jobs and payroll.
Promised and actual capital investment.
Ownership changes and assignments.
Public financial guarantees and contingent liabilities.
Potential conflicts involving officials, consultants and counterparties.
Compliance with every material promise used to justify public assistance.
Then put it online.
Not 200 pages of government accounting jargon.
Build a searchable database.
Data Center. Developer. Owner. Tax Break. Local Subsidy. Jobs Promised. Jobs Delivered. Public Infrastructure Cost. School Impact. Water Commitment. Compliance Status.
Let taxpayers see the deal.
Ohio’s Auditor Could Become the Most Important Data-Center Regulator Who Isn’t a Regulator
Keith Faber cannot decide where every data center gets built.
He doesn’t regulate electric rates.
He doesn’t issue every zoning permit.
He doesn’t run STRS.
That’s precisely the point.
The Auditor doesn’t need to take over anybody else’s job.
He can do his own.
Audit the public money.
Ohio’s data-center boom is becoming one of the largest transfers and reallocations of economic resources in the state’s recent history.
Private companies are investing tens of billions.
Government is foregoing enormous amounts of tax revenue.
Local governments are negotiating abatements.
Schools are negotiating compensation.
Communities are confronting infrastructure costs.
Utilities are preparing for enormous new electric demand.
Wall Street is financing the boom.
And Ohio pension money may be invested throughout the same financial ecosystem.
There may be excellent deals among them.
There may be terrible deals.
There may be perfectly legal deals that simply represent lousy economics for taxpayers.
And there may eventually be transactions involving improper expenditures or public money that should be recovered.
We shouldn’t have to guess.
Follow the Money
Ohio already has an independently elected Auditor.
He already audits state and local government.
His office already investigates misuse of public money.
It already audits compliance with economic-development incentives.
It already issues findings for recovery.
And Faber himself has already complained that Ohio has failed to hold companies accountable when they don’t deliver the jobs and payroll they promised in exchange for economic-development assistance.
So apply the same standard to the biggest economic-development boom in Ohio.
Don’t just audit the village clerk who misspent $10,000.
Audit the billion-dollar data-center tax breaks.
Audit the PILOTs.
Audit the TIFs.
Audit the infrastructure.
Audit the school agreements.
Audit the promises.
Audit the NDAs where public entities are involved.
And where public money was illegally spent, identify it and pursue the mechanisms Ohio law provides for recovery.
Ohio doesn’t need an Auditor who decides whether artificial intelligence is good or bad.
It needs an Auditor willing to ask the question every Ohio taxpayer has a right to ask:
Where did our money go—and did we get what we paid for?
Kentucky politicians keep talking about data centers as though citizens have only two choices:
Approve them. Or complain about them. There is another option sitting in Frankfort.
Audit them.
Kentucky’s Auditor of Public Accounts may possess one of the most powerful—and so far underappreciated—tools for bringing transparency to Kentucky’s data-center gold rush.
The Auditor cannot simply prohibit a privately financed data center because she doesn’t like the project. She isn’t the Public Service Commission, a zoning board or the General Assembly.
But that isn’t where the most interesting power lies.
Data centers increasingly depend upon an enormous web of public decisions and public resources:
tax incentives; local-government agreements; zoning and development decisions; public infrastructure; roads; water and sewer capacity; economic-development arrangements; utility infrastructure; and potentially hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of commitments whose ultimate costs can migrate toward taxpayers and ratepayers.
Where public money and public agencies enter the transaction, the Kentucky Auditor can enter the picture too. And unlike an ordinary citizen filing an Open Records request, the Auditor has statutory investigative powers.
The Auditor Can Follow the Public Money
The Kentucky Auditor describes the office as an independent constitutional office charged with auditing public funds.
Its jurisdiction includes state agencies, fiscal courts and other public or quasi-public entities receiving government funds.
More importantly, the APA isn’t limited to checking whether columns on a financial statement add correctly. It conducts performance audits and special examinations.
That creates an obvious data-center application. The relevant question isn’t:
Should Kentucky have data centers?
The audit question is:
What did Kentucky taxpayers give away, what obligations did government assume, who made those decisions, what information did they rely upon, and did taxpayers receive value in return?
Those are classic public-accountability questions.
The Auditor Has Something Reporters and Citizens Don’t: Compulsory Investigative Power
This is where things get interesting. KRS Chapter 43 gives the Auditor access to books and records and authority to obtain testimony.
That changes the balance of power. A reporter can ask. A citizen can file an Open Records request. A county resident can stand up at a fiscal-court meeting.
The Auditor can conduct an examination using statutory authority. That potentially makes the APA one of Kentucky’s best tools for following the money through a data-center transaction.
What About the NDAs?
This may be the biggest issue of all.
Data-center developers have increasingly relied upon nondisclosure agreements and claims of commercial confidentiality while negotiating with public officials.
An NDA may frustrate a citizen. It should not automatically defeat the statutory oversight authority of the Commonwealth’s Auditor.
Kentucky’s own procurement regulations illustrate the principle. State contracts must provide governmental oversight agencies—including the Auditor—with access to books, documents, papers, records and other evidence directly pertinent to the contract for purposes of financial audit or program review.
In other words:
Government cannot simply privatize public accountability by signing a confidentiality agreement.
There may still be legitimately protected trade secrets and confidential information, and the Auditor herself operates under confidentiality requirements governing information obtained during examinations.
But that is very different from saying the Auditor cannot examine the material.
In fact, the APA’s ability to receive confidential information while protecting it may make the Auditor particularly well suited to examine data-center deals.
Kentucky Legislators Have Already Identified the NDA Problem
This isn’t theoretical. Kentucky Senate Bill 330 was introduced in 2026 specifically to address data-center secrecy.
The proposal would prohibit public agencies from entering data-center confidentiality agreements that expand secrecy beyond what Kentucky law permits. It would also declare certain contractual provisions attempting to override Kentucky’s Open Records and Open Meetings laws void.
Why was such legislation proposed? Because secrecy surrounding data-center negotiations has become a public-policy problem. But Kentucky doesn’t necessarily have to wait for another legislative session to begin examining deals that already involve public money.
The Auditor has an existing oversight infrastructure.
Use it.
Audit the Zoning Process—Not the Zoning Decision
There is an important distinction here. The Auditor probably cannot tell a city or county:
You may not zone this property for a data center.
But the Auditor can potentially examine the financial transactions, controls, procedures and public expenditures surrounding local government.
That could include questions such as:
Were required procedures followed?
Were public resources committed before proper authorization?
Were economic assumptions independently verified?
