Rebecca Michalski in Rainelle, West Virginia received a $940 electric bill in February -- more than her fixed income check. She took out a loan to keep the lights on. Her annual electricity statements have totaled more than $5,000. She turns off every light she does not need.

The federal government that cannot find money to help her pay that bill is building a floating nuclear reactor to power its artificial intelligence operations.

That is not a figure of speech. It is a documented fact -- one of several that Plain Citizen is going to lay out in this article. This is a companion to our earlier piece on who broke your electric bill. That article covered Big Tech and the utility companies. This one covers the government -- and what it has been doing with your land, your money, and your power grid while telling you it cannot afford the basics.

What the Pentagon Is Spending on AI

The Department of Defense's fiscal year 2026 budget allocates more than $2.2 billion specifically to artificial intelligence and machine learning -- embedded across every branch of the military, from battlefield targeting systems to submarine production to electronic warfare. A separate line item adds $1.06 billion for software and digital infrastructure to support AI deployment at scale.

This is the same budget request that asked Congress for $1.5 trillion in total defense spending -- the largest military budget request in U.S. history -- while the administration said the federal government could not afford daycare, Medicaid, or Medicare.

The Pentagon's own published AI strategy, released in January 2026, states it plainly: "2026 will be the year we emphatically raise the bar for Military AI Dominance."

In December 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth launched GenAI.mil -- a government website giving all three million military and civilian Defense Department personnel access to commercial large language model AI tools. The same tools powering the data centers driving up your electric bill are now standard issue for every government clerk, contractor, and soldier in the federal system.

Your Land. Their Profit. No Obligation.

Here is where this story moves from budget numbers to something more concrete -- land that belongs to the American public, being handed over to private companies to build facilities that generate private profit.

In January 2025, President Biden signed an executive order directing the Departments of Defense and Energy to identify federal land -- including military bases -- that could be leased to private companies for AI data center construction. In July 2025, President Trump signed his own executive order extending and accelerating that framework, promising a "golden age for American manufacturing and technological dominance."

Both signed. Neither required those companies to compensate the civilian electricity grid for the demand their data centers create.

What followed was a systematic offering of American military land to private technology companies at terms that should make any taxpayer stop and ask questions.

The deal terms deserve to be read carefully. Private companies pay $250,000 plus "fair market value" for the land. They must supply their own power and water. The government, per the lease proposal, "is under no obligation" to purchase any of the power or services the data centers produce. Environmental reviews and permitting have been "streamlined" -- with specifics left unclear in public documents.

A national security expert quoted by Defense One said what many others were thinking:

The Edwards Air Force Base inclusion drew particular concern. The base is home to the Air Force's most classified test aircraft programs. A private company building and operating a commercial data center on that land would be in proximity to those facilities, training exercises, and test operations for the foreseeable future.

The Floating Nuclear Reactor

The electricity demand from AI is straining the civilian grid that Rebecca Michalski and 80 million other Americans depend on to keep their lights on. The military has noticed. Its solution is not to reduce its AI footprint. Its solution is to build its own power supply -- one that bypasses the civilian grid and its regulatory oversight entirely.

The Pentagon is in talks with UK-based Core Power to evaluate a 300 megawatt floating nuclear power plant for deployment at a U.S. military base as early as 2028. The concept places a reactor aboard a ship-like platform moored at a waterside installation, then connects it to the base -- and potentially the local grid.

The key regulatory detail: a reactor placed on a military base could bypass the standard U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission civilian approval process. Instead of going through the same licensing pathway that governs every civilian nuclear plant in the country, it would be handled by Defense Department specialists who manage naval nuclear propulsion. Faster. Less public scrutiny. No civilian oversight board.

Separately, the Pentagon is already developing Project Pele -- a portable nuclear reactor being built by BWXT Advanced Technologies at Idaho National Laboratory. A Pentagon official described it: "It's going to be the first generation portable nuclear reactor built anywhere in the world, outside of China." The demonstration target is 2026.

The administration's stated long-term goal is to quadruple U.S. nuclear capacity to 400 gigawatts by 2050, with military installations and AI data center hubs as primary siting locations.

To be clear about what this means: the civilian grid cannot keep up with AI demand. Electricity bills are rising across the country as a result. The government's answer for its own operations is to build nuclear reactors that bypass civilian regulatory processes. Your answer is a higher electric bill.

What They Can and Cannot Afford

Plain Citizen has covered this territory before -- in our articles on the military budget and on the federal government's daycare programs for its own employees. But it is worth putting the full picture in one place, because the contrast is stark.

Both Parties Built This

Plain Citizen applies the same standard to everyone. This is not a Republican story or a Democratic story. It is a government story -- and the record shows both parties wrote it.

Neither administration required private companies building on public military land to contribute to the civilian grid costs their data center operations create. Neither required them to compensate communities near military bases for the electricity demand their facilities place on local power systems. Neither made the lease terms public in their entirety. Neither held public hearings before offering the land.

The Question Nobody Is Asking Loudly Enough

The government is already the country's largest computing user, or close to it -- managing 40,000 servers in its IT arm alone. It is now leasing public military land to expand private commercial data center operations. It is developing its own nuclear power sources to run those operations off the civilian grid. It is doing all of this while telling the public that basic domestic programs are unaffordable.

Nobody voted on whether Fort Bliss should become a data center campus. Nobody was asked whether Edwards Air Force Base -- home to classified test aircraft -- should host private commercial computing operations. Nobody authorized a floating nuclear reactor through the civilian regulatory process that governs every other nuclear facility in the country.

These decisions were made in executive orders, budget line items, and procurement documents that most Americans will never see. The costs -- on the electric bill, in the national debt, in the long-term use of public land -- flow to ordinary people automatically.

Plain Citizen is not arguing that AI is not important, that military readiness does not matter, or that nuclear power cannot be part of an energy solution. Those are real and separate debates worth having.

Plain Citizen is asking a simpler question: who authorized this -- and who is paying for it?