The Trump administration moved Thursday to seize the policy ground vacated by the defeated Sanders-Ocasio-Cortez artificial intelligence moratorium, directing the National Economic Council to draft a grid-investment package within thirty days as House sponsors began circulating a discharge petition aimed at forcing a floor vote on the broader pause.

The dual maneuver, less than 24 hours after the Ways and Means Committee voted 24-21 to kill the moratorium, recast a fight that had dominated Capitol Hill for nearly a month into a contest over who could credibly answer the energy-cost concerns the bill had elevated. White House officials sought to lock in the industry’s narrow committee victory by acknowledging the underlying grievance, while progressive Democrats sought to keep the issue alive through the summer and into the midterm cycle.

Press Secretary Caroline Levitt told reporters at the Thursday morning briefing that President Donald Trump had directed senior advisers to deliver “a serious, market-aware response to the legitimate concerns Americans have about their power bills.” She said the package, which the administration intends to unveil before Memorial Day, would include accelerated transmission permitting, a federal backstop for utility interconnection queues, and targeted tax credits for advanced nuclear and long-duration storage projects sited near hyperscale facilities.

“Yesterday’s vote was a vote against a two-year freeze on American innovation,” Levitt said. “It was not a vote against doing anything. The president believes the country can build the grid and the data centers at the same time, and he intends to lead that effort.”

The White House posture marked a notable shift from the administration’s studied neutrality during the markup. Two senior officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations, said the political team had concluded over the weekend that a clean industry win on the moratorium would leave the president exposed on consumer electricity prices heading into the spring. The grid package, one official said, was “the off-ramp that became the on-ramp the minute the committee count tightened.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who led the House push for the moratorium, dismissed the announcement as “a press release in search of a policy” and said she would file a discharge petition Friday seeking to force a full House vote on the original Senate-passed bill. Under chamber rules, the petition would require 218 signatures to bypass Ways and Means; sponsors privately estimated they could reach roughly 190 within two weeks, well short of the threshold but enough, they argued, to keep pressure on wavering Democrats from data-center districts.

“The committee vote was not the end of this fight, it was the bell for the next round,” Ocasio-Cortez told reporters outside the Cannon building. “If the White House wants to build a grid, fine. We will hold them to every comma. But the people who fought this moratorium spent forty million dollars to protect a business model that is breaking the system.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, in a statement issued from his Senate office Thursday afternoon, called the committee outcome “a temporary setback engineered by the most expensive lobbying campaign in the history of the technology sector” and said he would introduce a narrower companion bill next week focused on mandatory grid-impact disclosures for new training clusters. Senate aides said the disclosure measure was designed to attract the three Republicans who voted for the broader moratorium on April 7, and to pressure House moderates who had argued the original bill was too sweeping.

Ways and Means Chairman Marcus Cobb, asked Thursday whether he would entertain Sanders’s disclosure proposal, said the committee was “open to good-faith ideas” but added that the panel’s focus would shift to the war supplemental and a pending trade package. Cobb, who held five of his Democratic colleagues against the moratorium and engineered the substitute language that became the basis for the final vote, was praised by industry groups as the architect of Wednesday’s defeat.

Republican leadership treated the outcome as vindication. House Speaker Mike Johnson, in remarks at a Heritage Foundation luncheon, said the committee vote “settled the question of whether Washington is going to surrender the AI century to the Chinese Communist Party.” He added that the conference would support the White House’s grid package “on the merits, provided it does not become a vehicle for the same regulatory overreach the committee just rejected.”

The reaction from the AI industry was muted but pointed. The Information Technology Industry Council issued a one-page statement Thursday morning praising the committee vote and welcoming the White House grid initiative, while a separate letter from the Data Center Coalition, representing roughly seventy operators, called on Congress to pair any grid investment with federal preemption of state-level moratoriums. New York and California advanced bills along those lines last week, and industry counsel have already signaled litigation challenges if either becomes law.

“The federal fight is over for now, but the state fight is just beginning, and the states are where the political risk has actually concentrated,” said Priya Ramaswamy, a Washington-based technology policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “What the White House announced today is essentially a peace offering to voters and a warning shot to Albany and Sacramento.”

Moderate Democrats who voted against the moratorium offered cautious endorsements of the administration’s pivot. Representative Hollis Granger of Virginia, one of the five committee Democrats who broke with sponsors, said in a statement that she would “engage constructively” with the grid package but expected “real teeth on transmission permitting, not warmed-over talking points.” Representative Daniel Park of Arizona, another committee Democrat who voted no, said his constituents in the Phoenix corridor “want the grid built, not paused, and they want it built fast.”

The political calendar will press both sides. House leadership intends to bring the $96 billion war supplemental to the floor next week, and the Senate is expected to take up the Kaine-Murphy war powers resolution by the week of April 27. Discharge petition organizers said they would not interfere with either vote, but planned to begin signature collection Monday.

Administration officials said the National Economic Council would convene a working group of utility executives, hyperscaler representatives, and consumer advocates beginning next week, and that a public framework document would be released ahead of the president’s planned Memorial Day energy address in Pittsburgh.