Congress’s Permitting Bill Is a ‘Massive Giveaway’ to the AI Data Center Industry, Critics Warn

Holly Bender, chief program officer of the Sierra Club, says that “based on their need for speed to power, the data center industry is driving a historic and alarming investment in gas and fossil fuels. There’s a lot in this bill that will make it easier and faster to build gas pipelines, while making it harder for communities to have a say.”

Another major concern from critics is that the bill will lead to many more data centers getting built on federally-owned land. The Trump administration has embraced this idea, and signed an executive order in July 2025 directing the Interior and Energy departments to make federal sites available for data centers and to streamline their environmental reviews. “We’re going to ‘mine, baby, mine’ so we can ‘build, baby, build’ because we’ve got to build AI data centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in 2025.

There are at least 17 active applications connected to data center campuses on public land, covering thousands of acres in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and other states, one recent study found. BAAJA’s permitting provisions could make those projects easier to advance and harder to stop, including limiting judges’ ability to halt construction due to environmental review.