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If you live near a military base, there’s a chance you’ll soon find that a privately owned data center has moved into your area. A year ago, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Defense to lease land to private developers for this purpose. “You can’t fight it,” Trump said this week of data centers, which have grown wildly unpopular. 

Amid concerns about massive electricity use and pollution, data center buildout on military bases is happening at hyperspeed. In March of this year, two private developers—the Carlyle Group and CyrusOne—were selected to develop hyperscale data centers, built for cloud computing and AI, on federally owned land in Texas and Utah. The Department hasn’t explained where they’ll get their power, though—and as El Paso Matters reported recently, the proposed Texas data center alone could require more power than all of El Paso itself. And in May, the DOD asked for an additional $30 billion to build hyperscale data centers that would, according to Defense One, “integrate largely untested hardware and software used to make life or death decisions into the military.”

Military spokespeople are framing this as critical to national security. “Nearly a century ago, President Roosevelt urged Americans to build the military infrastructure needed to preserve our democratic ideals during a time of profound global crisis,” Assistant Secretary of the Army Marc Andersen wrote in Fortune in June. “As we celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary, we once again find ourselves at a pivotal moment…The battlefield now begins long before the first shot is fired. It begins in mines, factories, power plants, laboratories, data centers, and logistics networks.”

As I’ve previously reported, the federal government is using national security to justify allocating billions of dollars to tech companies, including Elon Musk’s xAI. In one legal filing on behalf of xAI’s right to avoid permitting processes, Cameron Stanley, the Department of War’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, wrote that “Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security.” The Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury,” he added. The Pentagon has paid Musk’s company at least $200 million for use of its technology. 

Placing data centers on federal land may be a workaround for rising backlash over potential environmental harm caused by the facilities. Throughout the 20th century, under the legal doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” the federal government has historically exempted military bases from much pollution regulation by citing the primacy of national security. Bases such as Camp Lejeune in North Carolina have leaked volatile organic compounds, jet fuel, and heavy metals into nearby groundwater, rendering them what Abre’ Connor of the NAACP calls “sacrifice zones.”

Members of Congress across the political spectrum are raising questions about the military’s move into public-private data center partnerships. But Republican appropriators rejected several data-center-related amendments to a current Defense spending bill, including one from Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) that would have fully prohibited the construction of AI data centers on federal lands, including military installations. (Tlaib later introduced that amendment as a standalone bill.)

The only regulatory provision that actually made it into the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal year 2027 defense authorization bill was put forth by Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fl.) It would prohibit data centers built on military installations from using Chinese-built components. The Army said in a statement that Mills’ measure would create an “unworkable standard,” which would “drive world-class commercial partners—and over $1.3 billion in private capital—away from Army land.” 

Individual bills like Tlaib’s, however, may still move forward. “Public lands should not be turned into sacrifice zones for the AI arms race,” said Shayna Lewis, Deputy Director of Win Without War, in a press release. “This bill is a wakeup call and a necessary safeguard that would protect communities from being forced to shoulder the energy, water, pollution, and infrastructure costs of systems designed to accelerate war-making and deepen the Pentagon’s deference to Big Tech.”

This week, we’ve got a double dose of Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general. What a treat! From making up laws to whining to the court that it simply isn’t fair to make him file briefs or follow laws, Blanche does it all. And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, once again, covers himself in glory. After a flurry of rulings from several courts telling President Donald Trump again and…

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A cartoon by Tim Campbell. Related | Why the GOP loves to use ‘communism’ as an attack…

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About half of Americans think natural gas—a methane-based, planet-warming fuel—is a “clean” energy source, according to a recent poll. And a long-running fossil fuel industry marketing campaign might be to blame.

The “clean natural gas” label is a myth. Methane, the primary component of natural gas fuel, is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But the myth persists in large part due to a savvy, decades-long branding campaign by oil and gas corporations.

A new report released by the Center for Climate Integrity, a research and advocacy group, reveals that fossil fuel companies knew as early as the 1960s that branding gas as “clean” was deceptive.