Were officials given information that the public never saw?
Did consultants have conflicts?
Were infrastructure costs accurately presented?
Were taxpayer obligations omitted from the public discussion?
Did officials negotiate concessions that transferred costs from the developer to the public?
Did the government properly value land, infrastructure or other benefits provided to the project?
Were public funds used economically and for authorized purposes?
That isn’t second-guessing zoning.
That’s auditing government.
And a serious audit conducted while a controversial project is developing could dramatically change the political and financial environment surrounding it.
Follow the Water
A data center can require enormous water infrastructure.
So audit it.
Who pays for additional capacity?
Who pays for pipes?
Who finances treatment facilities?
Were preferential rates negotiated?
Are ordinary customers subsidizing the development?
What happens if projected demand doesn’t materialize?
What guarantees did the developer provide?
Kentucky citizens shouldn’t discover ten years later that a supposedly private development produced a public infrastructure liability.
Follow the Electricity
The Auditor doesn’t regulate electric rates.
But government involvement surrounding electric infrastructure and economic development can still create auditable public transactions.
What incentives were offered?
What infrastructure commitments were made?
Were economic-development assumptions reasonable?
Did government entities properly analyze contingent liabilities?
Were costs shifted elsewhere?
And were public officials simultaneously being told one story publicly and another story under NDA?
The Auditor can follow the public-dollar trail even when another regulator has jurisdiction over electricity itself.
Follow the Tax Breaks
This may be the easiest place to start.
Kentucky’s data-center strategy is built partly upon tax incentives.
Tax incentives aren’t magic money.
They represent public policy deliberately foregoing revenue in exchange for promised economic benefits.
That makes performance an obvious question:
What did taxpayers give up and what did taxpayers receive?
An Auditor’s performance examination could compare:
projected employment versus actual employment;
projected capital investment versus actual investment;
promised tax revenue versus foregone revenue;
developer-paid infrastructure versus taxpayer-funded infrastructure;
projected electricity and water consumption versus actual consumption;
and economic-development claims versus independently measurable results.
Instead of debating whether a project “creates jobs,” put the numbers on a spreadsheet.
And Follow the Politicians
This brings the Auditor directly into the issues I raised in my earlier pieces about Kentucky’s data-center boom and the relationships among politicians, pension money and enormous private-market investment managers.
Public officials shouldn’t be able to hide public financial decisions behind slogans like “economic development.”
Who proposed the incentive?
Who negotiated it?
Who reviewed it?
What outside consultants participated?
Who represented the developer?
What investment managers ultimately own or finance the project?
What political contributions or other relationships exist?
Did Kentucky pension systems have investments with the same financial firms appearing elsewhere in the transaction?
None of those facts automatically establishes wrongdoing.
They establish the need for transparency.
Allison Ball Is in an Especially Interesting Position
That makes State Auditor Allison Ball’s position fascinating.
Ball has cultivated a national political profile through the State Financial Officers Foundation and attacks on ESG.
But the data-center boom provides an unusually concrete test of what financial accountability actually means.
Forget ESG rhetoric for a moment.
Here is a straightforward taxpayer question:
Will Kentucky’s Auditor use the powers of her office to examine whether giant data-center developers and their Wall Street financiers are receiving sweetheart arrangements from Kentucky governments?
If the answer is yes, that could put Ball in conflict with powerful economic-development interests, utilities, developers, private-equity firms and potentially members of her own party.
That is precisely why an independently elected Auditor exists.
The Auditor Could Create a Kentucky Data Center Audit Program
The APA doesn’t need to investigate whether artificial intelligence is good or bad.
It could establish a narrowly financial Kentucky Data Center Accountability Initiative examining projects receiving significant state or local government assistance.
The mandate could be simple:
Follow every public dollar.
For each major project, identify:
State and local tax incentives.
Public land or property concessions.
Roads and transportation expenditures.
Water and sewer commitments.
Public infrastructure obligations.
Economic-development grants.
Contracts and side agreements.
Confidentiality agreements involving public entities.
Consultants and professional fees.
Promised versus actual employment.
Promised versus actual investment.
Contingent taxpayer liabilities.
Conflicts involving public officials, consultants and counterparties.
The ultimate owners and financiers benefiting from public assistance.
Then publish the results.
And Where Public Money Was Improperly Spent, Seek Recovery
The ultimate purpose shouldn’t merely be producing another government report.
Where an examination identifies unauthorized expenditures, overpayments, unsupported reimbursements or other improper uses of public money, the findings can become the basis for government recovery efforts or referrals to officials with authority to pursue repayment.
That distinction matters.
The Auditor isn’t a court awarding damages.
But an audit can identify who owes the taxpayers money and why.
That can be much more frightening to a politically connected developer than another angry speech.
Imagine What One Serious Audit Could Do
Imagine a controversial Kentucky data-center project approaching final approval.
The public is told the deal is confidential.
The developer cites an NDA.
Local officials say they cannot discuss negotiations.
Nobody can determine the real infrastructure cost.
Nobody knows exactly what taxpayers are providing.
Then the Auditor announces a special examination.
The APA obtains the agreements.
It examines the public expenditures.
It reviews the government’s assumptions.
It obtains testimony.
It traces the incentives.
It calculates the taxpayer exposure.
And it publishes everything the law permits it to publish.
Suddenly the economics of secrecy change.
That alone could have a chilling effect on bad deals.
Not because the Auditor banned data centers.
Because she made politicians and developers show their work.
Kentucky Doesn’t Need Another Data-Center Regulator. It Needs an Auditor Willing to Audit.
Kentucky already has zoning boards.
It already has utility regulators.
It already has economic-development agencies.
What it desperately needs is someone asking a different question:
Who is protecting the taxpayer?
The Kentucky Auditor of Public Accounts already possesses significant investigative authority over public money.
The office can conduct special examinations and performance audits.
It can obtain records.
It can obtain testimony.
It can examine local government.
And government confidentiality agreements do not magically erase statutory public oversight.
That creates an enormously powerful accountability mechanism.
Data-center developers may have billions of dollars.
Private-equity firms may have armies of lawyers.
Utilities may have lobbyists.
Politicians may have campaign contributions.
But Kentucky taxpayers have something too:
An independently elected Auditor with investigative powers.
The question isn’t whether Kentucky needs another law before anyone can investigate the data-center gold rush.
The better question may be:
Why isn’t the Auditor investigating it already?
One legal nuance I would preserve: “pierce the NDA” is excellent shorthand for the article, but legally I would say an NDA generally cannot be assumed to defeat APA’s independent statutory access rights. The Auditor also has confidentiality rules protecting material obtained during an examination, which strengthens the argument that commercially sensitive material can be examined without necessarily being indiscriminately released.
