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They dismantled the protections. Then they built the data centers.

In 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire in Cleveland, and America decided it had seen enough. The outrage that followed helped spur the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and an era of landmark laws — the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Noise Control Act — a promise, written into statute, that no community would ever again be forced to accept pollution as the price of progress.

That promise has been taken apart, piece by piece. And then the data center boom arrived at the exact moment our defenses were down.

What Was Stripped Away

1982

The year the EPA’s Office of Noise Abatement and Control was defunded. The Noise Control Act of 1972 is still law — but for over four decades, no one in the federal government has enforced it.¹

90%

Proposed cut to federal funds for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure — part of an FY 2026 budget that slashes the EPA’s total funding by 54%, from $9.1 billion to roughly $4.2 billion.²

33%

Share of the EPA workforce gone by the end of 2025, returning the agency to 1980s staffing levels — including two-thirds of its independent research staff.³

76%

The drop in civil environmental complaints filed by the Department of Justice on the EPA’s behalf in 2025, compared to just four years earlier, was only 16 lawsuits in the entire year.⁴

Big tech didn’t ask. They took.

The story of a two-year secret land deal in Perry Village, and the pattern repeating across Ohio’s 14th District.

Read the blog

How We Got Here

This didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen all at once.

First came the quiet cuts. The federal noise office — created in 1972 because Congress recognized that industrial noise is a public health issue — was zeroed out in 1981 and never restored. Responsibility was pushed down to states and towns, most of which never had the resources or expertise to take it on.

Then came the acceleration. The current administration’s FY 2026 budget proposed eliminating environmental justice enforcement entirely — while increasing funding to speed up industrial permitting. Congress rejected the deepest cuts, a reminder that the House still holds the purse strings. But much of the dismantling never waited for a vote. The EPA’s independent research office was dissolved and its scientists folded into policy shops, and roughly a third of the agency’s workforce was gone by the end of 2025. EJScreen, the public database communities used to document pollution burdens in their own neighborhoods, was taken offline — making it harder for citizens to prove in court what they can see and hear from their front porches. And the same cuts Congress rejected have been proposed all over again for the next budget year.

And Washington didn’t just look away — it lit the fuse. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, permanently restored 100% bonus depreciation, allowing companies to write off the entire cost of servers, chips, and cooling equipment in year one rather than over many years.¹⁸ For data centers, where that hardware is roughly 60% of the total cost and gets replaced every three to five years, it amounts to a standing federal discount on every buildout — and on every rebuild after it. Analysts credit the provision with helping fuel a historic wave of capital spending: hundreds of billions of dollars a year in new data center construction, subsidized through the tax code without ever naming the industry it benefits.

So when the largest industrial construction boom in a generation arrived — data centers consuming 4.4% of all U.S. electricity in 2023 and projected to reach as much as 12%⁶ — it met a federal government that had chosen, deliberately, not to look.

The results were predictable. In 2025, the operator of the electric grid serving Ohio and 12 other states held its annual auction to secure future power supplies. The price came in $9.3 billion higher than the year before — costs passed directly onto household electric bills — and data centers were responsible for 63% of the increase.⁷ In Ohio alone, data center tax breaks cost $1.6 billion in 2025 — eleven times what the state projected — and similar exemptions are draining budgets in state after state.⁸ Facilities with dozens or even hundreds of diesel backup generators went up near homes and schools, with no federal noise standard, shrinking enforcement, and disclosure rules weak enough that entire land deals were negotiated under NDAs before residents knew anything was planned.⁹

Communities noticed. More than 300 bills addressing data centers were filed in 30 states in early 2026.¹⁰ Towns passed moratoriums. Villages voted no — and some were taken to court for it.

The River That Started It All Is Exposed Again

Nowhere is the cost of this dismantling more direct than in the water of Northeast Ohio.