An internal report from Shell in 1966 indicated that methane gas was released in “embarrassingly large quantities” at oil fields. And in 1968, a review sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute declared that methane in the atmosphere was connected to “oil fields,” and that methane seepage was “not unlikely.” So in response, fossil fuel companies sponsored and promoted their own research, founding entities like the Gas Research Institute to create an appearance of objectivity and change the narrative. They aimed to drown out research that indicated gas might be harmful to the environment or human health, the Center for Climate Integrity suggests.

Throughout the 1970s, the American Gas Association, a trade group, worked with public relations firms to sell gas as a “clean” and environmentally-friendly fossil fuel. The gas industry launched a public relations campaign in 1971 called “GAS, CLEAN ENERGY FOR TODAY AND TOMORROW.” A 1972 report from the American Gas Association (AGA) said the “environmental benefits of an adequate natural gas supply are outstanding,” in that it offered a “very positive answer” to collective concern about the planet.

As the report further details, by 1996, the AGA was co-running studies with the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal communications published in the report show that EPA officials said they “simply do not have the expertise” to independently review the data presented by the gas industry in the study and they were “unlikely to find problems even if they exist.” (The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the CCI report.)

The public-relations campaign was effective—and in the 2000s, with the advent of fracking, American natural gas-extraction infrastructure expanded dramatically. The companies building that infrastructure were sometimes even eligible for “green” fuel subsidies and tax breaks. Today, natural gas is still classed as “green” in at least four states. The gas-appliance industry, meanwhile, still lobbies relentlessly against labeling standards that might designate its products as harmful.

“Officials who continue to justify expanding natural gas reliance by still claiming it’s clean or safe for the climate are using the same script and manipulated science that gas executives and their PR teams concocted decades ago,” Center for Climate Integrity President Richard Wiles said in a statement published with the report. “It’s time that these profoundly dangerous lies are finally put to rest.”

James Talarico’s comments come after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found that the attorney general may have broken state law by voting using an address where he no longer appears to live. By Zach Despart for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas is trying to turn a key talking point of his Republican opponent against him — alleging…

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The Conversation is a weekly dive into the most popular stories on Daily Kos and what it tells us about the national political environment. Why are Republicans so weird? Seriously. There was a time when our disagreements were over taxes, war, and reproductive rights. Those were profound disagreements, but they took place in a shared reality. We agreed on the basic facts…

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By Amy Maxmen for KFF This isn’t just a bad year for measles. It looks to be the start of a bad era. Confirmed measles cases just hit a 35-year high, and it’s only July. Together with last year, the number of cases has exceeded the combined total over the previous 25 years. The vast majority of cases stem from domestic outbreaks fueled by low rates of vaccination—and rates are declining.

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Democrats shouldn’t focus on ‘climate change’…

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This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

President Donald Trump is displeased and waging economic war with Canada yet again, this time because…our northern neighbor isn’t doing enough to fight the effects of climate change?

“We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable!” the chief executive wrote in a Friday Truth Social post, referring to the intense clouds of wildfire smog of Ontario origin that are choking states and currently wafting as far as Seattle and Pittsburgh. “Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal…costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying.” (On Monday, Trump rolled out new 50 percent tariffs on a wide array of Canadian goods, including alcohol and hockey sticks, but an official told CNBC that these are separate from his plans to hike trade taxes in response to the wildfires.)

The president also revealed to the media that he had confronted Prime Minister Mark Carney during Sunday’s FIFA World Cup finals in New Jersey. “I told him, you know, you got to stop these fires from coming in and poisoning our air,” said Trump. “If we can help them, we’ll help them. But maybe they should pay us some damages or something, or we should do some tariffs.” After some more rambling, the Donald hit on something of an inconvenient truth. “I never remembered this happening,” he added. “Over the last four or five years you saw it starting to take place. I never remembered it happening before.”

It’s almost like the climate is changing!

