Heinrich, on CNN, Warns Over a Reported Lab Illness in Russia and a CDC 'Running on Fumes'

U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) took his fight over who pays for the data center boom to national television this week, and used the same CNN appearance to raise pointed concerns about a reported deadly illness at a research facility in Russia and the state of the nation's disease defenses.

Appearing Wednesday on CNN's The Lead with Jake Tapper, Heinrich, the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, returned to the heart of the permitting bill he unveiled last week. Asked how he would make data center owners, rather than the families who live nearby, pay for the electricity their buildings demand, he pointed straight to the legislation.

"In the permitting bill, that we just released text on a little over a week ago, we mandate that [data centers] have to pay for both the electricity and for any grid upgrades," Heinrich said. "And we prohibit passing those costs along to average ratepayers, be those residential customers or small businesses."

The conversation then turned to reports of a suspected plague exposure at a Russian lab, and Heinrich said the country's track record left him uneasy.

"We have a long history of Russia kind of coloring outside the lines, going all the way back to the Soviet Union," he said. "I would be very concerned if this were an engineered pathogen. I don't have any unique information saying that is the case. But if it were the case, that would be cause for alarm."

He tied that worry to what he described as a hollowed-out Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, pointing to cuts made under the Trump administration and DOGE a year earlier.

"We have a CDC right now in the United States that is sort of running on fumes," Heinrich said. "The CDC is just simply not the agency that it should be for things like surveillance for any kind of international pathogen."

In the short term, Heinrich said he wanted to see a "hand-in-glove approach between Russia and the World Health Organization," including transparency about what tests were administered to the exposed lab worker and what they showed. A confirmed case of plague, he added, would actually ease some of his concern.

"If this were the plague, that would actually assuage a lot of my concerns because we all know how to deal with the plague. We've been dealing with the plague for hundreds of years," he said. "If it's something else, then that is the concern that I think a lot of people are expressing."

The permitting measure Heinrich keeps returning to, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, is co-sponsored with Sens. Mike Lee, Shelley Moore Capito, and Sheldon Whitehouse, and would require data centers to cover the transmission costs they create rather than passing them to households.