Big Technology has sought to allow loose clean water laws. Trump wants to give it to them

Currently available Over 50 issued national 404 permits– Some of these still require pre-construction notifications. This is updated once every five years. Many of these exemptions are for agricultural activities such as cranberry harvesting and farm pond construction, or for agricultural activities such as ecosystem and scientific services such as surveying and soil maintenance. Some types of coal mines and oil and gas activities are also included in the program.

Buildings such as stores, restaurants, hospitals, and schools now have their own national permits categorized into some data centers. However, this permit requires a more detailed, individual analysis if the project affects more than half of the protected waters.

The DCC in a comment in March recommended the creation of a national permit with “robust notification and coverage thresholds,” claiming that “longer timelines for approval allow for immediate action, either because they have high limits or because the PCN is not consistent with other national permits with no unnecessary thresholds.” Meta announced its intention to build A huge data center In several states, now developing Louisiana’s 2,250-acre data center also sought national permits in its comments, suggesting that the federal government further “rationalize” the 404 permitting process.

Joel Kaplan, Meta’s top global affairs officer Posted on x Last week, the AI Action Plan was “a bold step towards creating the right regulatory environment for businesses like us to invest in America,” and the meta was “investing hundreds of billions of dollars into job-creating infrastructure across the United States, including modern data centers.” Meta declined to comment further on the article through a spokesman.

Environmental attorneys are not convinced that a data center’s national permit will comply with the clean water law’s intent, regardless of its size. “The slightly more difficult thing about[blanket data center exemptions]is that the impact varies considerably depending on where these are,” says Mcelfish. One data center could simply affect “part of the acre,” but crossing the wetlands or filling the wetlands could have a much greater impact on local waterways during construction by other data centers in different parts of the country.

Hannah Connor, senior lawyer at the Center for Biodiversity, agrees. “What we’re looking at here is that we’ve reduced the reviews of regulations significantly, not just because of the intent of why the (permission) program was created, in order to expand the 404 national permit program,” she says. “There’s been a significant decline in regulatory reviews to literally speed up along the pavement of the wetland.”

There are several data center projects under development today, causing serious problems in federally protected waters. In Indiana, Amazon is now seeking local opposition. fill in Approximately 10 acres of wetlands and over 5,000 streams are building large data centers. Environmentalists in Alabama Note The water footprint from the proposed data center could have serious impacts on local waterways and lead to the possibility of extinction of fish species.