If you didn’t know better, you might have thought Trump was taking Carney to task for failing to stem the greenhouse gas emissions that have made North America hotter and sparked the conditions for Ontario’s raging forest fires. Such criticism would have been warranted, in light of the stark gap between the PM’s climate-conscious rhetoric and his pro-fossil-fuel policy. What we’re actually seeing, however, is something far more craven: an attempt to seize upon one of the president’s most specific, oddest environmental fixations in order to rattle the imperial saber at the north’s Liberal government. By vaguely—and inaccurately—gesturing toward forest management, Trump is imposing material punishment upon a fellow petrostate for failing to mitigate the effects of its still-too-high emissions. It’s a way to attack Canada over climate change without ever using those words—and without even suggesting the real policies that would help North America avoid these forest-and-smoke cycles year after year.

Since the White House’s climate denial remains strong, it’s unclear just what it’s expecting Canada to do here—other than retaliate in ways that hit the US even harder.

It’s not the first time the MAGA-era GOP has scolded Canada thus. Last summer, Midwestern Republicans sent various letters to Ottawa over its “failure to prevent and control wildfires”—without, of course, mentioning climate change. This year the clamor is louder, more aggressive, and tinged with showy economic threats. Michigan Rep. John James, running for governor in a state that saw some of the worst air pollution from the smog, announced he would introduce legislation imposing sanctions on Canada. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno also offered to follow suit in his chamber, while Montana Rep. Tim Sheehy accused Canada of running its firefighting operations “like a Chinese protection racket,” in a message approvingly amplified by Trump.

The second Trump administration is thus threatening Canada threefold over its hazy call for improved forest management: Failure to contain the smoke could mean even more tariffs on top of the current trade war escalation, full blockades of certain goods and services, and even a pullback of American assistance for Canada’s firefights. And since the White House’s climate denial remains strong, it’s unclear just what it’s expecting Canada to do here—other than retaliate in ways that hit the US even harder. Conservative Ontario Premier Doug Ford has already suggested that Ottawa should strike back proportionately: “tariff for tariff, dollar for dollar.”

Before this point, the administration’s policy toward Canada had been nothing less than a self-own. The constant trade-warring and “51st state” menacing bred such anti-American sentiment across Canada that our longtime friends in the north turned against us decisively—and effectively. Boycotts of US whiskey have decimated a key economic driver for the American South. Major cities throughout the States have seen crushing drops in Canadian tourism and business it affords to costly enterprises like ski resorts. And the Canadian government as a whole is planning a pivot away from the U.S. in the long term, welcoming cheap Chinese electric cars and building out oil-and-gas pipelines to increase energy exports to Asia.

Those pipelines will worsen the conditions that set off Canada’s devastating wildfires—but that’s not what Trump is worrying about at all. When the US president talks about “Debris Removal” and the “Brush” in forestry, he’s generally referring to prescribed or controlled burning, an Indigenous-pioneered environmental practice that slows the rapid spread of forest fires in dry climates by clearing out ground-level scraps (twigs, dead plant matter, bushes, etc.) that would otherwise provide extra kindling for the flames. You may remember the president invoking it repeatedly in California, after 2018’s deadly Camp Fire and during last year’s Palisades burns. He’s not wrong about the merits of controlled burns, but he’s wrong that they’re a straightforward panacea for wildfire season: Climate effects like drought, temperature hikes, and the spread of plant diseases strengthen fire conditions, and those climate consequences are bolstered by unceasing carbon and methane emissions that trap heat. Worse, burned trees release the carbon they were storing, then destroy other plant life that could keep that carbon absorbed.

Because Trump and his fellow Republicans view climate change as a hoax, they have zero solutions.

Trump is also wrong about prescribed burns as the be-all and end-all for Canadian forest preservation. Those green ecosystems are far different from California’s; our neighbor’s fires generally arise in massive boreal forests, which do not have debris or brush concerns because they’ve never been logged or otherwise interfered with. Boreal forests are also supposed to burn on an infrequent basis, in order to open up certain pine cones and spread their seeds, or to clear out lower tree branches. But climate change has thrown the entire cycle out of whack, and these forests are now bursting into flame more frequently—on the yearly basis that Trump and other Americans have come to experience this decade. And under a climate change–driven heat dome that fuels more storms, the forests are all the more susceptible to inopportune lightning strikes.

