Judge rejects Trump’s wild claim EPA can dismiss data center pollution lawsuits
Elon Musk’s SpaceXAI is stuck facing a lawsuit over alleged data center pollution after Donald Trump failed to convince a judge that his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has complete control over all Clean Air Act lawsuits and can dismiss any suit at whim. Soon after unpermitted gas turbines were discovered powering Musk’s giant Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP sued. Its lawsuit sought an injunction requiring xAI (which, following a merger, is known now as SpaceXAI) to
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A federal judge rejected the Trump administration's attempt to give the EPA power to unilaterally dismiss citizen lawsuits under the Clean Air Act. The administration had argued that the EPA could dismiss a pollution lawsuit against a data center company to avoid civil penalties, claiming this power was necessary for executive authority. The judge ruled that nothing in the Clean Air Act grants the EPA Administrator the ability to dismiss citizen suits, and that Congress explicitly preserved citizens' right to sue when the government fails to enforce pollution standards. This ruling allows a pollution lawsuit against an unpermitted data center to proceed, preventing what the judge characterized as an unprecedented expansion of executive power over environmental enforcement.
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Also reported by The Decoder
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Also reported by TechCrunch and The Decoder
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Democratic governance of frontier AI, part II: Empowering cyber defenders
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