The public purse is not a gift shop

Senator Elizabeth Warren is asking the leaders of Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to account for AI and data center subsidies authorized by recent Republican legislation, according to CNBC. That is a sound instinct, even if one might dispute the precise remedy she proposes. Public money carries public obligations. That was true when I asked Congress to assume the states' war debts in 1790, and it remains true in 2026.

Let me be clear about the first principle. I have never believed that encouraging domestic industry is wrong. I argued at length in the Report on Manufactures that the federal government has both the power and the duty to cultivate the productive capacity of this nation. If artificial intelligence and the data centers that power it are the iron foundries and textile mills of this century — and I am given to understand they may be — then a policy of active encouragement is not merely acceptable but wise. The nation that leads in the commanding technologies of its era does not suffer for it.

But encouragement and donation are different things. When I structured the assumption of state debts and the chartering of the Bank of the United States, I did so with an eye to what the public received in return: creditors made whole, credit restored, a financial institution whose notes would circulate as a reliable currency. The exchange was explicit. Congress could examine it. The public could judge it. What Senator Warren appears to be asking — and I mark this as inference from the CNBC report's lead, not from documents I have reviewed — is whether the current subsidies are structured with equivalent transparency and reciprocity.

Here is the concern that would press on a mind disposed as mine is. Meta, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are not small enterprises requiring a nursery. They are among the largest accumulations of private capital in the history of commerce. When entities of that scale receive public subsidy, the burden of justification runs to them, not against those who demand an accounting. Concentrated private power that escapes public check was precisely the danger I warned against in a different form — and the form changes, but the danger does not.

The productive questions are these: Do the subsidies require that the resulting infrastructure remain accessible to American competitors, so that no single firm captures the public investment as a private moat? Do they carry obligations to train and employ American workers? Is the intellectual property that emerges from federally subsidized research treated as a national asset or a purely private one? I cannot answer those questions from a newspaper lead, and I am humble enough to acknowledge that the engineering of modern payment rails and data infrastructure lies beyond my direct knowledge. But whether the credit is sound, whether the trust is well-placed, whether the check on private power is real — on those questions I have a view.

My recommendation is direct. Congress should require, as a condition of any AI or data center subsidy, a public disclosure of the subsidy's value, the recipient's obligations, and a mechanism for clawback if those obligations go unmet. This is not hostility to industry. It is the minimum that sound public finance demands. The nation's credit is built on the confidence that public money is spent with purpose and accountability. Spend it otherwise, and you do not merely waste the dollar — you erode the trust on which every future dollar depends.