Pacifica | A Tale of Data Centers, Clean Water, and the Purpose of Government

Every organization exists for a reason. It has some purpose, something it’s supposed to achieve. And if we can’t measure whether we’re making progress toward that purpose, how do we know whether we’re doing a good job? We can measure how much money an organization spends. We can measure how many people it employs. We can measure whether its paperwork is turned in on time. But none of those things tells us whether the organization is achieving the reason it exists. A measurable objective tells us what success looks like. It allows us to turn intent into accountability. That doesn’t mean everything important can be reduced to a number. But when we’re spending other people’s money, we owe them some way to judge whether the effort is working. If you aren’t readily familiar, the United States has six goals, as outlined in the Constitution Preamble: union, justice, domestic tranquility, defense, general welfare, and liberty. Let’s think about how we get from those very broad goals to the things our government actually does every day. To get there, let’s start in a fictional region called Pacifica. In Pacifica there are two cities, Sonora and Mojave. They share a river. Sonora sits upstream. Mojave downstream. Sonora has been building data centers. Its economy benefits from them, and the facilities consume substantial quantities of electricity and water. Sonora is doing a poor job regulating what happens to the water. They are contaminating the river, and Mojave depends on clean water to grow food. Mojave has tried talking to Sonora. Its leaders have complained, negotiated, and asked for better controls. Sonora hasn’t responded in any meaningful way. As conditions deteriorate, Mojave begins to view Sonora’s disregard for its water supply as a hostile act. Mojave would rather solve the problem diplomatically. But its leadership also asks its Department of Defense to develop options if diplomacy fails. The obvious military answer might be to destroy the data centers. After all, if the data centers are the problem, why not remove them? But Mojave’s planners are cunning. They know that destroying them would be a terrible way to achieve what Mojave wants. It could require a great deal of force, consume resources Mojave may need later, and create enough resentment to spark a much larger war. And there is no guarantee that destroying the facilities would restore the river. Depending on what is damaged, it could make the contamination worse. Then, having spent so much on the first attempt, Mojave might have little options left if it fails. So they think of alternatives. Sonora’s data centers need electricity, and they get it from multiple sources: a solar field, a coal-fired power plant, and wind turbines. The planners consider whether electricity to the data centers might be interrupted without destroying the facilities themselves. The idea isn’t to devastate Sonora. It is to demonstrate that continuing to disregard the river carries a cost, while leaving some way back to negotiation. Even a limited option is dangerous. Infrastructure may serve civilians as well as data centers. Sonora could retaliate. A threat intended to end a dispute could make it worse. Military planners don’t get to know in advance whether the assumptions on which their plan rests will hold. And this is where the objective matters. Mojave’s objective isn’t to destroy data centers, power plants, or transmission lines. Its objective is clean water for its intended agricultural use, today and tomorrow. There are different ways to get there. Some involve military force. Some don’t. Mojave could achieve the objective through negotiation without firing a shot. Its military could execute every assigned action perfectly and still fail to restore the water. Now imagine the commander assigned to develop and conduct those operations. While the commander works on the conflict, higher headquarters is also asking about personnel records, maintenance records, training documentation, and late performance reports. Maybe a quarter of the annual personnel reports are overdue. The headquarters wants that paperwork fixed. Those requirements aren’t imaginary, and some matter directly to operations. A broken maintenance process can cost lives. But reducing overdue personnel reports from 25 percent to zero would never tell us whether the river has gotten any cleaner. A unit can be busy. A unit can be compliant. A unit can have beautiful spreadsheets showing all the things it did. None of those things, by themselves, prove it achieved its mission. Pacifica is only an illustration. We don’t need to know whether Mojave attacks, or whether Sonora eventually cooperates. The question is what they’re trying to achieve, and whether the things they measure tell them they’re getting there. Pacifica is fictional. The distinction between an operational objective and the administration of a military unit is not. Inside the Department of Defense, strategic planning guidance connects what military organizations do to what the nation is trying to achieve. This isn’t a theoretical exercise. There’s a hierarchy of guidance. The President issues a National Security Strategy. The Secretary of Defense develops a National Defense Strategy. