The AI buildout's costs vanished from the federal ledger

There is a page in the Federal Register, the government's daily journal of rules, where the arithmetic now runs in one direction only. On January 12, EPA stopped translating the human benefits of clean-air rules into dollars — the premature deaths prevented, the asthma attacks avoided — while leaving the column that prices industry's compliance costs exactly where it always sat. The first rule written under the new bookkeeping weakened the limits on nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, the gases that turn into smog and soot, from gas-burning power turbines. A cost-benefit analysis can still say what a rule costs the company that must obey it; what it can no longer say is what the pollution costs the people downwind. ^[1] A former EPA official, Joseph Goffman, gave the maneuver its sharpest description.

to rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM2.5 and ozone. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

That entry was one line in a longer ledger. Over the past fourteen months, while the country argued about whether data centers should be built at all — a fight waged in county boardrooms and in governors' mansions of both parties — the federal government has been revising its own books, item by item, and nearly every deletion serves the same customer: the gas plants, backup generators and chip factories being thrown up to feed the artificial-intelligence buildout. The rationale was on paper before the deletions began. The July 2025 White House AI Action Plan, a strategy document titled "Winning the Race," lists "the removal of infrastructure regulatory barriers" among its priorities. ^[2] The measurement went first. In September 2025, EPA filed two proposals three days apart. On the ninth, it moved to let data-center construction start before air permits issue, and Administrator Lee Zeldin supplied the reasoning in his own words. ^[3]

For years, Clean Air Act permitting has been an obstacle to innovation and growth. — Lee Zeldin

Three days later came the bigger item: a proposal to end the Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, under which roughly 8,000 of the country's largest polluters, power plants prominently included, must disclose their emissions. ^[4] The program forces no cuts and installs no equipment. What it produces is the public knowledge of who emits how much, and the administrator's description of that knowledge is now part of the file.

The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

The next removal was subtler, because the counting was done and then set aside. For the buildout's chip supply, EPA approved two photoacid generators, chemicals used in making semiconductors, in the record's own phrasing "for datacenters." Its risk review, run under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the federal toxics law, found the chemicals carry an unreasonable risk of cancer, neurological damage and sudden death. The approval went through anyway, with this sentence in its justification. ^[5]

The risks for these endpoints were not quantified due to insufficient information on hazard. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

The harms, in other words, were named in an official document and left unnumbered by the same paragraph that permitted them. The vocabulary, meanwhile, kept hardening into policy. In April, an executive order designated data centers critical national-security infrastructure. In May, EPA proposed letting projects build the parts of a facility that do not yet emit — cleared ground, concrete pads, piping — before their air permits issue, a rule the administrator framed as a move in the rivalry with China.

Today’s proposal works to provide solutions to issues that have held up critical American infrastructure and advance the next great technological forefront. — Lee Zeldin

His two sentences are eight months apart and describe one program. In July, that program reached the power plants. EPA exempted "islanded" generators — plants wired to a single customer, never touching the public grid — from the Acid Rain Program, the standing Clean Air Act curb on power-plant pollution. The agency's air chief, Aaron Szabo, rested the exemption on the plain words of the statute. ^[6]

The EPA believes that, considering the plain text of these definitions, the Acid Rain Program does not apply to power generation facilities that are not connected in any way to the larger electricity grid. — Aaron Szabo

The reading is exact and exactly circular. The Acid Rain Program was written for plants that sell power to the public. An islanded plant sells power to no one — it exists to feed a data center and nothing else — and so, on the plain text, the program does not see it. A federal curb that has chased power plants for decades stops, on this reading, at the data center's property line. Last Monday, the sequence closed. EPA finalized the repeal of the 2024 carbon standards, which required existing coal plants and new gas plants to capture 90 percent of their carbon emissions or shut down by 2039 — and new gas plants are precisely the islanded generation the buildout runs on. ^[7] The agency's supporting assertion is the January bookkeeping carried to its end.

If you eliminated all Greenhouse Gases from power plants tomorrow, there would be no material impact on global climate change, much less public health. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

Where January declined to price the benefits of cutting pollution, September enters a zero for the whole account. Beneath the inventory sits the entry that is not a line item, and it was cut before any of the summer's paperwork. In May, Zeldin repealed the 2009 endangerment finding — the legal determination that greenhouse gases endanger public health, and with it the agency's authority to regulate carbon at all. Unlike the other deletions, which removed counts, this one removed the reason a count could ever be required. If it survives the lawsuits, no future administration of either party could regulate carbon again. ^[8] Christine Todd Whitman, a former EPA administrator from Zeldin's own party, has already rendered her verdict.

For over 15 years, the Obama and Biden administrations implemented a war on coal to destroy reliable and affordable energy. — Lee Zeldin

Laid end to end, the entries perform a single operation: the emissions unreported, the deaths unpriced, the risks unnumbered, the islanded plants uncapped, and beneath them the authority to count anything at all, repealed. The buildout's costs did not shrink; they simply left the books, in the official arithmetic, uncountable. Outside Washington, the accounting continues by other hands. Governors of both parties are rationing the buildout from the other end, Maryland's Wes Moore among them.

You cannot just big foot a local jurisdiction. — Wes Moore

County boards from Virginia to Idaho keep freezing projects, rescinding tax breaks and suing over concealed water sales ^[9]. Even the challenges to EPA itself run on the agency's own files: the carbon repeal was in court within days ^[7], and the toxics suit over the chip chemicals exists only because the approval papers concede the harms. ^[5] Nearly all of it is, on paper, reversible. A later administration could decline to end the reporting program, re-propose the carbon standards, put dollar figures back on the deaths its rules would prevent. The sentences are the exception. The paragraph that catalogued cancer, neurological damage and sudden death and declined to number any of it is published. The assertion that priced the end of all power-plant carbon at nothing is published. And the savings declaration that arrived with the repeal is published.

The Trump EPA has accomplished amazing achievements for the American people, including delivering over $1.3 trillion in deregulatory savings—all while fiercely protecting human health and the environment. — United States Environmental Protection Agency

Every rule struck in these fourteen months can be struck back. The Federal Register cannot unprint a page; it can only add the next one, and the additions are the most durable thing this rollback has produced: a permanent federal description, in the government's own words, of the costs it declined to count.