{"id":715358,"date":"2026-06-20T10:53:24","date_gmt":"2026-06-20T10:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/715358\/"},"modified":"2026-06-20T10:53:24","modified_gmt":"2026-06-20T10:53:24","slug":"the-trump-doj-is-trying-to-do-elon-musk-a-big-favor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/715358\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trump DOJ Is Trying to Do Elon Musk a Big Favor"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article is part of\u00a0TPM Cafe,<\/a>\u00a0TPM\u2019s home for opinion and news analysis.\u00a0\u00a0It was originally published at\u00a0Balls and Strikes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Since August of last year, Elon Musk\u2019s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has been building and operating a fleet of gas-fired combustion turbines in Memphis-area Black neighborhoods, in order to power a massive data center called Colossus. Each turbine is the size of a single-family home.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As of five weeks ago, xAI has installed at least\u00a057 of these turbines<\/a>\u00a0at the Colossus Gas Plant in Southaven, Mississippi, about 15 minutes south of Memphis. Combined, they have the potential to\u00a0spew<\/a>\u00a0over 5,300 tons of nitrogen oxides and 430 tons of particulate matter into the atmosphere every year, among other hazardous air pollutants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Even\u00a0short-term exposure<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0nitrogen oxides<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0particulate matter<\/a>\u00a0can cause hospitalization and premature death. And some communities are especially vulnerable:\u00a0Scientific<\/a>\u00a0evidence<\/a>\u00a0shows<\/a>\u00a0that children, older adults, and people of color\u2014especially Black people\u2014face heightened health risks. Nearly 160,000 people live within a six-mile radius of the Colossus Gas Plant. Around 22 percent of them are children or older adults, and 77 percent are people of color. U.S. Census Bureau data further shows that many neighborhoods near the plant have a higher percentage of people of color and children than 95 percent of other census tracts.<\/p>\n

In short, xAI is releasing a staggering amount of pollutants into the environment, precisely where it can do the most harm.<\/p>\n

\"\"Gas turbines at the xAI data center in Memphis, April 2025. (Photo by Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

There are (in theory)\u00a0laws about this sort of thing. Roughly 60 years ago, Congress\u00a0passed<\/a>\u00a0the Clean Air Act in order to \u201cprotect and enhance the quality of the Nation\u2019s air resources,\u201d and in doing so, \u201cpromote the public health and welfare and productive capacity\u201d of the nation\u2019s population. The Clean Air Act requires the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate emissions of hazardous pollutants and\u00a0prohibits<\/a>\u00a0the construction of facilities that would produce significant pollution, unless polluters get a\u00a0permit<\/a>\u00a0establishing several conditions\u2014like enforceable emission limitations and pollution monitoring\u2014to ensure compliance with the law. xAI did not receive the required permits; they never even applied for one.<\/p>\n