The proposed 90% cut to State Revolving Funds threatens the low-cost federal loans that cities like Cleveland use to upgrade aging wastewater treatment plants and separate storm sewers — the very projects designed to keep sewage out of the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie during heavy rains.¹⁴ The loss of two-thirds of the EPA’s research staff means fewer water samples taken from Lake Erie and its tributaries, creating blind spots in the data used to forecast toxic algal blooms and trace new contamination.³ And with federal enforcement at historic lows, industrial and agricultural dischargers in the watersheds feeding the lake face far less scrutiny — weakening the leverage communities have long relied on to compel compliance with the Clean Water Act.⁴

To be fair to the full picture: Ohio farmers have voluntarily reduced phosphorus application, contributing to a roughly 10% drop in dissolved reactive phosphorus — real progress toward the 40% reduction goal.¹⁵ But that progress depends on federal science support that is now being cut out from under it. And there is one bright spot that proves the House matters: Congress, on a bipartisan basis, rejected the administration’s attempt to gut the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, preserving roughly $369 million in the final FY 2026 budget.¹⁶ Even so, grants don’t administer themselves — with regional EPA staff cut, there are fewer people left to make sure that money actually delivers cleaner water.

Fifty years of public effort cleaned the river that caught fire in 1969. That recovery is now being asked to survive without the watchdog that made it possible — at the same moment an industry that draws millions of gallons of water a day is expanding across the region.

Maria’s Position

Maria opposes large-scale data center development. She wants to stop its expansion into communities that don’t want it, end the public subsidies fueling it, and rebuild the federal protections that were torn down before it arrived.

She holds that position because of what these facilities actually deliver at this scale: one-time construction work, a permanently small workforce, and decades of costs pushed onto Ohio residents. The constant mechanical hum next to what used to be a quiet neighborhood. The wells running low because a facility uses millions of gallons of water a day for cooling.¹¹ The electric bill that’s $40 a month higher than it was a few years ago.

And here is what makes her position different: every one of those harms is something federal law once had — or was building. The harm isn’t a gap in the rules. The rules were removed.
So her agenda has two halves that can’t be separated. Stop: no federal money, no tax windfalls, and no fast-tracked approvals for an industry expanding over the objections of the people who have to live beside it. Rebuild: restore the enforcement, the science, and the disclosure requirements that once made “no community has to accept pollution as the price of progress” a promise rather than a memory.

Maria is not seeking a fair deal from this industry. She is looking to end its free ride — and to make sure that when a community says no, the federal government stands behind the community, not the developer.

​What Maria Will Fight for in Congress

1. Rebuild the EPA — Starting With the Noise Office That’s Been Dark Since 1981

Maria will fight to restore the EPA’s budget, workforce, independent research capacity, and enforcement funding — and to reopen and fund the Office of Noise Abatement and Control so the Noise Control Act of 1972 is finally enforced again. She will also fight to restore public access to EJScreen and similar tools, because communities cannot fight what they cannot document. She’ll be honest about the fine print: new noise and emissions standards generally won’t apply retroactively to existing facilities, which are grandfathered in. That’s why her approach pairs restored standards with the tools that do reach existing sites — expansion triggers requiring any facility that significantly grows its footprint or power draw to bring its whole operation into compliance, and federal nuisance authority for cases where local remedies have failed, phased in on a schedule rather than demanded overnight.

2. Make Big Tech Show Its Work

Maria will champion the Data Center Community Impact Act — introduced in 2026 as H.R. 7858 — and co-sponsor its reintroduction in the next Congress. The bill directs the Department of Energy and EPA to study and publish what data centers do to nearby communities — water consumption, generator emissions, property values, and whether promised benefits ever arrive.¹² She’ll fight for federal disclosure requirements on energy and water usage, so no community learns what’s being built next door after the papers are signed.