However, because Trump and his fellow Republicans view climate change as a hoax, they have zero solutions for the widespread, fatal conflagrations of the type that Canada and the US witness every season. Remember this when you see the commander in chief posting about “climate fraud” (i.e., acknowledging that climate change is real) and international green policies. Or whenever you see Republicans doing everything they can to make life in a warming world worse than it already is, by stripping away heat protections from outdoor workers and shrinking public lands. They don’t care about Canada taking steps to mitigate global warming. What they do care about is using anything they can to attack one of our oldest allies—even as this ill-advised battle weakens the United States economically and only encourages Canada to industrialize in a manner that will make future wildfire smoke far, far worse.

It’s almost hard to believe now, but in the not too distant past, there have been presidents who actually labored quite intensely to not be in the news any more than was necessary. President Barack Obama, in fact, seemed to actually want his presidency ensconced in relative calm. If you wanted to know what happened at the presidential briefing, you had to either go to it, wait for those who went to it to report on it, or chill out until the White House published a transcript. It was only after Trump came to power in 2016 that the briefings became must-see TV on cable news—and even then, only because the White House had turned them into a daily train wreck.

Times have changed. Whereas TNR’s Matt Ford once famously compared Trump’s first term to the episode of Battlestar Galactica where the Cylons attack every 33 minutes, its second iteration has become a dull monotony. Just about everything this White House does is rooted in the president’s desire to get revenge on his perceived enemies, his quest for self-aggrandizement, and the extreme limitations that arise when your best days—from a pure cognition standpoint—are well behind you. Nowadays, there are only really seven types of Trump story, and they’re all bad.

Tariffs: Of all the kindnesses that the Supreme Court has bestowed on Trump, its February decision to strike down the president’s retaliatory tariffs stands out as advice that should have been heeded: “Hey, don’t do this, you are screwing up the economy.” Trump forsook this wise counsel and continues to wake up on random mornings with the yen for imposing tariffs willy-nilly. This week he imposed 50 percent tariffs on a slew of Canadian goods because our neighbors to the north had the temerity to fight back in the trade war Trump started. He followed that up with an announcement that he was going to put a ten percent tariff on 80 other nations. It’s always impossible to gauge whether Trump intends to stick with a tariff fight. After all, it’s in this arena that “Trump Always Chickens Out” was born. But behind the trade war pyrotechnics, the government has handed back approximately $50 billion in refunds to firms buffeted by the president’s tariff regime. Have you seen any of that money yet?

The War in Iran: As I’ve explained at length, Trump’s decision to wade into an unwinnable foreign war after limply cosplaying as The One Guy Smart Enough to Do That was born from the fact that he’s a dumb asshole who needed a distraction from a cratering economy and the daily effluvia of the Epstein news cycle. But even I thought that the backslappery that arose from the memorandum of understanding that briefly put an end to hostilities might be a sign that the administration understood it had a much-needed off-ramp. Color me naïve: We’re now back in the big muddy, talking about war crimes and taking over Kharg Island, as the president recoils from public inquiry and his congressional allies fret about their political futures. The only question left is the one asked by TNR contributor Joe Cirincione: Can Trump lose the same war twice?

ICE Violence: Too many members of the media treated the exile of Greg Bovino and Kristi Noem as a credible sign that the administration had overreached in its violent assault on American cities. But the White House’s bloodthirsty deportation machine suffered little if any lull, and ICE is back to its wanton ways, with new high-profile killings at the hand of Trump’s goons in Texas, Florida, and Maine—the latter of which may prove to regalvanize support for Senator Susan Collins’s future Democratic opponent. As TNR’s Melissa Gira Grant reminds us, the violence is a feature, not a bug. And now, Trump’s FBI has decided to turn a blind eye to investigating those responsible. Far from a drawdown, this looks like the administration is giving carte blanche to the agency to kill at will.

