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Growing up in San Francisco, the 48 Quintara was my lifeline. It got me across the city to school in the Sunset, to hang out with friends in West Portal, and then back to the Mission for soccer practice.

Whether I sat up front with the seniors and their grocery carts or was crammed in the back, wishing someone would crack the window, 35 cents got me wherever I wanted to go, surrounded by a microcosm of San Francisco’s wonderful people and cultures.

My son is two years old now, and the 29 Sunset is his lifeline. We take it to daycare, the playground, to the pediatrician, and to see his grandparents on the other side of the city. But if the Bay Area fails to pass the two transit measures on the ballot this November, his lifeline will go away.

RTM, the Regional Transit Measure, will add a half-percent sales tax in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara, and San Mateo Counties and a 1-percent tax in San Francisco. For transit agencies facing a downward spiral of insufficient funding, RTM is a critical lifeline. BART could close up to 15 stations and cut service by 70 percent. Caltrain would run one train per hour, and Muni could cut one-third of their service. In San Francisco, Measure H also needs to pass to prevent further Muni cuts that could eliminate up to 20 routes, double wait times, and end regular nighttime services.

My organization, Transform, works with low-income communities throughout the Bay Area, providing ‘Know-how-to-go’ travel trainings and signing folks up for transit benefits programs to help them get around easily and affordably. When we ask the people we serve what would happen if their bus line was cut, the answers are harrowing:

“I wouldn’t be able to get my shopping necessities.”

“Seeing a doctor would be difficult.”

“I don’t know…it’s necessary for survival.”

Public transit is essential for everyone in the Bay Area, but it is a lifeline for our most vulnerable residents. According to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission’s Snapshot Survey, 44 percent of transit riders have a household income under $50,000 a year. For two-thirds of all transit trips, the bus or train is the only way they can get around.

The cost of living in the Bay Area is so high; it’s tough to ask residents to pay new taxes. But the cost of losing transit is much higher. A new SPUR report found that families would pay $3,280 more per year in transportation costs if the Regional Transit Measure fails. For the 30 percent of households that don’t own a car, that cost could skyrocket as high as $20,000. Failing to pass the Regional Transit Measure would also drive up housing costs. To meet our growing housing need, we need to build 441,176 new units by 2031, including 180,000 units at 30-80 percent below market-rate.

California has recently passed numerous laws encouraging housing development near transit for middle- and low-income residents. These include exemptions and streamlined approvals, waiving minimum parking requirements to lower building costs, and loosening zoning restrictions for affordable housing. If the regional measure fails and transit service gets cut, these landmark housing laws will be significantly weakened or rendered ineffective, further increasing the cost of living as housing and transportation costs spike.

That’s why Transform and our partners have spent almost a decade building a strong coalition of housing, labor, and community organizations to bring the Regional Transit Measure to the ballot. We know transit is often the fastest and most cost-effective way to get where you need to go, and that the Bay Area’s economy, housing, and climate goals depend on it. Public transit is a lifeline for many, but it is also a joy for all. I cherish the smiles when my toddler shimmies up onto an open seat, the honks from friendly bus drivers as we depart, and the sense of belonging that riding the bus brings in our increasingly polarized world. I want a future where my son can enjoy all the people, cultures, and opportunities the Bay Area has to offer. I want him to grow up in a place with enough housing so everyone can afford a home. I want transit to be the lifeline for him that it was for me.

Please vote yes on Measure RTM and Measure H this November.

***

Zack Deutsch-Gross is the Executive Director of Transform, a Bay Area nonprofit that works to reshape housing and transportation decision-making around equity, climate, and community. He lives in Ingleside with his wife and two-year-old son.

The Trump administration is threatening to strip California of its authority to protect its coastline unless state regulators agree to demands that could benefit offshore oil companies and other powerful interests. The move could make it easier to restart dormant oil operations and expand offshore development, while limiting California’s ability to challenge projects that threaten its coast. 

While the state has not publicly discussed legal options should the administration move forward with its threats, there is no legal precedent for the federal government to act in this manner with the dozens of states that have similar deals. It doesn’t take a fortune teller to see this story ending up in court like the administration’s other pro-pollution, anti-California actions.