3. Make Data Centers Pay Their Own Power Bills

Maria will fight to pass ratepayer protections like those in the SHIELD Act and the Protecting Families from AI Data Center Energy Costs Act — introduced in the current Congress as H.R. 7066 and H.R. 6529 — to stop utilities from spreading data-center-driven grid costs across residential ratepayers.¹³ If a facility needs new transmission lines, substations, and generation, the company that profits from it pays for it — in law, not in a voluntary pledge.

4. Not One Federal Dollar Without Community Consent

Congress controls federal energy incentives, grants, and interconnection policy. Maria will fight to condition all of them on public disclosure of deal terms before they’re final, minimum setbacks from homes and schools, and demonstrated community consent. No consent, no federal support.

5. Defend Communities’ Right to Say No

The same budget that cut enforcement increased funding to accelerate industrial permitting. Maria will oppose federal efforts to fast-track data center approvals or preempt local zoning, and she’ll fight for legal protections so that when a town votes no, it isn’t dragged through years of litigation by a developer with far greater resources.

6. Protect Lake Erie and the Water We Drink

Maria will fight to restore the State Revolving Funds, facing a 90% cut, so Northeast Ohio cities can keep upgrading the wastewater and stormwater systems that protect the Cuyahoga River and Lake Erie.¹⁴ She will defend and build on the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative — which Congress protected on a bipartisan basis over the administration’s objections¹⁶ — and fight to restore the EPA monitoring and research capacity that forecasts algal blooms, tracks contamination, and supports the work Ohio farmers are already doing to cut phosphorus runoff. And she’ll connect it to the fight at hand: an industry that consumes millions of gallons of water a day should never be permitted to expand while the systems protecting that water are being defunded.

7. Claw Back What Was Taken on Broken Promises

Companies that accepted public incentives on the promise of jobs and delivered only a handful of temporary construction jobs instead should be required to repay the money. Maria will fight for clawback provisions in every federal energy and technology incentive program.

Why Is This So Hard?

Maria will tell you the truth on three fronts.

First, data centers arrive wrapped in the language of progress — jobs, investment, national security — and some local officials and construction unions point to real short-term benefits. There is also a genuine, ongoing debate among regulators about exactly how much of the recent rise in electric bills is attributable to data centers versus other factors. Maria doesn’t need to overstate the case. What isn’t in dispute is enough: tax break projections wrong by over 1,000%, deals negotiated under NDAs, and communities sued for voting no.

Second, Congress can’t zone land. Where these facilities get built is decided by states, counties, and towns, and Maria will back the state and local fighters waging that battle rather than pretend Washington can wage it for them. What Congress controls is the money, the disclosure rules, the ratepayer protections, and the federal agencies — and every one of those levers is currently being pulled in the industry’s favor.

Third, rebuilding takes longer than tearing down. An agency that lost a third of its workforce doesn’t recover in a budget cycle. But there’s proof these fights can be won: when the administration tried to gut the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, Congress said no — on a bipartisan basis — and the funding survived.¹⁶ And Ohio, of all places, knows this fight can be won at a larger scale, because Ohio started it. The fire on the Cuyahoga helped force the federal government to protect communities it had ignored for decades. That protection was built once by ordinary people who refused to accept the harm around them. It can be built again.

A Note from Maria

“I’ve been to protests, informational, and city council meetings. I’ve listened to the people living with the threat of data centers in their communities. They don’t want the destruction of the land, the air and noise pollution, the massive water usage, and the strain on the energy grid. Fifty years ago, this country decided people were entitled to environmental protections, and it built the agencies to back it up. What changed isn’t the people. What changed was that those protections were defunded, dissolved, and handed over to the industries they were meant to regulate. I want to stop the government give-a-ways to these big tech data centers and rebuild the protections for the people.”