There’s another very useful fact: SB 330 is sitting in Committee on Committees as of the legislature’s August 19 update. Its text would specifically prevent data-center NDAs from expanding confidentiality beyond Kentucky law and would void contractual attempts to supersede Open Records/Open Meetings requirements. That lets you contrast the legislature considering future transparency legislation with APA possessing significant investigative authority right now.
I would next dig into KRS 43.080 and 43.090 and prior APA special examinations where the Auditor compelled records/testimony and recommended or triggered recovery of public money. That could turn this from an opinion piece into a very specific blueprint for an APA data-center investigation.
Data centers have become politically radioactive across the country. The backlash is no longer confined to environmental activists. Voters are asking basic pocketbook questions:
Who pays for the electricity?
Who pays for the transmission?
Who supplies the water?
Who gets the tax breaks?
Who owns the data centers?
And in Ohio there is another question almost nobody asks:
How much of the capital ultimately comes from the retirement savings of Ohio teachers and other public employees?
That last question changes the entire story.
Ohio Teachers May Be Financing Both Sides of the Data-Center Boom
STRS Ohio reported roughly $103 billion in investments as of June 30, 2025, with approximately 19.7% allocated to alternatives and another 9.5% to real estate.
That does not mean 29.2% of STRS is invested in data centers.
It means Ohio teachers have enormous exposure to the private-market machinery increasingly financing data centers, private credit, power generation, real estate and infrastructure.
Follow the money far enough and the circle becomes extraordinary:
Ohio teachers → STRS Ohio → Wall Street/private capital → data centers + power plants + infrastructure → Wall Street fees and profits.
Meanwhile, Ohio communities can provide the land, water, transmission infrastructure and tax incentives.
Then Ohio families buy electricity from a grid being transformed by enormous new industrial loads.
That is not an ordinary investment story.
It is an intersection of pension policy, energy policy, tax policy and political power.
STRS Already Owns the Companies Creating the Demand
The story doesn’t begin with obscure private-equity partnerships.
STRS’s disclosed 2024 public-equity holdings included approximately:
$1.56 billion of Microsoft;
$1.44 billion of Nvidia;
$862 million of Amazon;
$542 million of Meta; and
roughly $873 million combined in Alphabet shares.
These are among the companies driving the AI computing explosion.
But STRS exposure doesn’t necessarily stop with the customers demanding computing capacity.
Teachers’ retirement money also flows into the enormous private-capital ecosystem financing the facilities, debt, power plants, transmission and other infrastructure supporting that demand.
That creates what might be called the Great Ohio Circular Trade.
Teachers can effectively own the companies demanding AI infrastructure while simultaneously supplying capital to investment managers financing the infrastructure required to serve them.
And those investment managers collect fees along the way.
Carlyle May Be the Cleanest Example
Carlyle says it manages approximately $1.5 billion for Ohio state teachers and public employees.
Carlyle-backed Ark Data Centers, meanwhile, has been expanding in Ohio.
Ark was connected to a proposed/approved approximately $4.5 million Ohio tax incentive for a roughly $136 million expansion.
Republican U.S. Senator Bernie Moreno criticized that arrangement, arguing in substance that Ohio taxpayers shouldn’t be subsidizing Wall Street.
He has a point.
But take the argument one step further.
Ohio public employees supply investment capital to Carlyle.
Carlyle backs a data-center company.
The company seeks Ohio tax benefits.
Ohio’s power infrastructure must accommodate data-center growth.
And the investment manager potentially earns fees and investment profits throughout the process.
That is exactly why Ohio needs look-through disclosure rather than another press release celebrating billions of dollars of “investment.”
Blackstone, Apollo and KKR Are Moving Into the Power Plants
The financial circle gets even tighter.
A Blackstone-led consortium involving Apollo- and KKR-managed vehicles agreed to invest approximately $5.34 billion with Williams in power-generation projects associated with rapidly increasing electricity demand.
Four named projects—Socrates, Apollo, Socrates the Younger and Neo—are in Ohio.
Think about what that means.
Private capital can own or finance the data center.
Private capital can finance the power plant.
Private capital can provide the private credit.
Private capital can own related infrastructure.
And public pension systems can supply capital to the private managers operating at several points in the chain.
That doesn’t establish that a particular STRS partnership financed a particular Ohio plant.
It demonstrates why simply telling teachers that they own “private equity,” “private credit,” “infrastructure” or “real estate” is becoming almost meaningless.
Ohio teachers deserve to know what they actually own.
Blue Owl Shows Why the Labels Don’t Work
STRS Ohio’s relationship with Blue Owl makes the disclosure problem even clearer.
STRS is a Class A member of Blue Owl Credit SLF LLC, a joint venture making senior secured and other loans.
Blue Owl, meanwhile, has made digital infrastructure a major real-assets strategy and closed its third Digital Infrastructure Fund with approximately $7 billion in commitments in 2025.
Again, that doesn’t prove the STRS lending joint venture financed a particular Ohio data center.
It proves something more important from a governance perspective:
An STRS annual report can say “private credit” while the underlying economic exposure may ultimately intersect with the same AI/data-center boom appearing elsewhere as real estate, infrastructure or private equity.
You cannot oversee what you cannot see.
Now Add Vivek Ramaswamy
This is where an investment story becomes an election-governance story.
Republican gubernatorial nominee Vivek Ramaswamy isn’t approaching this enormous economic transformation as a financially detached observer.
His financial interests have included cryptocurrency and a substantial continuing ownership interest in Strive. An April 2026 SEC filing reported Ramaswamy beneficially owning about 5.69 million Strive shares, representing 8.4% of the class.
Ramaswamy has also publicly embraced Bitcoin and supported the policy direction represented by Ohio House Bill 18.
HB 18 is not imaginary. The Ohio Legislature describes it as the Ohio Strategic Cryptocurrency Reserve Act. Its introduced version would amend the investment statutes governing Ohio’s five state retirement systems and address their investment in exchange-traded products while permitting certain state funds to be invested in digital assets.
That matters because data centers, cryptocurrency, AI, private equity, private credit and electric generation increasingly belong to the same financial ecosystem.
Ramaswamy’s own financial interests therefore deserve extraordinary scrutiny whenever state policy touches that ecosystem.
The Governor is the Glue of Data Center Dominance
More importantly for the data-center boom, the next governor will exercise enormous influence over economic-development policy, energy policy, tax incentives and regulatory appointments. And appointments to pension boards.
