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Data centers are increasingly making headlines for the serious problems they create for the communities where they are proposed and built, as well as for the resistance from people who live there, who refuse to accept the rising energy bills, noise and air pollution, and strains on water infrastructure that inevitably accompany these new neighbors. On Tuesday, February 10, I moderated a webinar, “From Community to Congress: Advocating on AI Data Centers,” that broke down the (de)regulatory landscape of data centers.

The other shoe has dropped with the announcement of the final rule repealing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) 2009 finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare. The Trump administration has the nasty habit of announcing new regulations before posting them. That means that for the moment, we are limited to the EPA press release.

Over the course of more than a century, serious statespeople came together to build the modern administrative state out of a shared commitment to redeeming their constitutional duty to form a more perfect union. The February 12 action to rescind the 2009 EPA endangerment finding represents the single greatest defiance of that project yet by the Trump administration.

To the extent that people think about the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at all, they likely think of an institution that works to safeguard our health and well-being, and that of our environment. So, The New York Times made quite a splash recently when it reported that the agency had adopted a new policy under which it would stop considering the health benefits of two of the most harmful and pervasive air pollutants: fine particulate matter and ozone.

One of the core beliefs of the Center for Progressive Reform is that our collective problems require collective solutions. One of the reasons we embrace the administrative state is that it provides a uniquely powerful institutional forum within our constitutional system of government in which to put that belief into practice — and was indeed created for doing so. That vision has not always lived up to its full potential, of course, and building a government that lives up to that vision is a focal point of the Center’s work. What is currently happening with the violent occupation of Minneapolis and other cities across the United States by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and other militarized civilian administrative agencies represents a categorically different problem, however.

Two policy briefs published by the Center in recent months explain that even before the second Trump administration and the 119th Congress launched their broadsides against the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the scale and pacing of decarbonization was already lagging at investor-owned utilities. Most customers in the U.S. are served by investor-owned utilities. Due to their complicated mix of historical industry capture and political power, information asymmetries in the regulatory context, the profit motive of energy production and distribution, and tax policy, IOUs are often disincentivized from advancing an equitable clean energy transition. Our policy briefs explore several alternatives to the IOU model as part of a just transition to clean energy.

The world’s ecosystems have been subject to an increasingly dangerous cocktail of stressors from land and ocean over-development, invasive species, and pollution. But rather than stem the tide of these harms, the Trump administration has resurrected several regulatory changes to the Endangered Species Act designed to stifle species’ protections and provide land developers even more power to destroy invaluable ecosystems.

At its core, the unitary executive theory (UET) says that the president can fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason or no reason. Although the UET purports to be based on originalism, it has become clear that the U.S. Supreme Court has no interest at all in examining the history. Supreme Court conservatives think complete presidential control is simply the ideal way to run the government. The deep flaws in that theory are now becoming apparent.

In 2025, President Donald Trump rolled out new initiatives at a dizzying rate. That story, in one form or another, dominated the news. This year, much of the news will again be about Trump, but he will have less control of the narrative. Legal and political responses to Trump will play a greater role, as will economic developments. Trump’s anti-environmental crusade may run into strong headwinds.