But the bill has also received vehement blowback from a growing coalition of anti-data center critics, who argue that it would accelerate the buildout of an industry that Americans resoundingly voted against in the midterm elections. BAAJA does address affordability concerns by forcing data centers to pay the full cost of the upgrades they trigger, and contains transmission reforms designed to modernize the grid. But it also strips back environmental protections and could lead to more data centers powered by gas and built on public lands.
The bill represents the first major test for Democrats post-election, as they contend with how to deliver on affordability and many other issues in their sprawling coalition at the same time.
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But environmentalists worry that the first and foremost beneficiary of the bill won’t be clean energy sources but rather gas-powered data centers, because there is already a massive pipeline of proposed projects waiting for various approvals. Rosenbluth points to several gas-powered data centers that are currently plodding through the permitting process, including the Ports-Pike Technology Campus in Ohio and the STAK Energy Campus in Alaska. If BAAJA were to pass, she says, key environmental permits they are trying to obtain could be fast-tracked, potentially allowing them to come online much more quickly.
Public and Tribal lands
Another major concern from critics is that the bill will lead to many more data centers getting built on federally-owned land. The Trump administration has embraced this idea, and signed an executive order in July 2025 directing the Interior and Energy departments to make federal sites available for data centers and to streamline their environmental reviews. “We’re going to ‘mine, baby, mine’ so we can ‘build, baby, build’ because we’ve got to build AI data centers,” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in 2025.
Additionally, some Tribal organizations and leaders have spoken out forcefully against the bill, with a coalition of Tribal leaders writing on Saturday that the bill would “gut the ability of Tribal Nations and the American public to identify and protect historic and cultural places threatened by federally connected projects—including data centers.”
Potential benefits
“The day of data center freeloading ends when this bill passes,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors, said last week. He added on Monday that passing the bill would set the stage for Democrats to work on substantial clean energy policies next year when they control both chambers.
“It's quite possible that if there are more gas pipelines being built, for example, that is going to increase data center demand,” she says. “We are supportive of transmission reform because we want to build a clean energy grid that benefits everybody. But these other provisions, we think, are going to fast-track the worst version of this story.”
The bill’s advocates argue that its passage would serve as a rare bipartisan win and a victory for affordability. But critics, especially those on the left, are calling for Democrats to wait until the next Congress. “You just heard Americans demand much more of a say in a way that AI is shaping their lives,” says Michele Jawando, the CEO of Omidyar Network. “Whenever you try to ram something through in a lame duck Congress before you have a hundred new House members, that’s never a good look for either the industry or other actors.”
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