Ohio’s next governor will appoint members of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio. State government will confront decisions involving data-center incentives, utility infrastructure, environmental regulation and economic-development subsidies.
Those decisions can move billions of dollars.
When a governor or candidate has significant financial exposure to industries affected by those decisions, disclosure and recusal aren’t partisan attacks.
They are elementary governance safeguards.
Ramaswamy has been forced to Respond to the Backlash
A recent report by Innovation Ohio concluded that Ramaswamy’s personal financial disclosure shows investments spanning virtually the entire Ohio data-center ecosystem, including semiconductor manufacturers, cloud computing companies, industrial real estate investment trusts (REITs), and cryptocurrency-related assets. The report argues that many of these holdings could benefit from state policies affecting tax incentives, utility regulation, infrastructure spending, and economic development.
Ramaswamy’s position has evolved from blatantly pro data center into what his campaign calls the “Ohioans-First Data Center Pledge.”
This so-called pledge causes more questions than answers. How are costs prevented from migrating to other ratepayers?
What happens to Ohio’s data-center tax exemptions?
How will enormous transmission and generation costs be allocated?
Will developers disclose beneficial ownership?
Will local governments be prohibited from signing secrecy agreements?
And will the governor disclose and recuse himself from decisions affecting companies and industries in which he has significant financial interests?
Ohio Republicans Have a Bigger Problem Than Ramaswamy
The data-center controversy shouldn’t be reduced to one candidate.
Ohio has been governed by Republicans for years while many of the financial and infrastructure conditions behind the boom developed.
Now the political danger has become obvious.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee reportedly warned AI companies this month that public anger over data centers threatens Republicans politically in Ohio. Data centers have become a major issue in the Senate contest involving Republican Jon Husted as well.
That is an extraordinary development.
The industry’s political problem has grown large enough that Republicans themselves are warning the technology industry about it.
The appropriate response isn’t better advertising.
It is better policy.
Ohio Has Seen This Movie Before
Ohio should have learned something from House Bill 6 and FirstEnergy.
The lesson wasn’t that electricity companies are evil.
It was that huge amounts of money + political influence + complicated financial relationships + weak transparency can become dangerous.
The names have changed.
Today the ingredients include:
AI.
Crypto.
Private equity.
Private credit.
Data centers.
Utilities.
Public pensions.
Tax incentives.
And enormous political contributions.
The financial structures are far more sophisticated than the old Ohio scandals.
That should make Ohio more cautious, not less.
STRS Should Open the Books Before Ohio Opens the Grid
STRS should publish a comprehensive Data Center and AI Infrastructure Look-Through Report.
It should identify every private fund, co-investment, real-estate vehicle and credit vehicle with material direct or indirect data-center exposure; estimate STRS dollars ultimately exposed; identify Ohio-specific investments; disclose associated natural-gas, pipeline, generation and transmission investments; identify fees and carried interest; and explain how privately valued assets are marked.
It should separately identify exposure to major managers including Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Carlyle, Blue Owl, Brookfield and others active in digital infrastructure.
And it should disclose relevant political, placement-agent and other conflicts.
Until STRS performs that exercise, nobody should pretend to know exactly how much Ohio teachers have riding on the data-center boom.
The inability of beneficiaries to determine the number is itself part of the problem.
The 2026 Accountability Test
Ohio doesn’t have to choose between banning technology and giving Wall Street a blank check.
There is an obvious middle ground.
Make data centers pay the full incremental cost they impose on electricity and transmission systems.
Require meaningful water and environmental disclosure.
Stop secret economic-development deals.
Disclose tax subsidies.
Protect local governments and landowners.
Require public pension systems to disclose their ultimate economic exposure.
And impose meaningful conflict-of-interest and recusal rules on public officials with financial interests in the industries they regulate.
Ramaswamy’s financial interests make those safeguards especially important if he becomes governor.
His new data-center pledge should therefore be treated as the beginning of due diligence—not the end of it.
Follow the Money Before You Follow the Campaign Ads
The CommonSense lesson is remarkably simple.
When politicians promise economic development, follow the money.
When Wall Street promises diversification, follow the money.
When a pension fund says an investment is merely “private credit” or “infrastructure,” follow the money all the way to the underlying asset.
When a candidate owns investments that could be affected by policies he would oversee, follow the money again.
Ohio teachers supplied the pension contributions.
Ohio residents supply the communities.
Ohio ratepayers supply the electric bills.
Ohio taxpayers supply the incentives.
Wall Street supplies the financial engineering.
And politicians supply the public policy.
The people supplying the money deserve to know who ultimately gets it.
Before Ohio hands the keys to its next governor, voters should demand the same thing a prudent pension fiduciary should demand before investing a dollar: full disclosure, independent oversight and an explanation of every material conflict.
Kentucky Republicans love talking about fiscal conservatism. They love local control.
They love complaining about government picking winners and losers. They love attacking ESG and Wall Street influence.
Then a multibillion-dollar data-center developer shows up. Suddenly the free market apparently needs a tax exemption.
Local control becomes an inconvenience. Corporate secrecy becomes economic development.
And Wall Street private equity becomes our new best friend.
Kentucky’s exploding data-center controversy is becoming a remarkably clean test of whether the state’s political establishment actually believes what it has been selling voters for years.
And the 2026 election gives Kentuckians an opportunity to demand an answer.
The Data-Center Gold Rush Wasn’t Free
I wrote in May about Kentucky’s emerging data-center gold rush.
The sales pitch sounds wonderful: artificial intelligence, billions of dollars of investment, construction jobs and the magic phrase every politician loves—”economic development.”
Look underneath the hood.
Kentucky created extraordinary sales-tax advantages for qualifying data centers. Some of these benefits can extend for decades.
Meanwhile, the infrastructure required by hyperscale data centers can be enormous. These facilities can consume staggering amounts of electricity. Communities have raised questions about water, transmission infrastructure, noise, land use and who ultimately pays for grid expansion.
Kentucky legislators themselves have effectively acknowledged the ratepayer problem.
House Bill 544, appropriately called the Kentucky Ratepayer Protection Act, was introduced in 2026 to require that data centers above 100 megawatts bear the capital and operating costs of infrastructure constructed to serve them rather than shifting those costs onto everybody else.
Think about what that tells us. Kentucky first raced to attract data centers.
Now Kentucky needs legislation to make sure ordinary electric customers aren’t stuck paying for them. That isn’t anti-technology. That’s basic accounting.
The Most Conservative Data-Center Policy Is Simple: Pay Your Own Bills
If Meta, Google, Blackstone, KKR, Apollo or another multibillion-dollar corporation wants to build a data center in Kentucky, fine.