What Happened

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued draft findings demanding that California’s coastal agencies complete more than a dozen “corrective actions” or risk losing federal approval of the state’s coastal management program. Federal funding for the program has also been suspended pending resolution of the alleged deficiencies. The report is not yet available online, but the Los Angeles Times received a copy through a public records request.

The demands seem more political than anything having to do with protecting the environment. Among them are a requirement the California Coastal Commission must meet with SpaceX, which happens to be owned by Trump ally and GOP mega-donor Elon Musk. The commission must also meet with Sable Offshore Corp., a Texas-based oil company seeking to restart a dormant oil operation off Santa Barbara County. Sable has been under investigation by California’s Senator Adam Schiff for using political donations to influence federal policy. Sable gave $300,000 to a Super PAC supporting Trump’s last campaign. 

“This is a five-alarm warning to every job and industry that relies on our sandy beaches and beautiful bluffs for its livelihood,” Schiff told the Los Angeles Times. “Soon, you too could see your environment for sale to Big Oil, Elon Musk, and any other high bidder that buys its way into the White House ballroom.”

California has participated in the federal Coastal Zone Management Act since 1978. The law gives the state a role in reviewing federally regulated projects that could affect its coast, including development in federal waters. While the administration tries to paint the state and the California Coastal Commission as obstacles to progress, the Commission has approved 96% of the permit applications it receives as submitted. 

A Review With a Predetermined Outcome?

The administration has portrayed its investigation as a response to what it calls California’s “environmental extremism” and alleged political bias against offshore drilling and SpaceX’s launch activities. But an earlier federal review reached a very different conclusion.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a review conducted during the Biden administration found that California was successfully implementing its coastal management program and gave its agencies high marks. The Trump administration nevertheless ordered a new evaluation focused on industries and projects the White House wants to advance.

As part of the legal requirement to complete its review, NOAA was required to hold a public hearing and take written input. Public feedback overwhelmingly favored preserving California’s coastal authority. More than 23,000 written comments were submitted, with approximately 95% supporting the state’s ability to protect its coast, according to the Surfrider Foundation. Hundreds of Californians also spoke at an August public hearing in Santa Monica.

Surfrider says the agency relied on roughly a dozen comments critical of California when developing its proposed corrective actions, even as the draft report acknowledged that parts of the state’s program are excellent.

California’s Coast Is Not a Bargaining Chip

In an October 24 statement published by the Surfrider Foundation, California Policy Associate Director Jennifer Savage argued that the review was designed to benefit companies favored by the White House.

“[The review] was never about coastal management. It was about making it easier to develop controversial projects favored by the White House and which benefit the administration’s allies, including SpaceX and Sable Offshore Corp.,” Savage wrote.

She added: “It’s a demand that a state agency promise outcomes to specific companies before it has seen their applications.”

California’s coastal protections do not automatically prohibit offshore projects. They give regulators a process for evaluating environmental impacts and determining whether development complies with state coastal policies.

What Happens Next?

The California Coastal Commission, State Coastal Conservancy, and San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission have been given until November 16 to respond to the draft findings. The Coastal Commission requested a 15-day extension, according to the Los Angeles Times.

NOAA will then issue its final findings. The federal government can pursue withdrawal of its approval of California’s coastal program if the state fails to address the identified deficiencies, potentially weakening its ability to challenge projects affecting the coastline.

Surfrider is urging NOAA to drop corrective actions unrelated to coastal management and preserve the federal-state partnership that has helped protect California’s coast for nearly 50 years.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

On Oct. 25, Serbia voted and the Student List won. Late that evening, President Aleksandar Vučić — the man who has dominated the country’s politics since 2012, steadily hollowing out its courts, media and elections along the way — went on television and admitted that his Serbian Progressive Party and its allies had lost. The final count isn’t in yet, but the result is not in doubt. Candidates selected by the Students List protest movement have more than half the vote and a majority in the 250-seat parliament.

For more than 20 years, our team at the Belgrade-based Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies, or CANVAS, has worked with activists from dozens of countries on one question: How do ordinary people defeat a government that looks unbeatable? This time the answer came from our own streets, again. We want to explain what happened, because movements elsewhere will try to learn from it, and we’d like them to learn the right lessons.

