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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.

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.

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.

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.

As projections of U.S. electricity demand rise sharply, President Donald Trump is looking to coal – historically a dominant force in the U.S. energy economy – as a key part of the solution. In an April 2025 executive order, for instance, Trump used emergency powers to direct the Department of Energy to order the owners of coal-fired power plants that were slated to be shut down to keep the plants running. But there remain limits to the president’s power to slow the declining use of coal in the U.S.

This November, we honor the leadership, knowledge, and resilience of America’s first peoples, who have safeguarded the land, water, and air that sustain us all.

After nearly five years of serving this amazing organization and its inspiring community of scholars, advocates, and activists, I’ll be stepping down as executive director of the Center for Progressive Reform.

President Donald Trump is on a rampage. He has big plans for a mass repeal of existing regulations, he’s trying to use emergency declarations to short-circuit normal environmental protections, and he’s savaging environmental agencies. He’s also at war with the rule of law, dodging court orders, ignoring statutes, and punishing lawyers and law firms that have dared to challenge him. In area after area, Trump has tried to sweep aside legal constraints. Part of the point of Trump’s “shock and awe” campaign has been to overwhelm the ability of opponents and the courts to keep up with his legally questionable actions. Trump’s attack on the bureaucracy is also an attack on the rule of law because one of the key functions of bureaucrats is to ensure that the government follows the rules.

In one of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders, he eliminated a centralized system that Jimmy Carter initially set up to issue regulations governing environmental impact statements. Instead, he called on each agency to issue its own regulations, which seems to have caused the predictable amount of confusion. I’ve examined the new regulations from three agencies: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the Department of Transportation (DOT), which happened to be the first ones that I saw. There seems to be little rhyme or reason in the variations.