Build it. But buy your own land. Pay your own taxes. Pay for the electric infrastructure you require.
Pay the real cost of the power you consume. Pay for the water infrastructure you need.
Disclose what you’re asking government to provide. And let the people who actually live in the affected community know what is happening before the deal is effectively done.
Why is that controversial?
Apparently corporate welfare becomes “economic development” when the corporation is large enough.
Kentucky’s Local-Control Problem Is Getting Bigger
The backlash isn’t theoretical anymore.
Oldham County has already experienced a major fight over a hyperscale project. Mason County has become another battleground. Across Kentucky, counties are discovering that they may have to create zoning, noise, water, infrastructure and siting policies for an industry moving much faster than local government.
In Mason County, the fight became so intense that two women made national news after refusing a reported $26 million offer connected to a proposed hyperscale data-center development.
Whatever one thinks about their decision, it destroys the idea that opposition to these projects consists simply of environmental activists trying to stop technology.
This is rural Kentucky.
These are property-rights questions.
These are local-control questions.
These are electricity-rate questions.
Those used to be conservative issues.
And Then There Is the Secrecy
Kentucky Senate Bill 330 tells another revealing story.
The bill would restrict government agencies from using nondisclosure agreements to hide information about data-center projects beyond what Kentucky law already protects. It specifically addresses public records, public meetings and information concerning potential impacts on utilities and communities.
Again, ask the obvious question:
Why did Kentucky need such a bill in the first place?
When taxpayers provide incentives, utilities build infrastructure and local communities absorb the consequences, “confidential economic development” cannot become a magic phrase that makes public accountability disappear.
A corporation is entitled to protect legitimate trade secrets.
It is not entitled to privatize government.
Follow the Pension Money Too
There is another part of this story almost nobody in Kentucky politics wants to discuss.
Data centers aren’t simply a technology story.
They have become a gigantic Wall Street infrastructure asset class.
Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Brookfield and other alternative-asset managers are pouring capital into digital infrastructure, electricity generation, transmission and data centers.
Where does Wall Street get enormous amounts of long-duration capital?
Pension funds.
Including public pension funds.
So Kentucky can potentially subsidize the data-center ecosystem with one pocket while public retirement systems finance the Wall Street funds participating in it with another.
The taxpayer can appear on both sides of the transaction.
That’s why “follow the money” matters more than the ribbon-cutting press release.
Allison Ball Demonstrates the Contradiction
Kentucky Auditor Allison Ball provides an especially interesting example of the political contradiction.
Ball built a national profile attacking ESG and warning about conflicts between Wall Street political agendas and public pension fiduciary responsibilities.
Yet while Ball served as state treasurer and sat on the Kentucky Teachers’ Retirement System board, KTRS approved substantial commitments to KKR funds.
I previously identified as much as $95.5 million in new KKR commitments during Ball’s tenure.
KKR has also participated in the State Financial Officers Foundation sponsorship ecosystem. Ball has longstanding connections to SFOF, and her former Treasury official O.J. Oleka eventually became SFOF’s CEO.
And KKR is a major participant in the data-center and digital-infrastructure boom.
That doesn’t prove wrongdoing.
It does demonstrate why Kentucky voters should stop accepting political branding as a substitute for following actual money.
If ESG conflicts matter, conflicts matter.
If Wall Street influence matters, Wall Street influence matters.
The principle shouldn’t disappear depending upon which asset manager is writing the check or which investment happens to fit today’s political agenda.
Andy Barr Is an Especially Useful Test Case
That brings us to Republican U.S. Senate nominee Andy Barr.
Barr has spent years at the intersection of Kentucky politics and the financial-services industry.
His campaign fundraising makes the relationship impossible to ignore.
According to federal campaign-finance records, Barr’s authorized committees raised roughly $10 million from January 2025 through June 2026.
In earlier research, I documented contributions associated with major financial firms including Apollo, JPMorgan and Blackstone.
That matters because these aren’t random industries sitting on the sidelines of the data-center boom.
Alternative-asset managers, private-credit firms, banks, utilities and technology companies are financing an unprecedented buildout of AI infrastructure.
The question isn’t whether accepting a legal campaign contribution proves corruption. It doesn’t.
The question is much simpler:
When the interests of enormous financial contributors collide with Kentucky taxpayers, electricity customers, pension beneficiaries and local communities, whose interests come first?
That is a perfectly legitimate question for Barr—and every other candidate—to answer.
Robert Stivers Should Answer It Too
Kentucky Senate President Robert Stivers has publicly defended data-center development.
Good.
Then let’s have the debate.
But don’t give Kentuckians another economic-development argument consisting primarily of enormous investment numbers.
Tell us the denominator.
How much public subsidy?
How much electricity?
How much new generation?
How much transmission?
How much water?
How many permanent jobs?
How much tax revenue would have been collected without the exemptions?
Who pays if projected electricity demand doesn’t materialize?
Who pays for stranded infrastructure?
And what protections prevent residential and small-business ratepayers from subsidizing hyperscale customers?
Those aren’t anti-business questions.
They’re the questions any competent investment analyst would ask before putting money into a deal.
Kentucky taxpayers deserve at least the due diligence Wall Street demands for itself.
This Is Bigger Than Data Centers
The real issue in 2026 isn’t whether Kentucky should have data centers.
Of course Kentucky will have data centers.
AI is real. The infrastructure supporting it will require extraordinary investment.
The issue is who bears the risk and who collects the return.
That’s the question politicians don’t put on the economic-development billboard.
If a project succeeds, private investors can make billions.
If government grants decades of tax advantages, somebody else pays taxes.
If a utility builds billions of dollars of infrastructure, somebody ultimately pays the utility bill.
If public pension money flows through expensive private funds into infrastructure projects, retirees bear investment risk while Wall Street collects management fees and carried interest.
And if local citizens discover the details only after confidentiality agreements have been signed and political decisions have effectively been made, democracy becomes another externality.
Kentucky Needs a Data-Center Bill of Rights
Every candidate running statewide in Kentucky should be asked to support a few simple principles:
No ratepayer subsidies. No secret government deals. Full disclosure of tax incentives. Genuine local control over siting. Public disclosure of projected electricity and water consumption. Developers responsible for project-specific infrastructure costs. Transparent pension-fund exposure to data-center investments. And public disclosure of political contributions from companies and investment managers financially benefiting from the boom.
Republican, Democrat or independent—that should not matter.
These are taxpayer protections.
