On July 24, 2025, the White House released the “White House AI Action Plan,” which includes over 90 policy actions focused on accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and increasing international diplomacy around artificial intelligence (AI). The Plan focuses on removing regulatory barriers and requires that systems are free from ideological bias and “woke” policies.

The Plan outlines three pillars as its foundation:

• Accelerate AI Innovation—Focuses on removing federal regulations that hinder AI development and includes seeking private sector input.
• Build American AI Infrastructure—Focuses on streamlining permits for data centers and semiconductor manufacturing to support AI growth.
• Leading in International Diplomacy—Focuses on promoting the export of American AI technologies and establishing global standards.

Several things of note in each pillar may give data privacy and security professionals pause, as well environmentalists. Because I fall into both categories, I wanted to point out the following:

Pillar I: Accelerate AI Innovation

• In order to accelerate AI innovation, the current administration intends to “work with all federal agencies to identify, revise or repeal regulations, rules, memoranda, administrative orders, guidance, documents, policy statements, and interagency agreements that unnecessarily hinder AI development of deployment.”

This can be interpreted as repealing or terminating any guidelines put in place to minimize the risk of using AI tools, such as bias, hallucinations, and data leakage. Unfettered development of AI tools with no guardrails increases the already known risks of AI tool usage and allows developers to ignore the risks and mitigate against them when developing products.

• In addition, the Office of Management and Budget will “work with Federal agencies that have AI-related discretionary funding programs to ensure, consistent with applicable law, that they consider a state’s AI regulatory climate when making funding decisions and limit funding if the state’s AI regulatory regimes may hinder the effectiveness of that funding or award.”

This can be interpreted that if a state determines that it is in its residents’ best interest to regulate the development and use of AI tools in its state, that the federal government can limit funding to the state to deter it from enacting consumer protection legislation. This is essentially a run around of the proposed moratorium on state AI regulation that has overwhelmingly failed in the past. This could have a chilling effect on appropriate regulation of AI tools by the states, since there appears there will be no regulation during this administration.

• A mandate to “revise the NIST AI Risk Management Framework to eliminate references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change.” The concern here is obvious—ignoring DEI and climate change, well-documented risks and concerns, perpetuates bias. Completely ignoring well-documented science on how the development of data centers and AI tools affects the climate poses significant risks.
• A requirement that the government only contracts with frontier large language model (LLM) developers who ensure that their systems are objective and free from top-down ideological bias. Whose “ideological bias” is mentioned here?

There is a clear message that the Republican ideological bias will be accepted, but any others will be rejected. Wouldn’t it be better to keep politics out of the AI systems that are being developed for use over generations? Will only right-leaning AI developers’ systems be approved to use, so only a portion of the truth is used to train the models? Doesn’t this make the models so biased as to not be worthwhile? This is a very concerning policy statement.

Pillar II: Build American AI Infrastructure

Pillar Two outlines how AI infrastructure can be developed. Some concerns mentioned in the Action Plan:

• Streamline permitting processes for Data Centers, Semiconductor Manufacturing Facilities, and Energy Infrastructure.
• Explore the need for a nationwide Clean Water Act Section 404 permit for data centers, and, if adopted, ensure that this permit does not require a Pre-Construction Notification.
• Expedite environmental permitting by streamlining or reducing regulations promulgated under the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, and other relevant related laws.
• Make federal lands available for data center construction and the construction of power generation infrastructure for those data centers by directing agencies with significant land portfolios to identify sites suited to large-scale development. (Hopefully, not any of our national forests or parks).

There has to be a balance between allowing the free market to innovate and regulating to protect national interests. Congress has passed numerous laws over decades designed to ensure that our environment is protected, mostly because of past experience of dumping harmful toxins that affected individuals’ drinking water and manufacturing products that contribute to air and water pollution, affecting our natural wildlife.

The concerning tone here appears to attempt to short-cut the processes in place that are designed to protect our environment. We have seen in the past what happens when companies operate in unregulated industries—lead pigment, lead in water pipes, tobacco, asbestos, oil and gas spills, social media, OxyContin, and the list goes on. The impact of manufacturing data centers on our environment should not be ignored or cut short. This will impact our environment for generations and these laws have been put in place to ensure the process is followed correctly.

Don’t get me wrong: the Action Plan is not all bad. There are solid policy recommendations on cybersecurity, information sharing, and work force training. It is just too bad that it allows the development of AI tools with no regulation or guidelines, especially when we know that there are inherent risks. It’s like letting the tobacco, lead pigment, and asbestos industries manufacture away, even after there was clear evidence of the products’ hazards. The Plan could have been instrumental in shaping AI regulation for the future, so we do not end up in the same place as we did with other hazardous products. For me, it’s a bit of déjà vu, which is disappointing.

That said, on June 23, 2025, the day before the White House unveiled its plan, more than 90 organizations launched a competing “People’s AI Action Plan,” characterizing the Trump administration’s approach as “a massive handout to the tech industry” that prioritizes corporate interests over public welfare. The coalition includes labor unions, environmental justice groups, and consumer protection nonprofits.

The coalition’s concerns include: “the environmental impact of data centers, potential job displacement, and the lack of meaningful safety standards.” The short AI Action Plan is easily digestible. I urge you to read it and provide comment.