The Environmental Protection Agency just announced it will not set nationwide environmental requirements for data centers. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the responsibility should fall to states and local communities — because they know what works best for them.

What he left out: those local communities are being asked to take on some of the most powerful and well-funded corporations on the planet with little to no regulatory backup from Washington.

Data centers consume enormous amounts of water — a critical concern in arid regions across the American West and South. They strain electricity grids, drive up utility bills for ordinary ratepayers, and in Memphis, Elon Musk's xAI installed methane natural gas turbines at its Colossus data center without proper permits, triggering lawsuits from residents who had no idea what was being built in their neighborhood until it was already running.

This is exactly the situation federal environmental standards exist to prevent. The EPA's job is to protect communities from environmental harm — not to shrug and tell a small town in Georgia or Arizona to figure it out on their own while a billion-dollar tech company's lawyers run circles around the local planning board.

The same administration refusing to set data center environmental standards just handed $700 million in taxpayer money to coal plants to meet the energy demands of the data center industry. They are actively subsidizing the problem while refusing to regulate it.

We're calling on Congress to direct the EPA to establish mandatory nationwide environmental standards for data centers — covering water use, energy sources, emissions, and community impact — before more towns are overwhelmed by facilities they never had the tools to regulate.