Self-enrichment: Trump spent last year becoming a world-class kleptocrat, on the back of self-dealing exploits too numerous to recount (though I did offer readers what I thought were the worst of the bunch). Estimates as to how much his bread got buttered by all the grift and graft are nearly as varied. The New York Times totaled up about $1.4 billion in takings, but this is the low end—financial disclosures released at the end of June put the total at $2.2 billion, while Democratic researchers on the House Oversight Committee estimate that this figure rises to “$9.7 billion when the value of Trump’s digital assets is factored in” to the equation. Regardless, Trump is still lining his pockets, with new schemes including Kazakh tungsten, Pentagon baksheesh, and what appears to be a pay-to-pardon scheme.

Voter Suppression: When Trump isn’t trying to steal your money, he’s well-nigh obsessed with stealing your vote, a subject that was supposed to serve as the (very) loose framework for his recent prime-time ramble. The president’s monomaniacal desire to see the SAVE Act—his signature voter suppression bill—pass muster has peppered the headlines with updates on the latest weird scheme to somehow enact it over the objections of all the Democratic lawmakers and not a few of their GOP colleagues. Not long ago, Trump was trying to sneak it through the reconciliation process; now Republicans have backdoored voter ID restrictions into a congressional stock-trading-ban bill. It’s clear that Trump would love to rig the upcoming midterms, though it’s not clear how he will accomplish this. It’s a bad sign for the GOP that many of the networks opted to not broadcast his prime-time rant. Perhaps the media is finally coming around to the reality that Republican claims of mass voter fraud are an obvious fiction.

Bad Renovations: Millions now living may not recall that it was once possible to go several years without thinking about the Reflecting Pool. Thanks to Trump, we’re now getting daily updates about algal blooms, phantasmal vandalism, and dubious criminal cases that only show how the administration’s Stasi-like authoritarianism can be extended almost everywhere. The real vandal, as TNR’s Michael Tomasky wrote, is Trump, whose desperate efforts to leave a mark in D.C. have led to a demolished East Wing, a hollowed-out Kennedy Center, and an Oval Office decorated with Temu gold wall appliqués. Still, as Tim Noah points out, it all does serve a grand purpose: funneling taxpayer dollars to Trump’s cronies.

Everyone’s Getting Sicker: Trump’s second term isn’t without its success stories—if you are the measles virus, anyway. As Axios reported this week, the “U.S. measles case count for this year has surged past last year’s total and now stands at 2,295—a level that hasn’t been seen in 35 years, according to a Johns Hopkins University tracker that compiles state and local health data.” This news comes hard on the heels of another public health crisis that also serves as a metaphor for the Trump presidency: the record number of cyclospora infection cases that have turned this into Explosive Diarrhea Summer. This is part and parcel of the long tail of DOGE’s effort to denude the government of its public health capabilities; we see this manifesting in our struggle to contain New World screwworm at home and Ebola abroad. And let’s remember: In the event of a Covid-style pandemic, the adults who were in the room during Trump’s first term have been replaced by quacks like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who make the titular character from “Storm”—Tim Minchin’s seminal song about pseudoscience—look like C. Everett Koop.

There are, of course, two and a half more years of this presidency. Is it possible that an eighth Trump story emerges? For once, I’m rooting against variety—we need Trump to discover a new thing to fail at like we need a hole in the head. Let us instead work in our own ways to bring a future of relative calm and solemnity back to these lands. We all would rather be getting different push alerts from the ones we’re getting now. I know there’s one in particular that I’m really looking forward to, and it’s definitely not whatever my readers at the FBI think it is.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Some New New Republic Newsletter News:This week, The New Republic launched the TNR Blue Book: a daily newsletter that will get you up to speed on the important Democratic and liberal-progressive news of the day in just a few minutes. With a panoramic view of left-wing politics from Capitol Hill to way outside the Beltway, original reporting from Emma Janssen, and contributions from the entire TNR team, it’s an informative and entertaining way to get your day started. As with all TNR newsletters, it’s free. Subscribe here if you haven’t already.

Last fall, life for the Perez children was turned upside down. Their father, Romeo Sr., was picked up on his way to work and sent to immigration detention. A few months later, their mother, Olga, was detained, too. Her daughter was driving when they were pulled over. Romeo Sr. and Olga were both undocumented and had lived in the United States for decades; their children are US citizens.

