The EPA’s Dark Embrace of the AI Industry

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

Since his nomination, Lee Zeldin, the head of Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, has been clear about his unprecedented intentions: supporting the artificial intelligence industry.

One of the core pillars of Zeldin’s “Powering the Great American Comeback” initiative is making the United States the AI capital of the world. The EPA’s proposed budget for 2027 calls for a 52 percent cut, but requests $202.2 million to “support the United States becoming the global leader in AI.” The budget document also anticipates the EPA “encouraging internal expansion of AI,” including using AI for pesticide evaluations and the federal permitting process, while collaborating with “external industry partners” on powering AI data centers.

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At this point, it should be mentioned that the EPA’s mission, still (surprisingly) on its website, is to “protect human health and the environment.” How making America the AI capital of the world furthers this goal is unclear. Yet before our eyes, the environmental agency has been transformed into an eager yes-man for an industry with both antisocial implications and a pollution problem. While it’s hard to tell how deeply AI has been embedded in the EPA’s workflow, the agency’s deregulatory actions to benefit the data center expansion are very real.

Deregulating Pollution and Defending Polluters

The EPA has taken several actions to allow AI data centers to pollute more with less public oversight. While refusing to set a nationwide environmental standard for data center operations, the agency is allowing data centers to begin construction before securing air pollution permits, and asserting that data centers powering themselves with off-grid gas plants or other “islanded” power generation facilities don’t have to comply with acid rain standards.

The agency has also proposed a controversial rule that would make it harder for communities to have input into the Clean Air Act permitting process for facilities like data centers by eliminating federal public participation requirements. We can imagine the result of state and local governments deciding whether communities have insight into the air pollution that nearby data centers will produce: dark zones cropping up around the country where citizens are deprived of this information and input. In the name of “advancing cooperative federalism,” Zeldin’s EPA is doing its best to enable a race to the bottom by eliminating the federal floor that leaves states free to establish stronger protections than the national baseline, but not weaker ones.

And that rule isn’t even the extreme edge of the EPA’s attempts to protect AI data centers from public opposition.

In Memphis, Tennessee, Elon Musk’s company xAI has been poisoning a largely Black and lower-income community by operating dozens of gas turbines without air permits to power its massive data center. The turbines release harmful pollutants into the air like nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde that are linked to increases in asthma, cancer, and other diseases. The NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), has sued xAI over this environmental injustice.

Instead of stepping in to halt these harms, the EPA has joined Trump’s Justice Department in intervening on behalf of Elon Musk’s company to try to shut the lawsuit down.

“The Department of Justice is trying to take power away from communities,” SELC senior attorney Patrick Anderson said in a statement. “It’s claiming an unfettered ability to dismiss any Clean Air Act citizen suit for any reason. For example, in this case, DOJ does not dispute that xAI has violated the Clean Air Act or that those violations have harmed the surrounding communities, instead it argues that xAI should be allowed to break the law solely because the Trump administration says so.”

To be clear, the Trump administration is arguing that it can unilaterally decide to let favored corporations break the law. That is to say, a president’s king-like whims should override laws passed by Congress.

Many of the Justice Department lawyers supporting xAI in this case, and working to undermine the Clean Air Act’s citizen suit provision, are also leading other attacks on communities’ ability to hold polluters accountable. Robert Stander, Justin Heminger, and Adam Gustafson are involved in the DOJ’s unprecedented lawsuits against Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont seeking to block those states’ attempts to make polluters pay for climate damages. The U.S. is also being represented by Andrew Darlington, a political appointee in the DOJ’s weaponized Civil Rights Division who was previously investigating “election fraud” in Florida for Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration.

While the DOJ’s environmental lawyers and the EPA are shielding Musk’s company from accountability, the litigating arms of both agencies have also largely stopped enforcing the law against other industrial polluters. On top of the Trump administration’s blatant disregard for the legislative and budgetary powers of Congress, the administration is also practicing another method of undermining the law when it contradicts the president’s politics: refusing to enforce it.

According to recent analysis by Inside Climate News, the EPA has lost over a quarter of its workforce since Trump’s inauguration, civil environmental enforcement cases have come to a “near halt,” and polluters are facing fewer monetary penalties even when they are found to have broken the law.

Compounding the insult of the EPA defending Musk’s polluting data center is the central role that Musk’s DOGE played in hollowing out the federal workforce, surveilling EPA workers with AI, stoking the idea that AI can replace human capacity, and using AI tools to target regulations for cutting.

An Inhumane Agenda

Zeldin’s EPA has not only shed a massive amount of human expertise; it has gutted some of its most humane work areas. Around half of the EPA’s budget every year goes out in grants to communities around the country. Julie Milazzo, a longtime former EPA employee who worked on the Community Change Grants program created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act as acting deputy manager, said that she was “heartbroken” to see the Trump administration terminate the program’s $1.5 billion in grants. (The EPA Office of the Inspector General investigated the program in 2026 after its termination and found no issues.)

“If people knew what these projects were for, they’d be all for it regardless of what side of the aisle they’re on,” Milazzo said. She described grants going to transforming defunct buildings into emergency shelters where people can take refuge during power outages, remediating black mold in households that couldn’t otherwise afford it, installing cooling systems, and replacing unhealthy or overly expensive heating systems.

Some grants supported “free training for community members who are having a hard time finding employment,” Milazzo explained. “They learn how to install solar panels, they learn how to install heat pumps, they learn how to remediate black mold and other problems. And so it’s this win-win for the community, you know?”

“To just have it all wiped away calling it waste, fraud, and abuse so that we can … provide more tax breaks to billionaires, it’s just astonishing to me,” Milazzo said.

The EPA under Trump has forcefully broken from its commitment to human value, both within its own workforce and in its work for the public it serves. When the time comes to clean up this mess, there should be no apologies for prioritizing human values—justice, transparency, responsibility, cooperation—over the values of the machines.