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff develops a National Military Strategy to describe how military power supports those higher objectives. There is also the Guidance for Employment of the Force, which military planners use as they develop plans for specific regions and problems. From there the guidance flows through combatant commands, campaign plans, contingency plans, and down to the units that execute missions. The point isn’t that every pilot sits down each morning and reads the National Security Strategy before climbing into an airplane. The point is that there is a reason for the mission. It connects to an operational objective, which connects to a larger strategic objective, which ultimately connects to something the United States is trying to achieve. And once we know the objective, we can ask whether we’re making progress. A measure of performance might tell us whether an aircraft flew its assigned sortie or completed a particular task. A measure of effectiveness asks a harder question: did that activity produce the result we wanted? Of course, that same military unit also has to administer itself. Maintenance records, training records, operational reports, inspections, evaluations of its people. Every year, the military produces personnel performance reports much like any employee evaluation. An operational unit has to do both jobs: accomplish its assigned mission and keep the organization running. This administration is necessary. If an aircraft isn’t maintained, no one flies it. If nobody knows who is qualified to perform a task, that’s an operational problem. But let’s not confuse everything we can track with everything that deserves equal priority. A late performance report matters to a person’s career. It doesn’t tell you whether the unit can achieve its wartime objective. There are two systems of measurement living inside the same organization. One asks whether the unit is making progress toward the mission. The other asks whether the unit is managing itself. We need both, but the first tells us why the unit exists. The second ought to help it do that work, not become the work. This isn’t just a military problem. It’s a government problem. Consider the United States Department of Agriculture. The Department administers programs for agriculture, research, conservation, rural development, and housing, among other responsibilities. USDA’s Small Business Innovation Research program includes a topic called Rural and Community Development. Its stated objective is to improve quality of life in rural America through the development and commercialization of technologies addressing economic and social challenges. USDA also has a Rural Housing Service. It provides loans, grants, and loan guarantees for single-family and multifamily housing and for community facilities in rural areas. These programs aren’t the same thing as the innovation research program. They are different efforts under the same large department. So let’s talk about what it means to improve the quality of life in rural America. For people working in small towns, being able to afford a place to live isn’t a minor concern. A person can have a job and still be unable to buy a home in the community where that job exists. If housing is out of reach, families move, businesses struggle to hire, and the community loses people it needs. Government can report how many loans it makes, how many grants it awards, and how much money it spends. Those are real numbers, and they matter for accounting and oversight. But they don’t answer the same question as whether housing has become more affordable. One proposed measure would compare the median price of a home in a community with the median annual household income in that same community. For this example, set a target: the median home price should be no more than twice the median household income. If median household income is sixty thousand dollars, that means a target median home price of no more than one hundred twenty thousand dollars. That is a proposed policy target, not an existing federal affordability standard. Nor is it the only relevant measurement. Mortgage interest rates, taxes, insurance, rents, and the housing needs of families below the median all affect affordability. But the ratio gives policymakers a plainly stated outcome to test. Housing supply is one possible way to make progress. If a community can build more housing where supply is constrained, additional homes generally put downward pressure on prices relative to what they otherwise would have been. That doesn’t mean every additional house automatically reduces prices, or that the federal government can create homes without local builders, zoning decisions, infrastructure, financing, and private demand. It means we can separate the activity from the result. Counting houses is useful. Counting dollars distributed is useful. But if the goal is to make housing affordable for working families, we have to measure…affordability. USDA does publish strategic plans and performance measures. Federal agencies are already required to do some of this work. The question is whether the connection between an individual program, the resources devoted to it, and the outcome it’s supposed to produce is clear enough for the public and policymakers to judge its value. That isn’t a hypothetical weakness. In a March 2026 report, the Government Accountability Office found that the federal program inventory still did not consistently describe how individual programs contribute to agency missions and goals. The same report explained that a previous review of inventories published in 2013 found that only eleven of twenty-four agencies identified the strategic objectives supported by each program. The issue isn’t whether government keeps records. It keeps a lot of records. The issue is whether those records tell us what we are achieving. The