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You can’t understand Sunday without understanding the 14 years before it, since Vučić first came to power.

Most people in Serbia learned to live with a low, constant fear. You assumed your phone wasn’t really yours. Amnesty International later confirmed what many suspected: Spyware was being installed on the phones of activists and journalists, sometimes while they sat in a police station. If you spoke up, a tabloid might put your face on the front page the next morning with a story about who was supposedly bankrolling you. People lost jobs and contracts for being on the wrong side. Plenty stopped saying what they thought, even at the kitchen table.

We see this pattern in almost every country we work in. That kind of power doesn’t have to arrest everyone. It only needs everyone to believe they could be next.

How it started

On Nov. 1, 2024, the concrete canopy at the Novi Sad railway station fell and killed 16 people. The station had just been renovated. Everyone understood immediately what that meant: The money meant to keep people safe had gone into someone’s pocket. Within days, “Corruption kills” was written on walls across the country.

Students shut down their colleges and refused to go back to class. Many observers abroad missed how important this was. A march lasts an afternoon. The blockade of the universities lasted for months and took a whole part of society out of normal life. In our field we call that noncooperation, and it is far more powerful than protest alone. Every regime depends on people showing up and doing what is expected of them. The students stopped.

For two years the students were arrested, followed, slandered and called foreign agents. Cars drove into crowds. People were beaten. The government gave them every excuse to respond with violence, and they didn’t.

A protest marshal at the front of a crowd during the largest march in Serbia’s history on March 15, 2025 in Belgrade. (Gavrilo Andrić / protesti.pics)

At the largest protest in Serbia’s history, in Belgrade on March 15, 2025 — with between 275,000 and 325,000 people, according to the independent Archive of Public Gatherings — student marshals in yellow vests kept the crowd calm and blue flares showed people the way out if things went wrong. None of that was improvised. The students organized themselves. The assembly of each fakultet (a specialized college within a university) chose its marshals. Before every big action they went over the same things again and again: how to spot provocateurs, how to calm a tense moment, how to move a crowd out safely. At CANVAS, we teach this in every training we run: Nonviolent discipline doesn’t happen by itself. It is planned, practiced and repeated until it’s second nature. The students did exactly that.

Here is why it mattered so much. Violence was the one thing the regime wanted from them. A single burning car would have given the government its “terrorists” and sent the cautious middle class back indoors. 

Because the students stayed nonviolent, everyone could join. Grandmothers did. Farmers did. People who had never been to a protest in their lives did.

What it cost

People sometimes talk about nonviolent action as if it were the soft option. Anyone who watched these students over the past two years knows better.

They walked across Serbia. They arrived with bloody socks and taped-up blisters, slept wherever someone offered a floor, and set off again in the morning. In village after village people stood by the road with bread, hot tea and blankets, and a lot of them were crying. Those marches reached places that no rally in Belgrade ever could, places the government thought it owned.

Wherever they stopped, they talked with people. In town squares, school yards and village halls, they explained why they were marching and listened to what local people were angry about. They also urged residents to set up their own citizens’ assemblies, and in many towns people did, often for the first time in their lives.

Their professors paid a price, too. When fakultets sided with their students, the government cut university salaries to a small fraction of what they had been. Some professors received nothing at all for months. The president went on television and said that instead of salaries, they would get potatoes. Schoolteachers who backed the protests were punished the same way. These are people with children, mortgages and parents to look after, and they stayed with their students anyway.

A list with no politicians on it

Then the students did something we had not seen done quite like this anywhere.

They didn’t hand their momentum over to the opposition parties, and they didn’t run for office themselves. They wrote their own rules for the slate of candidates that they would support. No students could be on the list. Nobody from the ruling coalition. No officials from the opposition parties. No extremists.

For more than a year, over 80 student assemblies in six university cities proposed names, argued about them, interviewed people and vetoed the ones they didn’t trust. It was slow, messy and deeply democratic. We think that is exactly why it worked. Nobody could say it was cooked up in a back room.

What came out was a list of 250 people, one name for every seat in parliament, who were respected long before politics: professors, teachers, doctors, actors, artists and athletes. 