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“I just remember after he had started banging on the window, like, telling me that I have to put the windows down so my mom and my uncle can give their IDs,” says 21-year old Eliza Perez. She told the officer, “You took my dad, and now you’re taking my mom.” 

With their parents gone, Eliza, Jessica, Romeo Jr., and Cynthia had to fend for themselves in Lake Worth, Florida. Eliza, a college student, took charge of the household and the family’s landscaping business. 

The Perezes are not alone. An estimated 205,000 kids have had a parent detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the last year and a half. It’s happening all over the country and, in some cases, to the same families who were separated at the border during the first Trump administration. 

This week on Reveal, filmmakers Max Maldonado and José Jesús Zaragoza and Mother Jones reporters Samantha Michaels and Isabela Dias look into the lives of two families fighting to stay together as the Trump administration’s deportation agenda rips them apart. 

President Donald Trump addressed a huge roomful of journalists Friday night at a correspondents’ dinner rescheduled from April after a shooting upended the first edition. Said the president: “As I said three months ago, the show must go on.” Trump entered the ballroom to polite applause, and was thanked for his support by White House Correspondents’ Association president Weijia Jiang of CBS…

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If a flood of new polling bears out, Democrats in swingy Wisconsin will likely nominate a democratic socialist for governor, raising the volume on a tense debate over the electoral appeal of political moderation. Francesca Hong, a 37-year-old single mother and state assembly member endorsed by local chapters of the Democratic Socialists of America, leads in all four public polls of the race…

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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Trump soothes ego by falsifying Iran war casualty data Seems bad. MAGA nominee in key House race says schools shouldn’t teach history As you can see, Republicans are having a normal one. You won’t believe what Trump wants to put his name on now Weirder…

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A cartoon by Brian McFadden. Support my Patreon for early access and exclusives. Follow me on Mastodon, Bluesky, or at my website. Related | Trump shills for AI while lying about surging energy prices…

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The weirdly out-of-the-blue, ill-timed announcement of a sweeping, decades-long, multibillion-dollar nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia just keeps getting more haphazard and nonsensical the more we learn about it. Finding out that the Trump family negotiated a lucrative private development deal alongside the diplomatic one illuminated things a bit, because President Donald Trump isn’t going to do…

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President Donald Trump on Friday issued yet another round of economy-destroying tariffs, announcing that levies of between 10% and 12.5% have gone into effect for roughly 60 countries, many of them top trading partners for the U.S., such as Canada, Mexico, China, and the European Union. The new tariffs attempt to skirt the Supreme Court’s February ruling, which deemed Trump’s initial…

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A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Well, sh-t: Trump’s gutted FDA can’t find source of diarrhea parasite…

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This story was originally published by Wired and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities—including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers—with little to no notice to the public.

On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public participates in the permitting process for certain new sources of air pollution. The proposed rollback comes as data centers face greater pushback across the US, with many communities using the permitting process to try to slow down development. Any changes could have major consequences for how ordinary people are given notice about new or expanded polluting facilities coming into their neighborhoods.

“As someone actively working in communities with data centers, I know this to be fundamentally true: People want to have a say,” Vanessa Lynch, a Pennsylvania organizer with Moms Clean Air Force, said at the EPA hearing.

“Georgia is an example of a place where I can say I’m concerned.”

Companies building any kind of facilities that release air pollution are required to get permits under the Clean Air Act. Polluting sources can either be put through a “major” permitting process, meaning that they meet or exceed thresholds for certain pollutants, or a “minor” one for those that don’t.

Major sources of pollution are reviewed by both federal and state regulators and have extensive requirements before and after construction. However, there’s less oversight of minor sources. The scope of what gets permitted as a minor source is extremely broad and can include everything from dry cleaners and auto body shops to diesel and gas engines. The latter two are increasingly being used to power data centers, with operators such as xAI and Meta using minor source permitting processes to build behind-the-meter gas plants.

The Clean Air Act does require the public to be involved in permitting processes; Congress has specified that major sources need to have several public steps, including a public hearing. EPA rules require some public participation for minor source permits. But thanks to a patchwork of state enforcement laws, that engagement process—and whether state agencies are actually complying with EPA requirements—varies across the US.

