Since his nomination, Lee Zeldin, the head of Donald Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, has advertised an extraordinary priority for an environmental regulator: helping the artificial intelligence industry. His “Powering the Great American Comeback” initiative includes making the United States the AI capital of the world.

The EPA’s proposed 2027 budget calls for a 52% cut while requesting $202.2 million to “support the United States becoming the global leader in AI.” The document also anticipates expanded internal AI use, including for pesticide evaluations and federal permitting.

The agency further plans to collaborate with “external industry partners” on powering AI data centers. That agenda sits awkwardly beside the EPA’s stated mission to “protect human health and the environment,” a commitment that remains posted on its website despite the agency’s accelerating retreat from it.

The EPA has taken several steps allowing AI data centers to pollute with less public scrutiny. It has declined to establish a nationwide environmental standard for data center operations while permitting construction to begin before air pollution permits are secured.

The agency also asserts that data centers using off grid gas plants or other “islanded” power generation facilities do not need to comply with acid rain standards. The industry gets flexibility, while nearby communities are left facing the consequences of weaker oversight.

Another proposed rule would eliminate federal public participation requirements in the Clean Air Act permitting process for facilities such as data centers. Decisions about whether communities receive information or input concerning nearby air pollution would instead fall to state and local governments.

Zeldin’s EPA calls this “advancing cooperative federalism.” In practice, the proposal would remove a federal floor that currently allows states to adopt stronger protections than the national baseline, but not weaker ones, clearing the way for a race to the bottom.

The agency’s intervention in Memphis, Tennessee, is even more alarming. Elon Musk’s company xAI has operated dozens of gas turbines without air permits to power its massive data center in a largely Black and lower income community.

Those turbines release pollutants including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde, which are linked to increased asthma, cancer, and other diseases. The NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, has sued xAI over what the article describes as an environmental injustice.

Rather than intervene to halt the harms, the EPA joined Trump’s Justice Department in seeking to shut down the lawsuit on behalf of Musk’s company. SELC senior attorney Patrick Anderson said, “The Department of Justice is trying to take power away from communities.”

Anderson said DOJ does not dispute that xAI violated the Clean Air Act or that the violations harmed surrounding communities. Instead, he said, the department argues that xAI should be permitted to break the law because the Trump administration says so.

Justice Department lawyers Robert Stander, Justin Heminger, and Adam Gustafson are also involved in lawsuits against Hawaii, Michigan, New York, and Vermont. Those cases seek to block state efforts to make polluters pay for climate damages.

The U.S. is also represented by Andrew Darlington, a political appointee in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Darlington previously investigated “election fraud” in Florida for Gov. Ron DeSantis’s administration.

At the same time, the litigating arms of the EPA and Justice Department have largely stopped enforcing the law against other industrial polluters. Inside Climate News found that the EPA has lost more than a quarter of its workforce since Trump’s inauguration and that civil environmental enforcement cases have reached a “near halt.”

Polluters are also receiving fewer monetary penalties, even when they are found to have broken the law. The retreat reflects an administration that is not merely rewriting regulations, but declining to enforce existing protections when they collide with the president’s politics.

Musk’s DOGE played a central role in hollowing out the federal workforce while surveilling EPA employees with AI, promoting the idea that AI could replace human capacity, and using AI tools to target regulations for elimination. Now the EPA is defending Musk’s polluting data center from accountability.

The agency has also dismantled work directed toward communities. Julie Milazzo, a longtime former EPA employee who served as acting deputy manager of the Community Change Grants program, said she was “heartbroken” when the administration terminated the program’s $1.5 billion in grants.

Those grants supported emergency shelters, black mold remediation, cooling systems, heating replacements, and free training for people struggling to find employment. An EPA Office of the Inspector General investigation conducted in 2026 after the program’s termination found no issues.

Milazzo said the training taught community members to install solar panels and heat pumps and remediate black mold. Her verdict on wiping away the program as waste, fraud, and abuse to fund more tax breaks for billionaires was blunt: “it’s just astonishing to me.”

Under Trump and Zeldin, the EPA has discarded human expertise, weakened public participation, abandoned community investments, and rushed to accommodate the AI industry. Cleaning up this mess will require putting justice, transparency, responsibility, and cooperation ahead of machines and the corporations profiting from them.