government shouldn’t have to invent some grand new purpose every time a new administration takes office. We already know the purpose. We wrote them down in the Preamble to the Constitution: Union, justice, order, common defense, general welfare, and liberty. These are national goals. That doesn’t mean the Preamble, by itself, authorizes every program someone thinks might be helpful. Congress still has to act within the Constitution, and the President still has to faithfully execute the laws. But these goals show how we ask why we’re doing something at all. Voters should demand accountability. Congress writes laws, establishes programs, and appropriates money. It ought to explain which national purpose a program serves, what result it expects, and how we will tell whether we are achieving that result. The executive branch, which administers those programs, should be able to trace its work and spending back to the law and those same goals. Not every result is going to be easy to measure. Some programs serve several goals. Sometimes the evidence takes years to develop. Sometimes we need to admit that our original assumptions were wrong. Fine. That’s a reason to think harder about our measures, not to give up on having them. We can’t hold one agency responsible for every economic condition in America. USDA cannot single-handedly determine housing costs across rural America. But if we say a program is intended to improve rural housing, then we ought to identify the part of the problem the program can influence and look for evidence that it is making a difference. It’s easier to track how much we spent than to know what we achieved. We count employees, grants, applications, inspections, reports, and dollars. Administration gives us numbers. But the numbers aren’t meaningful just because they show up in a report. Instead, for every program the executive branch runs, tell us the law that authorizes it. Tell us which national goal it serves. Tell us the measurable result it’s trying to produce. Tell us what it costs, and whether we’re actually making progress to the effect. When the evidence says the program isn’t working, we should be willing to change it. And if it no longer serves a defensible purpose, we should be willing to end it. We shouldn’t confuse activity with achievement, or compliance with success. And we shouldn’t assume that because a government program has existed for decades, its existence is the reason to keep it. The American people give government enormous resources. They have every right to ask what those resources are achieving. Government should be accountable not only for how it spends our money, but for what it achieves with it. Sources National Archives. U.S. Constitution, Preamble and Articles I and II.Provides the six national purposes used throughout the essay and the division between Congress’s lawmaking and spending authority and the President’s duty to execute the laws. U.S. Code. 10 U.S.C. § 153, Chairman: functions.Establishes the Chairman’s planning responsibilities and requires the National Military Strategy to support presidential and defense objectives, grounding the essay’s connection between national purpose and military action. 2025 National Security Strategy, White House. Establishes the President’s national security priorities and the objectives that guide the use of American power. 2026 National Defense Strategy, Department of Defense. Explains how the Defense Department translates presidential priorities into military priorities, capabilities, and resource decisions. 2022 National Military Strategy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Demonstrates how military strategy connects to national security and defense objectives. CJCSI 3500.01K, Joint Training Policy, November 2024. Figure 1 explicitly identifies the NSS, NDS, NMS, GEF, and combatant commanders’ guidance in the strategic-document framework. National Military Strategy historical archive, Department of Defense. Explains the Chairman’s responsibility for producing the strategy and its relationship to the higher-level national strategies. USDA NIFA. SBIR/STTR Topic Areas, section 8.6, Rural and Community Development. Identifies improving rural quality of life through technological innovation as a stated program objective, giving the USDA example a documented purpose against which to judge results. USDA Rural Development. Rural Housing Service. Confirms that rural housing is part of USDA’s responsibilities and identifies its loans, grants, and guarantees, distinct from the small-business research program. USDA Rural Development. Single Family Housing Programs. Shows that USDA already helps families buy, build, and repair homes, grounding the question of whether those activities produce more affordable housing. Performance.gov. Performance Framework. Explains existing federal requirements for setting goals and reviewing results, so the criticism concerns weak connections and accountability rather than an absence of any measurement system. U.S. Government Accountability Office. Federal Programs: OMB Needs to Continue Developing a Complete and Useful Inventory. GAO-26-107551, March 5, 2026. Documents missing links between programs, agency goals, and performance evidence. HUD, Office of Policy Development and Research. Rent Burden in the Housing Choice Voucher Program, October 2017. Explains housing costs as a share of household income, clarifying why the essay’s proposed home-price-to-income target differs from established rental cost-burden measures. Get full access to I Believe at joelkdouglas.substack.com/subscribe