If the proposed rule is finalized, “it would put state and local agencies most familiar with local issues in the driver’s seat to determine whether, when, and for how long to provide opportunities for public participation for proposed new minor sources and modifications,” an EPA spokesperson tells WIRED, noting the rule wouldn’t alter emissions standards.

These state-by-state differences can make a big difference in how the public gets involved. Keri Powell, an Atlanta-based attorney at the environmental legal advocacy group Southern Environmental Law Center, says that groups like hers often end up taking on cases in states like Georgia, which, she says, has a more robust public notification and participation process for minor sources. Earlier this month, the group alerted the state utility about construction issues at a data center, based on information they’d gotten from the companies’ public air permit applications. But if the EPA removes the federal requirement, community and legal groups in the state could get little to no heads up about upcoming projects and be shut out of participation and review.

“Georgia is an example of a place where I can say I’m concerned,” Powell says.

Sara Lips, the director of communications at Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division, says that the agency is “determining whether proposed federal rule changes would affect the public participation requirements per the state regulations.”

The EPA is working to make the US “the AI capital of the world.”

Kentucky also has stronger public participation laws for minor source permits. Byron Gary, a senior attorney at the Kentucky Resources Council, says state agencies have made an “informal commitment” behind the scenes to keep their public participation rules the same, even if the EPA changes its rules. But, he says, that could shift: “Who knows [if] the next administration, whether they would actually change it.”

Texas is an example of what lower levels of engagement look like. The data center boom there has driven a massive buildout of private gas plants, many of which rely on minor pollution permits. The state’s lower levels of enforcement have left some communities living in the shadows of data centers surprised at the scope of fossil fuel infrastructure being installed near their homes.

Since coming into power, the Trump administration has gone all in on artificial intelligence, removing multiple roadblocks for data center development at the federal level. That includes efforts at the EPA, which is working to make the US “the AI capital of the world,” the agency spokesperson says.

Companies are also spending vast sums of money on the data center buildout: Spending on data center construction outpaced spending on public transportation infrastructure for the first time in June. Given that public opposition is creating a new bottleneck for data center development, the timing of the rule revision, Powell says, is probably not an accident.

“I think it’s part of a package of rules that the Trump administration is pushing through to make it easier for AI data centers to be constructed,” she says.

The White House has admitted in court that it deliberately canceled federal grants to states that didn’t vote for President Trump.

In court documents filed last week, and first reported on by The New York Times, Trump administration officials confirmed they terminated $7.5 billion in clean energy grants in October “based solely” on political criteria, focusing on states with Democratic leadership who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. The admission came in a lawsuit filed by California researchers challenging the cancellation of Biden-era funding in multiple federal agencies.

At the time, the White House said it was slashing the grants, passed during the Biden administration, to prevent tax dollars from being wasted. Office of Management and Budget Director and Project 2025 architect Russ Vought called the money “Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda,” and singled out projects in 16 blue states: “CA, CO, CT, DE, HI, IL, MD, MA, MN, NH, NJ, NM, NY, OR, VT, WA.”

Only one month ago, Energy Secretary Chris Wright angrily insisted to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the cuts “did not involve politics in the decision-making of our review process,” calling any accusation that the funding cancellations targeted certain states for political reasons “bullshit.”

But last week, a Department of Energy lawyer conceded the obvious.

“With one exception, the 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators,” the attorney wrote in a court filing, confessing that the grants were not terminated “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

Similar green energy grants in Republican-led states that voted for Trump in 2024 were left untouched despite the Department of Energy recommending their cancellation, the government said in the filing. The Trump administration is coming clean now, they said, because they wanted to avoid the government having to participate in the discovery process for the lawsuit.

That process could lead to the government having to hand over much more damaging internal documents to the lawyers representing the researchers. It’s not just about clean energy grants. The Trump administration has also held up other federal funding for states that didn’t support the president, such as FEMA disaster aid and childcare funding. While the court’s decision on this lawsuit is still pending, no matter how the judge rules, Trump is not likely to end his belligerent attempts to use federal funding as punishment.