Serbia doesn’t have local districts. The whole country votes as one constituency for party lists, seats are shared out by each list’s share of the vote, and they are filled in the order the names appear. So the order matters, and the first name on the list was a cardiologist from Novi Sad. A former governor of the National Bank shared the list with one of the best basketball players this country has ever produced. Several opposition parties pulled their own lists and backed the students instead, which could not have been easy for them.

Tens of thousands gathered at Slavija Square in Belgrade on Oct. 22 ahead of the general election. (Gavrilo Andrić / protesti.pics)

The people on that list don’t agree about much. Some are on the left, some on the right, and some have never thought of themselves as political at all. State-owned media called that chaos.

We see it the other way around. Movements win by bringing huge numbers of people on board, and huge numbers of people never share one ideology. If the list had looked like one camp, it would have attracted one camp. Because it looked like Serbia, almost anyone could find someone on it they trusted.

What held it together was simple. Nobody wants another leader the whole country has to obey and adore. Nobody wants to live again in a place where a handful of people get rich off everyone else. The students put it on their posters in three words: “Serbia or Mafia.”

Healing from a cancer

The best way we can describe where Serbia is today is this: we’ve had the diagnosis, and treatment has just started.

For years the country lived with a cancer — with captured courts, captured media, public money flowing into private pockets, and fear as the normal background of life. It spread slowly into nearly every institution.

Sunday’s defeat of Vučić didn’t cure it. Sunday made treatment possible.

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Anyone who has sat next to someone they love during chemotherapy knows what comes next. It takes a long time. It hurts. Some weeks the treatment feels worse than the illness. There will be setbacks and bad results, and people saying things were better before. The old networks won’t leave quietly, and some reforms will fail the first time they are tried.

But this cancer can be beaten. And the whole body has to heal, including the neighbors, relatives and colleagues who voted for the other side on Sunday. They aren’t the disease. They’re part of the country that has to get well.

What we ask of each of us

No government can do this healing by itself. Here is what we think it will take, and from whom.

1. The new governing majority: Start with institutions, not with settling scores. Establish courts that are actually independent, a public broadcaster that tells the truth, and clean elections — all of which will outlast any government. And open a full, public investigation into the surveillance of citizens, so no one is tempted to do it again.

2. The movement: Don’t let the assemblies fade away. They built this list, and they are the best protection Serbia has against the next strongman, including one who might come from inside the movement itself.

3. Friends abroad: Support Serbian institutions and citizens rather than personalities. In practice, that means long-term funding for independent media, watchdog groups and local citizens’ assemblies; sending judges, auditors and prosecutors from your own countries who can work alongside Serbian colleagues rebuilding theirs; and support tied to concrete rule-of-law results rather than to warm words for whoever is in office. And please stay for the whole treatment, not only the first week.

4. Activists in other countries: Don’t copy the slogan. Copy the method. Go beyond marching to real noncooperation, train for discipline instead of hoping for it, and build unity out of your differences.

Serbia has just shown that nonviolent action still works when it’s planned, patient and carried by many hands. Now it has to show that a country can heal. We intend to be part of that work: training the next generation of organizers, writing down honestly what worked and what didn’t, and holding the new government to the same standard the students held the old one.

A version of this article first appeared on CANVAS’ newsletter.

This article How Serbian students toppled an authoritarian was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

CONTACT: Kayla Ritchie | kayla@unbendablemedia.com 

Climate Justice Alliance-led coalition warns the Bipartisan American Affordability & Jobs Act would roll back environmental safeguards, expand corporate power, and deepen environmental injustice.

WASHINGTON, DC — Today, Climate Justice Alliance, joined by more than 100 environmental, faith, and labor organizations, led a letter urging U.S. Senators to reject the Bipartisan American Affordability & Jobs Act (BAAJA), a “permitting reform” proposal slated for a November 9, 2026, vote. The action comes as the nation marks the 35th anniversary of the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, where the foundational 17 Principles of Environmental Justice were drafted. 

The coalition argues that this legislation undermines those principles; in part because  “BAAJA codifies environmental injustice and discards the civil rights of Black, Indigenous and people of color by permanently locking in fossil fuel infrastructure in communities that legislators have already sacrificed time and time again.”

The coalition identified key sections of the legislation that, if passed, would deregulate federal protections, codify mining on public lands, limit peoples’ access to legal redress, and expand the buildout of more fossil fuel projects. This comes at a time when the Trump Administration is already wreaking havoc on multiple federal protections, including public health and legal safeguards. 

