August 22, 2026
Idaho’s $50 Billion Handout
By: Idaho Senator Brian Lenney
A guy on X posted this week that the “experts are in shock,” that Micron is putting $50 billion into Boise, that it’ll produce 17,000 jobs, and that this is huge for Americans.
We’ve spent decades being trained to cheer at numbers. A random figure gets announced, a governor stands next to a hard hat with a golden shovel, and we’re all supposed to feel something.
I have a different take:
In 2008 the legislature passed House Bill 562 to lure Areva, a French nuclear company, into building an enrichment plant near Idaho Falls. It said if you put $1 billion into the state within seven years, your taxable property value gets capped at $400 million forever.
The French never showed (shocking). But Micron hit the threshold in 2011 and took the deal written for somebody else.
By 2019 Micron’s Boise plant was assessed at $1.86 billion. Without the cap, that footprint would have owed $20.32 million in property tax the following year. Its actual bill in 2024 was $3.4 million. The new build sits under a separate entity, so it gets a second $400 million cap. Then House Bill 678 in 2022 killed the sales tax on construction materials, and Washington added $6.165 billion in CHIPS money too.
Micron passed a $1 trillion market cap this spring and has been above it since, on $90 billion of revenue at a 56% net margin. This week it announced a $10 billion AI research lab in Boise, funded out of pocket.
That’s the company we decided needed “relief.”
But wait, there’s more! In 2020 the legislature passed House Bill 521, exempting data centers from sales tax. The bar: $250 million invested within five years, and 30 permanent jobs.
That’s not a typo: 30.
Meta turned up almost immediately with an $800 million campus on farm ground outside Kuna, a town of 25,000. It has since crossed the $400 million threshold too (permanent headcount is around 100) and its record with kids is no mystery with headlines like:
What does it cost you?
A Boise homeowner pays about $300 a year more than he otherwise would, a Kuna homeowner about $160. Those are Ada County numbers and I represent Nampa, so here’s how it reaches us: the sales tax exemptions are statewide. Every dollar we forgive in Boise or Kuna is a dollar the general fund doesn’t have, and that fund pays for stuff in Nampa and Caldwell and Melba.
Call it what it is: this is a retired couple in Kuna sending money to Menlo Park, or a framer in Nampa sending money to shareholders in New York and Riyadh.
Chris Bruce and Lori Den Hartog tried to trim it back this session with House Bill 897. I voted yes. Micron objected to the part touching its property tax cap, and it died in the House.
Here’s a big part of it: dinners, receptions, drunken trips somewhere a lot nicer than Boise in January on somebody else’s plane. I get the invitations. Once in a while I’ll go to something if there’s an actual reason (but we’re talking single digits out of a hundred). Saying no to the other ninety-some is a large part of why I have time to sit here and write this.
A lobbyist isn’t a stranger to anybody in that building. He’s there every day of the session. He learns a member’s kids’ names, asks after the wife, buys dinner, drinks, and who knows what else. There’s wine and shots and drunk legislators, and by March many legislators have eaten 40 meals with their lobbyist “friends” and maybe two with their own families.
Then a bill comes up and he says what he needs, and it doesn’t land on that member as a bribe.
It lands as a favor for a “friend.”
The filing burden falls on the lobbyist, not the legislator, and most of what he files is a lump sum by category. Entertainment. Travel. Lodging. A dollar number with nobody’s name attached to it.
Then at the end there’s a banquet where a lobbying group hands out awards for being a “friend of Idaho business.” None of this is the exception. It’s how that building works, and a big chunk of the legislature takes part in it. Nobody breaks a law but somehow men who consider themselves honest cast votes they couldn’t explain at home, because the man who asked was a “friend” who bought them drinks.
But I digress…
Go read House Bill 562 and find me the part that requires anybody to hire anybody.
It isn’t in there. Section 63-4502 defines a qualifying investment as a billion dollars of construction and equipment. That’s the whole test. No employment floor, no wage standard, no residency requirement, not one word about a human being.
Buy the machines, skip the taxes, forever.
Meanwhile Micron filed 573 labor condition applications last year. H-1B doesn’t spread evenly across a new build. It concentrates in exactly the roles a kid from Nampa with an engineering degree is aiming at. Process. Yield. Integration. Design. The construction and technician jobs mostly go local while the career goes to a guy from India.
And that Indian can’t quit. His status belongs to his employer, so he doesn’t push on wages, doesn’t jump to a competitor, and doesn’t file the complaint. That’s not a knock on him. It’s a knock on a company that would rather have a workforce it owns than one it has to bargain with, the same instinct that shipped our plants to China and called it efficiency.
So about those 17,000 jobs. Maybe Micron delivers every one of them. But nothing in Idaho law says they have to, nothing says the jobs go to Idahoans, and nothing happens if the number comes in at 6,000.
We held $50 billion worth of negotiating position and asked for nothing.
I’m bringing a bill to repeal all of it. Not sunset it. Not index it. Repeal.
Title 63, Chapter 45, the $400 million cap. Written for a company that never came, passed 41 to 27, no member’s name on the bill, and they declared an emergency to backdate it. Brad Little even voted no on it when he was a legislator.
Idaho Code 63-3622VV. The data centers. Thirty jobs.
Idaho Code 63-3622WW. Read subsection 4(e): to qualify you have to already be collecting CHIPS money and already be claiming the 2008 cap. We wrote the old giveaway into the new one as a prerequisite. It’s a corporate welfare ladder, and we built every rung ourselves.
Three sections need to go.
Because a tax break for one company is a tax increase on everybody else. And a business that has to be paid to come here is coming for the check, not for Idaho. It’ll leave for a bigger one.
America First isn’t a line for a mailer…
It means the American worker comes before the shareholder, the kid from Nampa gets first look at the job in his own state, and a trillion-dollar corporation that wants our power and water and roads pays the same freight as the framer down the road and hires our kids while it’s here.
I’m tired of watching my own party act like the Chamber of Commerce with a flag pin on and what I actually want is harder to put in the tax code. I want a kid who grows up in Nampa to be able to stay in Nampa, own a house on one income, and bury his parents in the county he was born in.
That used to be ordinary here, and no press release with a big number in it is going to bring it back.