Follow the Power
Kentucky’s data-center story ultimately comes down to two kinds of power.
There is electrical power—the gigawatts these facilities require.
And there is political power—the ability of enormous corporations, Wall Street firms, utilities and their lobbyists to convince government that their private investment deserves public assistance.
Kentuckians should follow both.
Andy Barr should be asked about it.
Robert Stivers should be asked about it.
Allison Ball should be asked about it.
Every legislator who votes on another data-center subsidy should be asked about it.
And every candidate asking Kentuckians for a vote in November should have to explain exactly where they stand.
Because Kentucky doesn’t have to choose between technological development and protecting its citizens.
It can welcome AI investment while demanding that billion-dollar corporations pay their own bills, disclose their deals and stop treating Kentucky taxpayers as silent limited partners.
That’s not anti-business.
That’s common sense.
Send Kentucky Republicans a message on Date Centers by defeating Andy Barr
When Pension Fight Club premiered in Sacramento in May, just steps from CalPERS, it looked like the culmination of years of battles over public pension secrecy.
It may turn out to have been the beginning.
Award-winning filmmaker Doug Orchard’s 87-minute documentary Pension Fight Club is now available to stream online, bringing together one of the most unusual collections of pension critics ever assembled in one film: Republican and Democratic elected officials, union leaders, current and former pension trustees, professors, journalists, whistleblowers, retiree advocates—and ordinary teachers who simply started asking what was happening to their retirement money.
The film’s premise is provocative but remarkably simple: Public pension money is public money. Why has so much information about how that money is invested—particularly in private equity, private credit, hedge funds and other alternative investments—become secret?
The documentary argues that pension fiduciaries themselves can face obstacles obtaining the contracts governing some of their largest and riskiest investments. It examines hidden or difficult-to-measure fees, opaque valuations and benchmarks, consultant and manager conflicts, and the political and institutional resistance encountered by trustees and beneficiaries who demand answers.
What makes Pension Fight Club particularly powerful is that there is no convenient political stereotype for its cast. These people come from California, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, New York, Rhode Island, Minnesota and North Carolina. They include Republicans, Democrats, union officials and people with no obvious partisan agenda at all.
Wall Street secrecy turns out to be bipartisan. So does opposition to it.
Meet the Pension Fight Club
Margaret Brown — Former CalPERS Board Member
Brown has moved from being a dissident voice inside CalPERS to one of its most persistent outside critics. Now president of the Retired Public Employees’ Association of California, Brown argues that trustees, retirees and taxpayers cannot meaningfully evaluate private equity without credible information about fees, risks, valuations, benchmarks and performance. She has criticized CalPERS communications that portray private equity positively without giving members an equally clear picture of its risks. Her message is fundamentally about governance: you cannot have accountability without information.
J.J. Jelincic — Former CalPERS Board Member
Few people know CalPERS from the inside as well as J.J. Jelincic, who spent decades at the system as an investment officer before serving on its board. Long before pension transparency became fashionable, Jelincic was asking uncomfortable questions about private-equity fees, fee offsets, carried interest and what exactly CalPERS was paying its managers. His criticism goes to the heart of fiduciary oversight: if a trustee doesn’t know all the fees being charged, how can the trustee determine whether the pension is receiving value for them?
Katie Muth — Pennsylvania State Senator
Muth turned the transparency issue into an actual legislative program. She has proposed making public-pension investment contracts subject to Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law, disclosing managers and contracts to beneficiaries, and limiting pension exposure to non-public markets. She has also fought PSERS over access to records as a board member herself. Her experience illustrates one of the documentary’s most disturbing questions: What does it say about pension governance when an elected pension trustee has to fight her own pension system for information?
Curtis Loftis — South Carolina State Treasurer
Loftis may be one of the original pension fight-club members. For more than a decade he has attacked excessive investment costs, opaque alternative investments and contracts that restrict meaningful oversight. He has repeatedly argued that private equity can have a legitimate place in a portfolio—but only if fiduciaries actually know what they are paying and can compare those costs with performance. Years ago, he complained that South Carolina was paying hundreds of millions to Wall Street while struggling even to identify all the underlying expenses. His issue isn’t simply high fees. It is fees nobody can reliably measure.
Wade Steen — Former STRS Ohio Board Member
Steen became one of the central figures in the extraordinary political war over Ohio STRS. As a reform-oriented board member, he questioned investment practices and management and aligned himself with members seeking significant changes at the pension. His disputes eventually escalated far beyond ordinary boardroom disagreements, including litigation and controversy surrounding the QED proposal. Whatever one’s view of that separate controversy, Steen’s story illustrates the intensity of the institutional resistance that can develop when pension trustees challenge entrenched investment practices.
Rudy Fichtenbaum, Ph.D. — STRS Ohio Board Member
Economist Rudy Fichtenbaum has made perhaps the clearest quantitative case among the Ohio reformers. He advocates greater use of low-cost passive investing, lower investment expenses, better benchmarks and greater transparency around alternative investments. He has argued that STRS increased risk and reduced transparency through heavy exposure to alternatives and has repeatedly challenged the benchmarks used to judge their performance. Fichtenbaum’s question is devastatingly straightforward: if expensive active and alternative management is worth the money, demonstrate it against a credible benchmark after all costs.
Chris Tobe — Former Kentucky Retirement Systems Trustee
Tobe brings the perspective of a former Kentucky pension trustee, investment consultant, author and longtime critic of public-pension alternative investments. His work has focused on hidden investment fees, misleading benchmarks, conflicts involving consultants and money managers, and the difficulty trustees face when investment contracts and underlying economics are obscured. His broader argument fits squarely into Pension Fight Club: a fiduciary cannot prudently oversee an investment he cannot independently value, benchmark, cost and fully understand.
Maria J. Rodriguez — Chicago Teacher Pension Trustee
Rodriguez represents another important constituency in the movie: pension trustees willing to dissent rather than simply ratify staff and consultant recommendations. Her presence broadens the story beyond the better-known CalPERS and STRS fights. Chicago’s pension systems operate in an environment of chronic funding pressure, making independent trustee scrutiny of investment costs, governance and risk particularly important. Pension Fight Club makes the larger point that board dissent should be treated as part of fiduciary governance—not as an institutional nuisance.
Drew Warshaw — New York Comptroller Candidate
Warshaw has taken the fight directly into electoral politics. His campaign against New York’s longtime comptroller attacked the state’s reliance on hundreds of outside Wall Street managers and argued that much of the portfolio could be managed more cheaply through diversified passive strategies. Warshaw says New York has paid billions to outside managers without receiving adequate value for those fees. His challenge is essentially the index-fund question writ large: why should taxpayers pay Wall Street billions to try to beat markets if the expensive strategy fails to beat appropriate benchmarks after costs?