Among the over 75 rollbacks, we are concerned BAAJA will:

• Gut foundational environmental protections. Eviscerating the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), ripping up key protections of the Clean Water Act, weakening the Endangered Species Act, and codifying the highly problematic Mining Regulatory Clarity Act that gives mining companies free rein over public lands, all while simultaneously preventing ordinary people from challenging harmful projects in court.
• Lock in harmful projects indefinitely. Title IV would make it much harder for federal agencies to revisit certain permits; even when communities experience worsening air pollution, water shortages, or other harms that weren’t fully understood when a project was approved. Communities could be left living with the consequences while the government’s ability to respond is sharply limited.
• Give project developers new legal benefits with no parallel protections for communities.. Protecting big business rather than people by granting project developers the new ability to bring a ‘disparate treatment’ claim in the courts–a concept rooted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This expands legal avenues for corporations while failing to offer equivalent protections to communities facing environmental injustice.

With a Senate vote approaching, the coalition  warns that the legislation would advance an agenda that rolls back environmental justice protections while leaving frontline communities to bear the consequences. The letter ends with a hard truth that has been felt for too long by too many, “Your closed-door deal bolsters the work of the Trump administration which is hell-bent on dismantling environmental justice at every turn, and we are beyond outraged at what you are saying our lives are worth. Reject this travesty.”

Read the full letter here.

# # # # #

The post More than 100 Environmental, Faith and Labor Groups Urge Senators Heinrich and Whitehouse to Reject Permitting Bill Ahead of November 9 Vote appeared first on Climate Justice Alliance.

Members of ECOSOL MX Network redecosolmx@gmail.com. For contact: Marcos Cortez Bacilio, marcosbacilio@gmail.com; Celina Valadez, celinavaladez@yahoo.comalternatives

Beacons of Hope in Citrus Country: Weaving Autonomy, Biodiversity, and Economies for Life in Veracruz and Puebla By Amanda Gpe. Macías Caballero and Jesús Flores Cruz Introduction Across the agricultural landscapes of northern Veracruz and northeastern Puebla, Mexico, amid the scent of orange blossoms and the green of the milpa, a quiet yet vibrant transformation is taking shape. Faced with the multiple socio-environmental crises caused by the agroindustrial model, peasant and Indigenous c…

Shrinking labor forces and population loss are pressuring rural Missouri to find new revenue sources to balance budgets and avoid tax increases for residents who can’t afford them.

Local officials are finding that protecting a county’s future takes more than saying no to change.

Federal labor and population statistics place several rural Missouri counties in the difficult position of providing valuable services, such as emergency response services, education and roads, for shrinking populations.

A study by Judith Stallman and Austin Sanders of the University of Missouri notes that “jurisdictions losing population must still provide and maintain basic infrastructure and services. That means these costs must be spread across a smaller population, resulting in higher costs per capita.” Some local officials are finding new revenue to keep services running. Others turn it away and leave residents to pay more or get less.

In 2020, Missouri’s growth rate of 0.2 percent was half that of the rest of the country and many of the state’s rural counties lost population. That was particularly true in the Bootheel section of Southeastern Missouri and in counties north of the Missouri River.

“Overall, 62 of Missouri’s 115 counties (including St. Louis City) lost population between 2019 and 2020,” said a report by the Missouri Small Business Development Center. “During that period, 10 of Missouri’s 35 metro counties and 52 of its 80 nonmetro counties lost population.”

The combination of decreasing population and labor forces leads to a vicious cycle as more people leave rural counties to seek opportunities. The remaining populations are older and in poorer health. As Checks & Balances Project reported, many of these counties suffer from premature death rates higher than the Missouri and national averages.

Local officials can’t stop every cause of rural decline. But when they reject new revenue, they owe residents a plan for paying the county’s bills.

Ray Locker is the executive director for Checks & Balances Project, an investigative watchdog blog holding government officials, lobbyists, and corporate management accountable to the public. Funding for C&BP is provided by Renew American Prosperity and individual donors.

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The post Declining populations and labor forces put rural Missouri counties under pressure appeared first on Checks and Balances Project.

