The Trump administration directed the Environmental Protection Agency to stop publicizing or seeking public input on data center construction projects, a move that could keep residents from learning about permits before construction starts. That’s the machinery of power in plain sight: decisions made above, consequences dumped below, and the people expected to swallow the noise, the heat, and the bill.
Who Gets Shut Out
The column said The New York Times described the change this way: “The move could prevent residents from raising concerns about – or even learning about – data centers before permits are approved and construction starts.” That’s not consultation. That’s managed silence. The state and its agencies don’t just approve the projects; they decide who gets to know, who gets to object, and who gets left staring at a fence line after the permits are already stamped.
The piece said there were more than 4,700 data centers across the United States as of Aug. 28, 2026, citing the global directory Data Center Map. The scale matters because the expansion isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s happening across communities, with the same old pattern: corporate infrastructure spreads, local people absorb the disruption, and the institutions at the top call it progress.
What the Bosses Call Progress
U.S. President Donald J. Trump praised data centers, calling them “big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built.” In July, he said, “You have to convince your community how great these things (are). You can't fight it, you have to go with it.” That’s the language of consent manufactured from above. First the project arrives. Then the community is told to be convinced.
The column opened by saying the writer thought the expansion of data centers was a wonderful thing and described that view as an honest opinion not paid for or written with help of an AI chatbot. It also said the writer believed in the power of artificial intelligence to generate images of President Trump riding atop an eagle and to make deepfake videos used to frame a neighbor named Doug for murder. The piece leaned hard into fantasy, but the real-world structure underneath stayed the same: power concentrates, and ordinary people are told to adapt.
The column said data centers would create jobs, though it described that as one job after construction was over and AI had taken over the jobs of the writer and neighbors. It said the local data center would need one person to sit there and make sure everything kept going “hummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.” That’s the promise, stripped bare. A giant industrial project, a handful of jobs, and a lot of people expected to live with the consequences.
What People Actually Said
Polling showed strong opposition to data centers. A Gallup poll conducted in March found 71% of Americans oppose local AI data center construction, with opposition coming from both sides of the political aisle. A recent Franklin & Marshall College poll of registered Pennsylvania voters found 79% oppose building AI data centers in their community. A recent Heatmap Pro poll conducted by Embold Research found 75% of Americans would oppose a data center going up near where they live.
Those numbers cut through the cheerleading. People don’t need a billionaire’s sermon about the future when they’re the ones who have to live beside the humming machines, the permits, and the closed doors. The column ended by saying the benefits of having an AI data center in a community were obvious because it would help billionaire tech CEOs, and it said artificial intelligence was clearly the future. That’s the whole arrangement in one sentence: the future, according to the people with the money, the platforms, and the permits.
The rest is just noise. A constant hum. A community told to go with it.