July 23, 2025
The White House’s broad plan to bolster artificial intelligence (AI) includes calls to ease or remove numerous environmental standards for construction of AI-related data centers, and create new exclusions from environmental review, new general clean water permits and eased rules under federal air, water and waste laws.
“AI will require new infrastructure — factories to produce chips, data centers to run those chips, and new sources of energy to power it all. America’s environmental permitting system and other regulations make it almost impossible to build this infrastructure in the United States with the speed that is required,” says the July 23 report.
The plan advances the Trump administration’s push to use multiple policy levers to speed AI.
Trump officials have named Iran developing a nuclear weapon and China winning the AI “arms race” as the two major global threats the U.S. government must tackle, with officials noting climate change is not on that list. Also, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has said ensuring the United States is “the artificial intelligence capital of the world” is among the five “pillars” guiding his leadership at EPA.
Specifically, the report’s environmental policy suggestions include establishing new categorical exclusions (CEs) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) “to cover data center-related actions that normally do not have a significant effect on the environment.”
To ensure speed, agencies should “[w]here possible,” adopt other agencies’ existing CEs.
Also, officials should “[e]xplore the need” for a nationwide Clean Water Act section 404 permit for data centers. Officials should also “ensure that this permit does not require a Pre-Construction Notification and covers development sites consistent with the size of a modern AI data center.”
EPA officials should also broadly “[e]xpedite environmental permitting by streamlining or reducing regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act [CAA], the Clean Water Act [CWA], the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, and other relevant related laws.”
The permitting section does not specify which of the policy recommendations could be accomplished via executive authority and which might require legislative action, nor does it name EPA.
The policies align with suggestions from groups such as the Data Center Coalition (DCC), which in March 15 comments on a draft version of the AI action plan urged the administration overhaul permitting under the NEPA, CWA, and CAA and prioritize federal land, including brownfields, for energy and data center development.
Zeldin has already signaled some plans to ease permitting, announcing last week that EPA is preparing a broad overhaul of new source review air permitting requirements, part of a push to boost construction and use of power plants for AI data centers and other facilities, though many of the plans echo previous efforts by Republican administrations to ease permitting burdens for industry in general, not only the power sector and AI facilities.
The White House report also calls to make federal lands available for construction of data centers and related power generation infrastructure “by directing agencies with significant land portfolios to identify sites suited to large-scale development.”
Energy Permitting
Trump officials have repeatedly derided the Biden administration for what they frame as limiting coal and other traditional energy production, while boosting renewable energy — and officials are now attempting to reverse that trend to meet growing energy demand from AI and other sources.
The report cites emerging energy types such as enhanced geothermal, nuclear fission, and nuclear fusion, urging officials to “[p]rioritize the interconnection of reliable, dispatchable power sources as quickly as possible and embrace new energy generation sources at the technological frontier.”
“AI is the first digital service in modern life that challenges America to build vastly greater energy generation than we have today,” the report says, lamenting that “American energy capacity has stagnated since the 1970s while China has rapidly built out their grid.”
“America’s path to AI dominance depends on changing this troubling trend,” the report adds.
The White House report says the Trump administration has already made “unprecedented progress” in improving the permitting system, including NEPA changes. The report says it is “time to build on that momentum.”
In addition to broader use of CEs to evade detailed NEPA review, the report says the government should expand the use of the “FAST-41 process” that streamlines certain major federal projects, ensuring “all data center and data center energy projects eligible” can take advantage of that process.
AI should also be used to “accelerate and improve” environmental reviews, such as by participating in the Energy Department’s PermitAI project. — Abigail Mihaly (amihaly@iwpnews.com)