Lawrence Kotlikoff, Ph.D. — Boston University Professor
Economist Lawrence Kotlikoff supplies an academic perspective on the much larger problem: pension promises, funding assumptions and the intergenerational transfer of costs when governments fail to account honestly for retirement obligations. His presence helps move the film beyond individual managers or individual pension systems. Ultimately pension opacity is not merely an investment-management problem. If risks and liabilities are misstated today, workers and taxpayers bear the consequences tomorrow.
Robin Rayfield, Ed.D. — Ohio Retirement for Teachers Association
Rayfield and ORTA helped transform Ohio teachers from pension beneficiaries into pension investigators. ORTA helped finance Edward Siedle’s forensic investigation of STRS and has repeatedly demanded disclosure of investment fees, expenses and alternative-investment information. Rayfield has asked why STRS refused to provide records needed for that investigation and has argued that accountability cannot exist when information remains hidden from the people whose retirement money is being managed.
Dean Dennis — Ohio Retirement for Teachers Association
Dennis has focused relentlessly on the connection between investment policy and lost teacher benefits. His criticism is that teachers have worked longer, contributed more and lost inflation protection while STRS continued expensive active management and opaque private-market investing. Dennis contrasts that approach with simpler index investing and argues that hidden fees and nondisclosure agreements make meaningful accountability more difficult.
Edward Siedle — The Pension Warrior
Ted Siedle is effectively the connective tissue of the movie. A former SEC lawyer turned forensic pension investigator, Siedle has spent years investigating public pensions and arguing that the combination of secrecy, complex alternatives, hidden fees, conflicted advisers and weak trustee oversight creates an enormous opportunity for Wall Street to extract wealth from retirement systems. His investigations in Rhode Island, Ohio, Kentucky, Minnesota and most recently CalPERS have also demonstrated something important: retirees themselves can finance independent forensic scrutiny when pension institutions won’t provide it. The CalPERS investigation that helped inspire the documentary was itself crowdfunded by pensioners.
Pulitzer Prize-winning financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson brings something different to the film: decades of experience following money that powerful institutions would prefer not be followed. Her reporting has examined pension investment costs, private markets and the CalPERS forensic investigation. Morgenson helps connect what might otherwise look like isolated fights in individual states into a national financial story: hundreds of billions of dollars of workers’ retirement savings have migrated into increasingly complicated and opaque investments.
Michael McDonald — President, Rhode Island Council 94, AFSCME
Rhode Island is an important chapter in the modern pension story. Public workers experienced benefit reductions while the state moved substantial assets toward expensive alternative investments. McDonald represents the union and beneficiary perspective: workers are routinely told sacrifices are necessary to protect pension solvency, yet far less attention may be paid to the fees, costs and investment decisions on the asset side of the pension equation. Pension Fight Club asks why workers’ benefits are so easy to scrutinize while Wall Street contracts can remain so difficult to see.
John Damschroder — The Blade
Damschroder brings the Ohio fight into the realm of public accountability and journalism. While much of the Ohio media was controlled by Private Equity interests, Damschroder and the Toledo Blade brought real independent journalism to Ohio. The STRS controversy demonstrates why local and regional financial reporting matters: pension disputes that sound technical—benchmarks, alternative-investment expenses, staff incentives and governance—ultimately determine the retirement security of hundreds of thousands of people. The movie turns those seemingly obscure financial questions into something understandable: Whose money is it, who controls it, and who is watching the people controlling it?
This group represents the people at the bottom of the pension organizational chart but at the center of its purpose: teachers. They have testified publicly about disparities affecting Minnesota teachers’ retirement benefits. Their presence reminds viewers that pension policy isn’t an academic argument over basis points. Changes in retirement ages, contribution requirements and benefits determine how long a teacher must remain in the classroom and what kind of retirement that teacher can afford.
After decades in education, they have argued that retirement rules can leave veteran teachers feeling that they have little financial choice but to continue working. Her story puts a human face on the numbers: when a pension system underperforms expectations, teachers don’t experience a spreadsheet variance—they experience additional years of work and a less secure retirement.
Minnesota educators helped raise money for an independent forensic examination of their pension investments rather than relying solely on assurances from the institutions managing them. Their involvement is one of the documentary’s strongest themes: beneficiaries increasingly want independent verification, not simply another consultant telling them everything is fine.
Trina Prufer — Ohio Teacher
Prufer gives the Ohio battle its most important perspective—the teacher living with the consequences. Ohio educators have watched contribution rates rise, retirement requirements change and COLAs disappear or become uncertain while investment professionals and outside managers continued to be paid. Her presence keeps the STRS debate focused where it belongs: the pension exists to provide retirement benefits to teachers, not to provide an asset pool for the investment industry.
Ardis Watkins — Executive Director, State Employees Association of North Carolina
Watkins brings organized labor into the transparency coalition. SEANC has fought for pension transparency and accountability in North Carolina for more than 15 years. Her presence also destroys the convenient argument that questioning Wall Street pension management is somehow anti-worker or anti-pension. Watkins’ position is essentially the opposite: protecting public employees’ pensions requires demanding accountability from the people investing their money. SEANC itself has urged members to watch the documentary.
This Isn’t a Movie About Red States or Blue States
That may be Pension Fight Club’s most important accomplishment.
Look at the map.
California. South Carolina. Pennsylvania. Ohio. Kentucky. Illinois. Rhode Island. Minnesota. North Carolina. New York.
Look at the participants.
Republicans. Democrats. Union officials. Retirees. Professors. Teachers. Journalists. Pension trustees.
Yet they repeatedly arrive at versions of the same questions:
What are we paying?
What are we getting?
What risks are we taking?
Who picked these managers?
Who is checking the consultants?
Why can’t trustees see everything?
Why are public investment contracts secret?
Why are private-market valuations accepted without the same market discipline applied to publicly traded securities?
And perhaps most importantly:
Why does asking these questions so often produce hostility rather than answers?
That is why Pension Fight Club matters beyond pensions.
America’s public retirement systems control trillions of dollars. Those trillions have helped make public pensions some of the most important customers of private equity, private credit, hedge funds, real estate funds and Wall Street investment managers.
The people whose money supplies that enormous financial machine are teachers, firefighters, police officers, nurses and other public workers—and ultimately taxpayers.
They should not need a forensic investigator to find out what they own.
A trustee should not have to fight staff to see an investment contract.