Nurses are demanding that ICE or any federal immigration agents stay away from their hospitals and that their employers refuse to cooperate, that ICE get out of their communities, and ultimately that the agency be abolished.

Weaker rules for new wells would lock in years of increased methane pollution if Senate permitting bill passes

DENVER—President Donald Trump will roll out plans today to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2024 methane standards for oil and gas operations, according to reporting in The Hill and Bloomberg. The proposal would scrap the Super Emitter Program, which requires operators to investigate and fix leaks of 100 kilograms of methane per hour or more once satellites or certified third parties flag them. It would also create separate, looser standards for low-producing “marginal” wells and revisit the phaseout of routine flaring at new oil wells. The changes would apply to oil and gas wells nationwide, including those on public lands.

Marginal wells produce roughly 7 percent of U.S. oil and gas but account for about half of the industry’s methane from oil and gas production, and nearly 80 percent of oil and gas wells in the U.S. qualify as marginal. The 2024 rule Trump is proposing to weaken was projected to keep 58 million tons of methane out of the atmosphere through 2038, the climate equivalent of taking 28 million gas-powered cars off the road.

The methane giveaway comes as the Senate plans to take up the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act the week after the election. The sweeping permitting bill would make Trump-era approvals on public lands nearly impossible to revisit. Section 1401 of the bill bars agencies from taking any new action that would “revoke, rescind, withdraw, terminate, suspend, amend, or alter” a federal permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026. Agencies could do so only by proving an exception with “clear and convincing evidence,” and if they lost in court, taxpayers would owe the developer 25 to 50 percent of everything it had spent. The bill also explicitly shields every drilling permit that results from the 2025 reconciliation law’s mandatory oil and gas lease sales.

The Interior department is pursuing a parallel rollback. In June, the Bureau of Land Management proposed scrapping most of its 2024 methane waste rule, including the requirement that drillers file a waste minimization plan with each drilling permit application. Permits approved without those conditions would fall under Section 1401 of the Senate permitting bill. If it passes, a future administration that tries to add methane leak detection or flaring requirements to existing wells would have to prove an exception by “clear and convincing evidence” and could owe the operator 25 to 50 percent of its costs if it lost in court. Section 1401 of the bill also bars any agency action that would “interfere with or prevent the construction or operation at full capacity” of a permitted project, language that would likely block new pollution standards from reaching wells that are already permitted.

The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Executive Director Aaron Weiss:

“The Trump administration is giving oil companies a free pass to spew methane across the country, and the Senate permitting bill would make that pass permanent.

“Every drilling permit and stripper well that the Trump administration rubber-stamps over the next two years would be shielded from future safeguards, and the next president could be on the hook to compensate drillers just for asking them to fix their leaks. Senators should slow down and fix the permitting bill to avoid locking in decades of pollution allowed under the Trump administration’s assault on America’s air and water.”

Learn more:

• The Senate permitting bill would lock in data centers and nuclear waste on public lands. It only gets worse from there – Westwise
• Trump plans to loosen methane rules for low-producing, high-emitting oil wells – The Hill
• Trump Targets Methane Curbs on Oil and Gas in a New Climate Rollback – Bloomberg

The post Trump plans to roll back methane regulations for all oil and gas wells in the U.S. appeared first on Center for Western Priorities.

The BLM is using a shortcut that could come back to bite the AI industry

In June, the Bureau of Land Management approved the first AI data center on America’s public lands. It didn’t write a new rule, hold a public comment period, or prepare a new environmental review. It amended a right-of-way BLM granted in 2023 for a solar farm near Boulder City, Nevada, and let the developer, Townsite Solar 2, swap out its solar panels for an 80-acre data center with a substation, battery storage, and biodiesel backup generators—a very different project with different environmental impacts and energy needs. Boulder City had already voted not to approve the project on city land, so the developer attempted an end run around the community by pivoting to public land.

In September, an Interior department administrative judge froze the approval, finding BLM likely acted “arbitrarily or capriciously” when it treated a solar farm and a data center as substantially the same project. Weeks later, the BLM asked a judge to set aside the approval to allow the agency to reconsider the application. Meanwhile, the agency has received applications for at least 16 more data center proposals, following a July 2025 executive order directing the Interior department to identify national public land for data centers. The BLM is reportedly now considering approving one of those applications, a 3,700-acre data center campus on public land outside of Twin Falls, Idaho.

