Former EPA Officials: Trump Is Letting Data Centers Make People Sick

Former Environmental Protection Agency officials, working with the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, warn in a new report that the Trump administration's EPA has taken at least 30 actions since January 2025 to weaken pollution safeguards, permitting processes, and inspection norms, raising health risks from the roughly 3,000 US data centers powering AI. Dan Costa, who spent 35 years at EPA studying air pollution, said at a press briefing that the agency's research workforce has been gutted and that "transforming the nation's energy system, while diminishing its scientific capacity to understand what the impacts are going to be, makes no sense." EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said the agency is cutting "heavy-handed regulations" to build and power data centers, with more than 1,500 new centers in planning stages.

Sign up for the free https://www.motherjones.com/newsletters/?mj oac=Article Top No Oligarchs Mother Jones Daily . While tech oligarchs grandstand https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/08/ai-safety-congress-doom/ about the existential danger https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/anthropic-ai-risks-coxon-amodei-openai-cybersecurity-dangers/ AI superintelligence https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2026/09/openai-congress-senate-hawley-casar-committee-probe-investigation/ poses to humanity, former Environmental Protection Agency officials say we should be worried about a more immediate threat to our health: the data centers that power those AI models. The former EPA researchers, now working with the nonprofit Environmental Protection Network, are warning in a new report https://safernotsicker.org/take-action/the-hidden-costs-of-ai-data-centers/ that since January 2025, Donald Trump’s EPA has embarked on a systematic weakening of pollution safeguards, permitting processes, inspection norms, and other guardrails—at least 30 different actions—that could increase the health risks associated with the data center boom. There are currently about 3,000 data centers in the United States, and more than 1,500 https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/13/most-new-data-centers-in-the-us-are-coming-to-rural-areas/ new centers are in the planning stages. But as developers build out this vast, energy-hungry infrastructure, the country is losing the government regulatory safeguards https://insideclimatenews.org/news/11092026/data-center-boom-fossil-fuel-expansion-health-hazards/ that are needed to ensure that expansion is done safely, the ex–EPA officials say. Dan Costa, who spent 35 years at EPA studying air pollution, noted that for decades the environmental agency, which was established in 1970, had a large and committed cadre of researchers who investigated emerging sources of pollution and new environmental threats. “Over the decades, toxicologists, chemists, atmospheric scientists, modelers and engineers worked in concert with academic colleagues on behalf of the American people—not on behalf of industry,” Costa said in a press briefing last week. “We wanted to carry out EPA’s mission of protecting people’s health from industrial air pollution.” Now, though, that work force has been gutted. The Trump administration has dismantled EPA’s main research office, https://www.npr.org/2025/07/20/nx-s1-5474320/trump-epa-scientific-research-zeldin and the agency’s priorities have shifted away from strict enforcement of pollution standards. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2025-12/reinforcing-a-compliance-first-orientation-for-compliance-assurance-and-civil-enforcement-activities.pdf “Transforming the nation’s energy system, while diminishing its scientific capacity to understand what the impacts are going to be, makes no sense,” Costa said. But that appears to be the direction the country is heading in. President Donald Trump is “positioning America as the global leader in AI,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a memo last year. The agency is “committed to bolstering” those efforts, Zeldin said, by “cutting heavy-handed regulations to ensure America can build and power the data centers essential to Making America the AI Capital of the World.” Since Trump returned to the White House, data center developers have seized the opportunity to expand at a rapid pace, helped by the administration’s moves. In some cases, that deregulation has involved keeping old coal-fired plants online past their planned decommissioning times https://environmentamerica.org/center/resources/fossil-fuel-power-plants-are-staying-online-longer/ in order to power data centers; other times, it has meant easing regulations on the use of onsite fossil-fuel-powered turbines https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/06/grok-doj-justice-naacp-clean-air-act-gas-turbine-pollution-national-security-ai/ to power hyperscale data centers like xAI’s Colossus. The agency has proposed a rule change that would let developers begin constructing data centers and their associated power plants before they get air pollution permits. And it has directed the agency’s enforcement staff to avoid any action that could “unduly burden or significantly disrupt” energy production or power generation. According to one study the former EPA researchers cited in their new report, pollution associated with the AI boom may lead to 1,300 additional deaths https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2024/12/09/ais-deadly-air-pollution-toll per year. Physician and former EPA administrator Lynn Goldman said some health impacts of increased data center pollution might be felt quickly—for example, heart attacks or premature births associated with particulate exposure. Others, such as cancer, might take years to emerge. “The AI industry’s race for advantage should not be a matter of life or death,” Goldman said at the press conference. “Families shouldn’t have to pay for the AI boom with their health.”