Sources
  1. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “EPA History: Noise and the Noise Control Act,” https://www.epa.gov/history/epa-history-noise-and-noise-control-act; Administrative Conference of the United States, “Implementation of the Noise Control Act,” https://www.acus.gov/document/implementation-noise-control-act
  2. Holland & Knight, “EPA Proposes Significant Budget Reduction for Fiscal Year 2026,” https://www.hklaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/06/epa-proposes-significant-budget-reduction-for-fiscal-year-2026; Congressional Research Service, Report R48575, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48575
  3. Holland & Knight (see no. 2); Environmental Protection Network, “What Trump’s Budget Proposal Says About His Environmental Values,” https://www.environmentalprotectionnetwork.org/what-trumps-budget-proposal-says-about-his-environmental-values/
  4. Environmental Integrity Project, “Enforcement,” https://environmentalintegrity.org/enforcement/; Inside Climate News, “Trump EPA Polluter Enforcement Collapses,” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05022026/trump-epa-polluter-enforcement-collapses/
  5. Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, “EPA Removes EJScreen from Its Website,” https://envirodatagov.org/epa-removes-ejscreen-from-its-website/; Harvard Environmental & Energy Law Program, Regulatory Tracker, https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/tracker/epa-added-environmental-health-indicators-to-ejscreen/
  6. Congressional Research Service, Report R48646, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646
  7. Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, “Projected Data Center Growth Spurs PJM Capacity Prices by a Factor of 10,” https://ieefa.org/resources/projected-data-center-growth-spurs-pjm-capacity-prices-factor-10
  8. Zuckerman, Jake. “Ohio Data Center Tax Break Cost $1 Billion More Than Expected in 2025,” Signal Ohio, May 21, 2026, https://signalohio.org/ohio-data-center-tax-break-cost-1-4-billion-more-than-expected-in-2025/
  9. Virginia Mercury, “Virginia Regulators Weigh Expanded Use of Data Centers’ Polluting Generators,” Dec. 16, 2025, https://virginiamercury.com/2025/12/16/virginia-regulators-weigh-expanded-use-of-data-centers-polluting-generators/; Virginia DEQ, “Issued Air Permits for Data Centers,” https://www.deq.virginia.gov/news-info/shortcuts/permits/air/issued-air-permits-for-data-centers
  10. Encino Environmental, “Data Center Legislative Trends,” https://encinoenviron.com/data-center-legislative-trends/
  11. Ohio Capital Journal, “Ohio Data Center Ban Advocates Are Trying to Get 413,000 Signatures by July 1,” April 30, 2026, https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/04/30/ohio-data-center-ban-proposal-advocates-are-trying-to-get-413000-signatures-by-july-1/; Environmental and Energy Study Institute, “Data Centers and Water Consumption,” https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-consumption 
  12. H.R. 7858, 119th Congress, https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7858
  13. H.R. 7066 (SHIELD Act), 119th Congress, https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7066; H.R. 6529, 119th Congress, https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6529
  14. Congressional Research Service, Report R48575 (see no. 2); Great Lakes Now, “EPA 2026 Budget Cuts Target Clean Water Programs” (June 11, 2025), https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2025/06/11/epa-2026-budget-cuts-target-clean-water-programs/
  15. Ohio Governor’s Office, “H2Ohio Accomplishments for Fiscal Year 2024,” https://dam.assets.ohio.gov/image/upload/h2.ohio.gov/H2Ohio-FY24-Report-Final.pdf
  16. Northeast-Midwest Institute, “Tracking of Federal Funds,” https://www.nemw.org/policy-outreach/tracking-of-federal-funds/
  17. U.S. EPA Watershed Academy, “Introduction to the Clean Water Act,” https://cfpub.epa.gov/watertrain/moduleFrame.cfm?parent_object_id=2571; National Park Service, “The 1969 Cuyahoga River Fire,” https://www.nps.gov/articles/story-of-the-fire.htm
  18. Internal Revenue Service, Notice 2026-11, “Interim Guidance on Additional First Year Depreciation Deduction under § 168(k),” https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/n-26-11.pdf; Epoch AI, “Servers Account for 60% of the Total Cost of Ownership of a One-Gigawatt AI Data Center” (2026), https://epoch.ai/data-insights/ai-datacenter-cost-breakdown