The legal problem with putting data centers on public lands runs deeper than one rushed review. BLM’s governing law, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, lists what rights-of-way on public lands can be used for: water systems, pipelines, electric generation and transmission, communications, roads, and railroads. Data centers aren’t on the list. To approve them, BLM would likely have to rely on a catch-all allowance in the law for “other systems or facilities which are in the public interest.” A warehouse full of servers primarily benefits private industry, not the general public. For industrial and commercial uses like that, BLM uses a different tool: leases under Section 302 of FLPMA. Marinas, recreation businesses, farms, and equipment staging yards are some examples of uses BLM authorizes with leases and permits.

Right now, the Trump administration is attempting to authorize data centers through right-of-way applications, which would require stretching a provision no court has ever applied to this type of project on public lands. What’s more, the BLM has yet to formally determine whether data centers are even a legal use of public land. This is clearly the wrong approach, but is there a right one? BLM has faced new technologies before, and history illustrates how this could work.

Geothermal

In the late 1960s, no one knew whether underground steam on federal land counted as water or as a mineral. Meanwhile, California’s Geysers field was already producing geothermal electricity. Pacific Gas and Electric built an 11-megawatt plant there in 1960, running on steam from geothermal wells on private land. Developers wanted to drill on public land too, but the Interior department said it had no authority to lease it, telling Congress that geothermal steam was water governed by state law. Congress responded by passing the Geothermal Steam Act of 1970, which made geothermal a leasable resource like oil and gas. Congress revised the law in 2005, making competitive lease sales the norm and creating a plan for splitting royalties generated from geothermal energy sales with states and counties.

BLM built its geothermal program on that foundation. Companies bid on leases at auction, pay rent and royalties, and need separate approvals to drill, build a power plant, and begin commercial operation—much like BLM’s oil and gas leasing process. In 2008, BLM and the U.S. Forest Service completed a programmatic environmental review that amended 114 land use plans to determine where geothermal leasing could occur.

Data centers have none of this authorization. Congress has not addressed whether they belong on public land, BLM has not done a programmatic review mapping where they should go, and there is no structure in place to ensure data centers pay out royalties to the federal government or to the cities, states, or counties that host them.

McGinness Hills, the largest geothermal complex in Nevada, has about 138 megawatts of capacity. Source: BLM/Flickr

Wind

Wind didn’t need its own statute, since FLPMA already lists “systems for generation, transmission, and distribution of electric energy” as a right-of-way use, and turbines clearly fit that description. BLM initially approved wind projects case-by-case, and by 2002 it was managing about 25 wind rights-of-way in California and Wyoming, generating roughly 500 megawatts. As interest grew, the agency issued an interim wind policy that year, then paused to create a permitting plan before allowing the industry to scale up.

In 2005, it finished a programmatic environmental impact statement that amended 52 land use plans in nine states and set rules to protect birds, bats, and other wildlife. Projects still require site-specific review, typically starting with short-term grants to test the wind before receiving full approval.

Unlike data centers, wind had a clear legal footing under FLPMA and BLM still paused to plan for it before approving projects at scale.

Solar

Solar is the closest parallel to today’s data center scramble. By 2008, about 130 applications for solar projects on BLM land had piled up and none had been approved. BLM briefly froze new applications while it studied the issue, then reversed course after industry objected, and went back to the drawing board.

That work became the 2012 Western Solar Plan, a programmatic review conducted by the Interior department along with the Department of Energy that amended 89 BLM land use plans. It sorted public land into three categories: 17 Solar Energy Zones where BLM steered development, about 19 million acres of “variance” land where developers could still apply and receive extra scrutiny, and areas closed to utility-scale solar energy development. In 2016, BLM adopted rules for competitively leasing land inside the Solar Energy Zones. An updated plan in 2024 eliminated the variance category, replacing it with more than 31 million acres open to applications, mostly near existing transmission lines. Congress set targets along the way for solar development on public lands but never had to authorize solar, because FLPMA explicitly names electric generation as a valid use of public lands.

