Trump is giving data centers a pass to pollute

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President Donald Trump is weakening environmental regulations in the name of speeding up the construction of AI data centers, raising health risks for Americans, a cadre of former EPA officials said this week in a briefing and new report. They are urging — perhaps futilely — the president to adopt a “Data Center Health Protection Pledge” to signal that the administration is taking the environmental threat seriously.
Trump is giving data centers a pass to pollute
The Trump administration is sacrificing Americans’ health to build data centers, former EPA officials warn.
At the start of his term, Trump’s EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, proclaimed his goal of making America “the AI capital of the world” through deregulation. Since then, Zeldin and the White House have rolled back dozens of rules on top of cutting staff and funding at the US EPA.
As a result of the Trump administration’s deregulation spree and attacks on renewable energy, the wave of new AI data centers is increasingly powered by dirty energy that can impact Americans’ health even if they don’t live near a data center, the group of EPA alumni warn. They say that the agency they once worked for, which was created to “protect human health and the environment,” is no longer the watchdog it should be as the physical infrastructure underpinning generative AI changes America’s landscape.
“You would think that an industry buildout of this magnitude, billed as a revolution, would mean more vigilance from EPA.”
“You would think that an industry buildout of this magnitude, billed as a revolution, would mean more vigilance from EPA,” Lynn Goldman, a pediatrician and a former EPA assistant administrator, said at the briefing. “Instead, EPA is doing just the opposite, thinking first about industry’s needs and weakening or reconsidering limits on toxic chemicals and harmful pollutants.”
Goldman and other former EPA employees who are part of an independent organization called the Environmental Protection Network released a report this week that identifies 30 different federal actions since January 2025 that they say exacerbate health risks stemming from data center pollution.
That includes executive actions and proposals meant to curtail renewable energy projects while softening pollution regulations and exempting existing power plants and factories from certain standards. Of the 30 policy changes included in the report, 17 specifically mention AI or target data centers.
Trump released an “AI Action Plan” in July 2025, recommending “streamlining or reducing regulations” under the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Superfund law to expedite permitting for data center projects and chip factories. “What the AI plan is really about [is] using unprecedented emergency powers to grant massive new exemptions for data centers and specifically fossil fuel infrastructure,” Tyson Slocum, energy program director at the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, told The Verge at the time.
Trump has essentially laid the policy groundwork for new gas projects to power energy-hungry data centers, ranging from turbines installed on-site to power plants built specifically to serve tech companies. Meanwhile, demand for advanced chips needed for generative AI is reviving the production of forever chemicals that don’t break down easily and build up in the environment and human bodies. All this new infrastructure can spread pollution far from the data centers they support.
“You do not need to be near a data center to be affected, because the pollution doesn’t just come from the data centers themselves,“ Goldman says.
“A more polluting AI buildout is not inevitable. It depends on the choices government makes now.”
Last year, hundreds of current EPA employees fired off a public letter addressed to Zeldin saying, “EPA under your leadership will not protect communities from hazardous chemicals and unsafe drinking water, but instead will increase risks to public health and safety.”
The new report cites a study from UC Riverside, Caltech, and the Rochester Institute of Technology that found that air pollution associated with AI could lead to up to 1,300 premature deaths and more than $20 billion in public health costs by 2028. The toll could be even larger after factoring in the policy changes outlined in EPN’s report, according to the organization. The US can avoid those losses by restoring clean air and water standards, as well as rebuilding federal agencies’ capacity to enforce those rules, the EPA alumni argue.
“A more polluting AI buildout is not inevitable. It depends on the choices government makes now,” Marc Boom, EPN’s senior director of public affairs, said in the briefing. “EPA should be measuring how this buildout is changing pollution, who is being exposed, what it means for their health, and making all of that information public. That is what a Data Center Health Protection Pledge should mean in practice.”
Responding to the report in an email to The Verge, EPA spokesperson Cora Mandy said, “In each action EPA has taken, the agency has returned regulations to the best reading [of] the Clean Air Act after years of overreach by previous administrations.” She also reiterated the agency’s commitment to “Protect Human Health and The Environment” while simultaneously prioritizing “Making America the AI Capital of the World.”

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