As a general rule, the enforcement of federal law is left up to the federal government. But the Clean Air Act authorizes\u00a0private enforcement<\/a>, empowering any person to sue someone who violates an emission limitation or constructs a major emitting facility without a permit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, two months ago, the NAACP\u00a0sued<\/a>\u00a0xAI and its subsidiaries, aiming to shut down xAI\u2019s Colossus Gas Plant \u201cunless and until they obtain the required permits.\u201d In May, the organization also\u00a0asked<\/a>\u00a0a federal district court for an order prohibiting operation of the plant while the case is pending. The NAACP\u2019s filings highlight that Musk has\u00a0publicly griped<\/a>\u00a0about how environmental regulations require polluters to get \u201cpermission in advance\u201d rather than just \u201cpaying a penalty\u201d later, and\u00a0urge<\/a>\u00a0the court to stop him from treating Black people like \u201cjust one more natural resource the companies can buy and exploit in pursuit of their business goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, the Trump administration is trying to come to Musk\u2019s aid. The Clean Air Act\u2019s provision allowing citizen enforcement also allows the EPA administrator to \u201cintervene as a matter of right at any time in the proceeding.\u201d And on Monday, Trump\u2019s Department of Justice filed a\u00a0motion<\/a>\u00a0to intervene in the NAACP\u2019s lawsuit as the\u00a0plaintiff\u2014and to dismiss the NAACP\u2019s suit with prejudice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the\u00a0memo<\/a>\u00a0accompanying its motion, the DOJ characterizes the NAACP\u2019s lawsuit as a national security threat\u2014Colossus powers Grok, an AI model that the Department of Defense uses in\u00a0military operations<\/a>\u2014and contends that enforcing the Clean Air Act against xAI is not \u201cconsistent with federal policy and the public interest.\u201d This ignores the fact that the Clean Air Act\u00a0is\u00a0a federal policy, enacted by Congress based on its assessment of the public interest. The DOJ further argues that the NAACP may not enforce the Clean Air Act \u201cover the United States\u2019 objection,\u201d because the government\u2019s \u201cexpress and unconditional right to intervene\u201d in a citizen suit \u201cnecessarily includes the right to unilaterally dismiss the case in its entirety.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is not how intervention works. Although people suffering the consequences of corporate lawbreaking have a strong personal incentive to push back in court, they don\u2019t always have the resources necessary to do so effectively. So, even when the federal government is not a party to a lawsuit, Congress sometimes allows it to intervene, and to use the government\u2019s resources to make sure federal law is vigorously enforced. Trump\u2019s DOJ is claiming it has the right to intervene to make sure that federal law is not enforced at all.<\/p>\n

\"\"(Photo by Anna Moneymaker\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

To support this novel proposition, the DOJ\u2019s memo points to two Supreme Court cases. First, in 2023, the Court\u00a0held<\/a>\u00a0in\u00a0United States ex rel. Polansky v. Executive Health Resources\u00a0that the government can intervene in and dismiss someone else\u2019s lawsuit filed under the False Claims Act.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The problem for the government is the False Claims Act is an entirely different law, and includes an\u00a0explicit provision<\/a>\u00a0authorizing the government to dismiss a lawsuit \u201cnotwithstanding the objections of the person initiating the action.\u201d The Clean Air Act has no such provision. In fact, the same section of the Clean Air Act authorizing the government to intervene in citizen suits says that \u201cnothing in this section shall restrict\u201d people\u2019s right to enforce the law.<\/p>\n

The administration next turns to\u00a0Gwaltney v. Chesapeake Bay Foundation, a 1987 case which\u00a0held<\/a>\u00a0that the Clean Water Act does not authorize citizen suits based on \u201cwholly past violations\u201d of federal law. To illustrate why this might be improper, the Court presented a hypothetical in which the EPA agreed not to impose a financial penalty on the condition that a violator take some corrective action, and then, years later, a private citizen sued to impose the penalty the EPA chose to forgo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This case, too, is inapposite.\u00a0Gwaltney\u00a0is a case about whether citizens can sue over past violations of the Clean Water Act. The NAACP is suing over a current, ongoing violation of the Clean Air Act. Furthermore, the Trump administration is extrapolating from a 40-year-old hypothetical example\u2014one which expressly contemplates government enforcement, at that\u2014and arguing that it can forgo\u00a0any\u00a0penalty to force would-be citizen-enforcers of the Clean Air Act to back off.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Congress created the EPA and the Clean Air Act to protect people from big companies that might steamroll them and destroy the environment. And Congress provided for citizen enforcement so that people could protect themselves. In attempting to dismiss the NAACP\u2019s lawsuit against xAI, the Trump administration is simultaneously retreating from its legal duty to enforce Black people\u2019s right to a livable environment, and declaring that Black people have no rights under the Clean Air Act that xAI is bound to respect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This article is part of\u00a0TPM Cafe,\u00a0TPM\u2019s home for opinion and news analysis.\u00a0\u00a0It was originally published at\u00a0Balls and Strikes.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":715359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[182,28,26627,36270,24836,12,11,192,16407,16675,9948,20200,15754],"class_list":["post-715358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-business","tag-cafe","tag-clean-air-act","tag-doj","tag-donald-trump","tag-elon-musk","tag-environment","tag-epa","tag-justice-department","tag-naacp","tag-pollution","tag-racism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=715358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/715358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/715359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=715358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=715358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=715358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}