In this case, BLM faced a flood of solar applications, then spent years doing planning and collecting public comment to figure out how to handle them. Data center applications are creating a similar pressure on the agency, and the Trump administration’s answer has been to approve the first one through a modified solar permit, a lazy strategy that quickly failed. If data centers are determined to be a valid—and appropriate—use of public lands under FLPMA, BLM must follow a similar planning process to develop a fair and responsible structure for them.

This solar array in California is similar to the approved Crimson Solar Project, located on BLM land in California. Photo courtesy of Recurrent Energy. Source: BLM/Flickr

Are data centers even a legal use of public land?

Wind and solar energy development each arrived on public lands with a clear legal basis under FLPMA, and BLM still paused to determine where each belonged and created processes before approving projects at scale. Congress authorized geothermal development on public lands, and BLM created a leasing system for it. Data centers have no congressional approval, no clear standing under FLPMA, and no permitting process in place. The administration would have to rely on a catch-all right-of-way provision written for “necessary” facilities “in the public interest” to approve private server farms, some powered by new natural gas plants or nuclear reactors. Whether AI data centers serve the “public interest” is an open question—but poll after poll suggests that Americans think they do not.

This raises two important questions. First, are data centers a legal use of public land under federal law? And second, are they an appropriate one? If the courts rule that data centers don’t fit FLPMA’s definition of a legal use, every approval issued by BLM would be invalid, and a future administration could revoke them.

Interior should pause new data center approvals until both questions are answered, and the public should have a real say in determining the appropriateness of putting data centers on public lands. BLM should conduct a programmatic review to determine this, with a robust public input process, that looks at the water, energy, and habitat impacts of putting data centers on public lands and asks whether data centers are a valid and appropriate use of public lands. If the answer is no, BLM should throw out the data center applications it has already approved and stop reviewing new ones.

If the answer is yes, BLM would still have to revise land use plans across the country before it moves forward with approving individual data centers. Each BLM field office has a Resource Management Plan that designates where pipelines, power lines, and energy projects can go. BLM would need to amend these individual land use plans to determine where data centers can go through a transparent public process before attempting to approve any more.

If the Trump administration begins revising land use plans before engaging in a high-level review to determine if data centers are a legal and appropriate use of public land, any data center approvals that follow would still be in legal limbo.

Aerial view of the Google Data Center in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Source: Chad Davis/Wikimedia

The permitting bill could lock it all in

Much of this may not matter if the Senate permitting bill passes. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is expected to come up for a vote on the Senate floor after the November election and would bar agencies from revoking, suspending, or altering any project, action, or federal authorization or permit in effect on or after September 16, 2026, except under extremely rare circumstances proven by “clear and convincing evidence.” What counts as a project, action, authorization, or permit under the bill is extremely broad, so a data center approved on public land under the current ad hoc process BLM is using could be locked in for good, unless it’s ruled by a court to be an illegal use of public land.

The permitting bill could also make a moratorium on data centers prohibitively expensive. As it’s written, if a future administration slows an entire category of projects, developers could collect 50 to 100 percent of their expected construction costs from the Judgment Fund, a Treasury account that pays out without a vote of Congress. A pause on data center application approvals while Interior weighs whether they belong on public lands is the kind of slowdown that could trigger those payments.

Finally, the bill would limit the public’s ability to push back against data centers. Challengers would have only 150 days to sue, and a court that finds a BLM environmental review for a data center is flawed could order it to be redone, but couldn’t halt construction from moving forward. The bill would also rewrite the National Historic Preservation Act so agencies like the BLM judge what counts as harm to sacred sites and consult Tribes only after reaching their conclusions.

The stakes are incredibly high, and things are moving quickly. Trump’s Interior department needs to stop all efforts to approve data centers until it determines whether they are an appropriate and legal use of public lands, and if so, how to assess and approve them responsibly, ensuring communities both have a say in whether data centers end up in their backyards and receive financial benefits from them. If the department fails to do so, it could face a massive wave of public backlash as Americans realize they can’t rely on the federal government to protect their communities or their national public lands.

Feature image: The Utah Data Center is a 1.5 million-square-foot National Security Agency facility located at Camp Williams in Bluffdale, Utah; Source: ParkerHiggins (Electronic Frontier Foundation)/Wikimedia

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