Under the second Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has focused its energies on examining and expanding all the things it cannot do for the people of the United States.
The standards it cannot set, the deadlines it cannot hold, the public it cannot consult, the experts it cannot employ, the grants it cannot fund, the enforcement it cannot conduct: for EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, it has been a relentless pursuit of cannot. Or rather, cannot for the people, in service of can for a select polluting few.
Nowhere is this clearer than in all the ways EPA is suddenly arguing that it cannot protect the public from a surge in pollution due to the rapid build-out of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data centers and the increasing amounts of coal, gas, and diesel resources now being relied on to power them. So much so, in fact, that Administrator Zeldin has made slashing safeguards for AI-enabling infrastructure one of the five core pillars of his agency’s entire agenda for President Trump’s second term.
This ethos of “cannot” is a staggering perversion of EPA’s mission. It is also incredibly consequential.
Exactly as EPA is attempting to remove itself from the business of protecting the public, the public is being confronted by a massive onslaught of new fossil fuel-fired power plants, alongside an increasing reliance on existing gas and coal plants.
The consequences for people’s health and the environment are severe: these are heavily polluting sources, yet the administration is frantically working to free them from basic pollution control requirements and shield them from public view. And because of the long lifetime of this infrastructure, if the Trump EPA gets its way, the result will be vastly more pollution today and for decades to come.
Power sector scene-setting
Right now, all across the country, tech companies are on the hunt for power. They are seeking enormous amounts of electricity to run energy-intensive new data centers, each equivalent in electricity use to the needs of entire cities. As these data centers rapidly hoover up any remaining surpluses of electricity supply, attention has turned to building out new sources of generation.
Renewable resources, especially wind and solar generation alongside energy storage, are overwhelmingly the fastest and cheapest resources to deploy. Or at least, they should be.
However, the Trump administration is actively, often illegally, holding back their deployment and antagonistically increasing their costs, while at the same time heavily pressuring companies to embrace the use of fossil fuels. As a result, while there are still large amounts of renewables and storage being added to the system, there is nowhere near as much as there could or should be—and there is a lot more new gas, both on the grid and, increasingly, off. Moreover, demand for gas plants is now so high, and regulatory accountability around resulting pollution is now so low, that it’s not “just” typical gas plants being built, either: it’s also far less efficient, far heavier polluting jet engines, reciprocating internal combustion engines, and what-should-be-back-up generators running full-out, full-time.
And here’s what makes this bad situation even worse: the slashing of pollution standards is an entirely worthless dealing away of the public interest.
Beyond the wrongness in principle, there’s also the wrongness in underlying fact. The thing that energy-seeking Big Tech is constrained by is rapid access to power, not cost of power. Their willingness to pay is incredibly high. If fossil-based power plants were rightly held accountable for their pollution harms, the tech companies would pay for plants employing pollution controls. They’d also, of course, be likelier to avoid more gas to start. And for the Trump administration, that’s the catch.
It’s not about AI. It’s not about Big Tech. It’s about fossil fuels. More specifically, it’s about making fossil fuels win and renewable resources lose, as much for the benefit of special-interest polluters as for the chance to advance a grievance-born, anti-renewables agenda.
How the Trump EPA is making it easier for data center-related power plants to pollute
Here are just a few of the ways that EPA is wielding “cannot” to withdraw from the business of holding tech companies to account for the surging pollution generated by their energy-intensive, increasingly fossil-powered data centers. Staggeringly, these lists are not exhaustive.
Rolling back regulations. Key regulatory rollbacks include:
- Attempting to strip EPA’s basic ability to regulate power plant carbon dioxide emissions, not just repeal the standards set to limit those emissions (though the agency also proposed to cut those, too).
- Dramatically weakening standards limiting emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) from new gas turbines.
- Fully striking down rules that strengthened the regulation of mercury and other hazardous air pollutants from coal plants.
- Proposing to significantly weaken regulations covering toxic wastewater discharged from coal plants and required handling of coal ash.
Introducing new loopholes, delays, and exemptions. Where EPA has not been able to fully strike or weaken regulations—or to do so on as fast a timeline as it would like—it has adopted other approaches to achieve a similar effect, including:
- Incorporating new loopholes to enable entire tranches of polluters to slip through; in the recent NOx rule, this included certain exemptions such as for temporary turbines and low-use turbines, as well as hard-coding a conditional exemption for an entire class of turbines if the agency lands a triple-bank-shot of a polluter handout.
- Delaying implementation timelines until the agency can more fully dismantle the underlying regulations, such as for methane standards covering oil and gas operations (meaning the upstream supply of gas for power plants) as well as coal-related regulations.
- Setting up a plug-and-play process for coal-fired power plants and other toxic polluters to receive a two-year exemption from complying with certain Clean Air Act requirements.
- Easing restrictions around how and when emergency backup generators can be operated outside of emergency events.
- Explicitly and proactively declaring that power plants operating in off-grid configurations fall outside of Acid Rain Program coverage.
- Adopting a position of non-enforcement for regulations that it does not “prioritize,” in alignment with the broader Trump administration’s guidance to this effect.
Cutting out the public. At the same time as EPA is rolling back regulations and polluter coverage, it is also attempting to make it harder for the public to be in the know and able to participate. This includes by:
- Proposing to shield polluters from public awareness by removing a federal public notice-and-comment requirement for “minor” New Source Review-related pollution permits—which is frequently how data center-related fossil generation projects are classified, despite there being nothing minor about their overall pollution footprints.
- Proposing to make it easier for large sources of pollution, including data center-related projects, to be built before the public has a say, by allowing significant facility construction to occur before actually obtaining a permit.
- Repeatedly working to hide data around the magnitude, and impacts, of health- and climate-harming pollution, including by proposing to repeal requirements for polluters to measure and report carbon emissions; stopping the use of the social cost of carbon, which translates carbon emissions into economic impacts; and stopping the quantification of public health impacts from changing levels of key pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and ozone.
This is a staggering array of actions—and it’s only a subset of what EPA is doing to further clear the path for polluting data center infrastructure, alongside so many other polluting industries. Furthermore, EPA’s work is only a subset of the broader administration’s pro-polluter, anti-accountability agenda.
The consequences of these rollbacks will reverberate for decades
In the absolute best of cases, the data center buildout would be shaped by an unequivocal prioritization of the public interest, intentional and long-range planning, rigorous standards, meaningful transparency, and a wholesale commitment to accountability—and even then, it would pose a massive challenge to navigate responsibly and effectively.
Suffice it to say: now is not the best of cases. Indeed, across every one of these issues, the Trump administration is instead careening toward the very worst of cases.
As a result, communities across the country are being asked to bear entirely avoidable harms and costs, in the here and now and for decades to come. This unchecked, fossil-heavy data center bender is on track to leave the country with a staggering hangover, full stop.
What shameful, profligate waste.
Yet there’s another implication, too. Even in the best-case scenario, not one of those interventions would begin to contend with addressing the societal risks and harms, nor capturing the potential opportunities, arising from the deployment of AI as enabled by these data centers. Addressing that gap should be one of the nation’s, and the world’s, foremost issues of the day. But because of the actions of the Trump administration, attention and expertise are being diverted to contend with this entirely preventable, entirely self-inflicted catastrophe instead.
The necessary recourse, the only recourse, is for people to keep pushing back. To push back against disastrously consequential and inequitable regulatory proposals, to push back against lawmakers enabling this pro-polluter agenda, to push back against reckless and unaccountable projects.
To push back against an EPA that repeatedly asserts it cannot for the American people, and instead demand an EPA that can.