A retiree should not need a finance degree to determine whether a manager beat a legitimate benchmark.
And taxpayers should not be told to write bigger checks without being able to determine how much money disappeared into fees, expenses and underperformance first.
The First Rule of Pension Fight Club Should Be: Talk About Pension Fight Club
The movie had its world premiere May 19 at Sacramento’s historic Crest Theatre, near both the California Capitol and CalPERS, as California debated legislation intended to increase private-equity transparency.
Now the fight has moved online.
This is a documentary that should be watched by every public pension trustee, every state legislator who oversees a retirement system, every union representing public workers, every financial reporter covering state government—and especially every teacher and public employee who has ever been told:
“Don’t worry. The experts have this under control.”
Maybe they do.
But after watching Pension Fight Club, you may decide you’d still like to see the contracts.
My Latest Broadcast Retirement Network Interview—and Why Artificial Intelligence May Be the Biggest Transparency Tool Retirement Investors Have Ever Had
By Christopher B. Tobe, CFA, CAIA
In my latest interview with Jeffrey Snyder on the Broadcast Retirement Network, we talked about 401(k) litigation, target-date funds, annuities, collective investment trusts and private markets. https://www.youtube.com/@BroadcastRetirementNetwork
Bloomberg used artificial intelligence and extensive data analysis to examine a market that historically has been extraordinarily difficult to map.
That matters because CITs have grown into a roughly $6–$7 trillion market rivaling mutual funds, while disclosure remains fragmented among federal and state regulators and no regulator appears to possess a complete picture of the marketplace.
That is remarkable.
We have trillions of dollars of American retirement savings sitting in investment vehicles for which the public lacks anything resembling the SEC’s centralized mutual-fund disclosure system.
Bloomberg used technology to begin putting that puzzle together.
I have been trying to do something similar on a much smaller scale.
AI Gives every Participant the power
A smart participant say someone who is an engineer or almost any business background, by putting their statement and 5500 in AI and could know more than historically plan sponsors and even their advisors. On issues like fees which many plans and most advisors have tried to ignore now become transparent.
In the hands of an expert AI can tear apart almost any 401k plan and sort out the ones that should be litigated.
A smart plan sponsor would put their plan in AI and ask what is wrong? But their advisors will discourage doing this to protect their jobs.
AI makes expertise scalable.
I can ask questions today that would have been economically unrealistic for an independent researcher to ask five years ago.
Follow the Money—At Machine Speed
This is where things become uncomfortable for Wall Street.
AI is increasingly good at connecting information that institutions have historically disclosed separately.
Each document by itself may tell you relatively little.
Connect 50 of them and you may have a story.
That is exactly the kind of work AI makes dramatically easier.
The Most Important AI Skill Is Still Knowing What Doesn’t Smell Right
AI is not magic. It makes mistakes.
Every important finding still needs to be verified against original documents.
But that misses the real significance of the technology.
An experienced investigator often knows that something doesn’t make sense long before he can prove why.
Those questions come from experience.
AI allows the investigator to pursue dozens of them simultaneously.
Human skepticism + investment experience + AI research capacity is an extraordinarily powerful combination.
The 401(k) Industry Was Built for an Information-Scarce World
A surprising amount of retirement regulation assumes that information is expensive.
Participants cannot investigate everything, so give them standardized disclosures.
Plan committees cannot analyze everything, so hire consultants.
Regulators cannot inspect everything, so require periodic filings.
Courts cannot reconstruct every investment decision, so rely upon benchmarks and fiduciary process.
Wall Street learned to operate inside those limitations and lack of transparency.
Complexity became protection.
Fragmentation became protection.
Scale became protection.
Put something inside another fund and it becomes harder to see.
Put it inside a CIT and disclosure may decline further.
Put a private fund inside the CIT and another layer appears.
Put an insurance contract underneath it and another appears.
Twenty years ago, following that chain might have required a team of lawyers, accountants and investment professionals.
Today an experienced investigator with AI can start pulling those layers apart from a laptop.
AI Could Be Particularly Dangerous to Hidden Fees
Wall Street can defend a disclosed 40-basis-point fee.
It is much harder to defend economics nobody disclosed.
This is why I think insurance products deserve particular attention.
If participants receive 2% while an insurer earns substantially more on the underlying portfolio, the economic difference can dwarf the tiny mutual-fund expense-ratio disputes that have dominated ERISA litigation.
Historically, determining those economics was difficult.
AI makes it increasingly possible to combine crediting rates, insurer portfolio yields, statutory filings, product documents, competitor rates and plan disclosures.
The same principle applies to private equity.
Private credit.
Real estate.
CITs.
Target-date funds.
Consulting relationships.
Revenue sharing.
And conflicts of interest.
Opacity becomes less valuable when computers can connect the disclosures you scattered across 20 different places.
Bloomberg Has Resources. Now Individuals Have Leverage Too.
Bloomberg’s investigation demonstrates what sophisticated technology and financial data can accomplish at institutional scale.
But the more revolutionary development may be happening below Bloomberg’s level.
Independent investment professionals. Even individual retirement-plan participants.
They increasingly have access to analytical capabilities that once belonged almost exclusively to large financial institutions.
The information advantage is narrowing.
That could ultimately matter more to retirement investors than another thousand pages of regulation.
This Is Why Wall Street’s Move Toward Complexity May Backfire
Private markets are arriving in 401(k)s at exactly the wrong historical moment for secrecy.
Wall Street is moving toward investments with: More complicated contracts. More subjective valuations. More layers. More affiliated entities. More private credit. More insurance structures. More state-regulated CITs.
Less standardized disclosure. That strategy assumes complexity will continue protecting the industry from scrutiny.
AI is making the opposite bet.
The more complicated the structure becomes, the more relationships there are for machines to discover.
The more documents scattered among regulators, the more documents there are to connect.
The more affiliated entities involved, the more potential conflicts can be mapped.
The more complicated the money trail, the more valuable automated analysis becomes.
Wall Street is building increasingly complicated haystacks at precisely the moment AI is getting extraordinarily good at finding needles.
I don’t believe AI replaces investment professionals, lawyers, journalists or regulators.
It does something potentially more important.
It dramatically increases their reach.
An experienced investment professional can investigate thousands of plans instead of dozens.
A journalist can connect records scattered among regulators.
A plaintiff attorney can identify potential fiduciary problems before discovery.
A pension trustee can independently test what consultants are telling the board.
And participants may eventually be able to ask questions about their retirement investments that previously required institutional research departments to answer.
For decades, complexity gave Wall Street an enormous advantage.
The CommonSense 401k Project 