GoKawiilPosts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
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.
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.
“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.”
... continue reading