The Republican-controlled Senate will soon formally announce a legislative “permitting reform” deal to speed the development of AI data centers and energy infrastructure. We expect the Senate will then rush through a vote in the lame duck session immediately after the midterm elections, sending the bill to the Republican-controlled House of Representatives before a new Congress is seated in January 2027. While the text of the bill has not yet been released, credible intelligence suggests that the bill, if passed, would prove to be the largest rollback of environmental and public health protections in U.S. history, weakening the Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act, and more.
The bill would erode state and Tribal authority provided by the Clean Water Act to review and certify federal permits to protect that state or Tribe’s water resources. The bill would also hand developers new exemptions from Clean Water Act permitting for natural gas pipelines and other infrastructure. These provisions would compound the Trump administration’s own deregulatory attacks on the fundamental law and the Supreme Court’s disastrous 2023 Sackett v. EPA decision, which radically scaled back the Clean Water Act’s jurisdictional scope. In New Mexico, this resulted in the loss of federal protections to upward of 96% of the state’s rivers, streams, lakes, and wetlands.
The deal would also weaken Americans’ right to participate in federal planning and decision-making processes, setting the pace of permitting based on developer interests, rather than those of the community. Worse, the deal would weaken the public’s ability to seek justice in federal court when their interests are threatened or harmed, tilting the scales in favor of development interests. Adding salt to the wound, the bill would even create a new cause of action for AI hyperscalers, fossil fuels, and other development interests to challenge legal, regulatory, and other requirements that they deem treat them “unfairly.”
While proponents justify the deal on the basis it will prevent the Trump administration’s obstruction of renewable energy projects, the legislation would do no such thing. Instead, it is predicated on a promise by President Trump that he will merely “ease” his obstruction, based on reporting, of only 30 out of 300 renewables projects. Given the administration’s chronic pattern of lies, deceptions, and broken promises, that so-called “win” is illusory.
Interests promoting the bill also claim it will set the stage for future presidents, once Trump is removed from office or his term ends, to accelerate the buildout of renewable energy infrastructure by providing developers with permitting “certainty” and “parity.” A close read of relevant “certainty” and “parity” legislation introduced into Congress over the past year demonstrates that this is not the case and that the deal would instead hobble future presidents, handing the keys for the country’s energy future over to developers and erecting barriers in the way of climate, conservation, and environmental justice action that seeks to address the harms caused by AI data centers and fossil fuel infrastructure.
The permitting deal’s provisions risk grave, irreparable harm to the western U.S., and not just relative to clean water. More than 45 million acres of pristine roadless lands in national forests across 36 states and Puerto Rico, the entire 245 million acre public lands system managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and beloved landscapes such as Greater Chaco in New Mexico are all at risk. In all three cases, the Trump administration is actively rescinding critical conservation and community protections, again with the intent to commodify and exploit these public lands for fossil fuel and other resource extraction and again, for AI data centers. Once these protections are rescinded by the Trump administration, the permitting deal would drastically accelerate the exploitation of these public lands.
The plague of data centers across the U.S. is of particular concern, with more than 2,000 planned that would consume more than 387,000 megawatts of electricity. Critically, the Trump administration is now actively siting AI data centers on public lands in multiple states, including Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, and Wyoming, and these efforts will only intensify in the coming months.
“The permitting deal is a betrayal of public lands, water and wildlife, and environmental justice values that Westerners depend on for clean air and water, places to hike, hunt, and fish, and the inestimable sense of freedom the West provides us all,” said Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, executive director of the Western Environmental Law Center based in New Mexico. “Sen. Heinrich has built a name for himself as a champion of these values, but credible intelligence indicates he is poised to hand the Trump administration a major political win that erases that legacy in service of AI hyperscaler, energy, and finance lobbyists. We hope this is not the case. But there is an acute risk he is making a strategic mistake that will hobble the ability of future administrations to enact an ambitious climate and conservation agenda. We desperately need action that opens new doors to a thriving, prosperous world that respects Westerners’ values, not bills like this that bulldoze us and our way of life.”
In this full context, the Western Environmental Law Center urges Congress to do the following:
- Do not betray progressive climate, conservation, and environmental justice values essential to Westerners.
- Build policy ideas that respect people and place and transparently assess, rather than bulldoze over, the tradeoffs between climate and conservation action and infrastructure development.
- Move a standalone grid modernization, transmission bill in the 120th Congress.
- Support state-level climate action action and embrace federal-level strategic patience.
- Develop policy reforms that will create strong, mission-driven federal agencies that serve the public interest—not corporate technology, energy, and finance interests.
“Congress cannot legislate its way out of the multiple crises we face and serve the public by surrendering to AI hyperscaler, fossil fuel, and finance interests,” said Schlenker-Goodrich. “But it can exhibit strategic patience and methodically build power for change with people and communities that can be leveraged once a new Congress is seated in January 2027. That empowers us to fight our way out of the ruins of the Trump administration, together. Making a deal with the devil fails the American people here.”
Contact:
Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, Western Environmental Law Center, 575-751-0351, eriksg@westernlaw.org
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