InvestigateWest and the Invisible Institute are suing Idaho State Police and the Idaho Department of Correction, alleging the agencies deliberately concealed police employment records in violation of the state’s public records law. 

The lawsuit, filed June 16 in Ada County District Court, accuses the agencies of withholding information about officers’ employment histories that previously had been disclosed to the public, including to reporters with the two news organizations. InvestigateWest used officer employment records in its October 2025 reporting that exposed alleged sexual misconduct by dozens of Idaho prison guards, many of whom were allowed to resign without facing other consequences. 

Following the reporting, both the prison system and state police’s certification division denied additional requests for updated officer employment records, saying they’d no longer release information about whether an officer retired, resigned or was fired. Idaho Gov. Brad Little, who had called for a review of the prison system’s public records procedures in response to InvestigateWest’s reporting, supported the change, with his office citing a new interpretation of an unchanged state law. 

The lawsuit, filed by Idaho attorney Deborah Ferguson on behalf of the news organizations, argues the agencies “frivolously and deliberately” chose to violate the Idaho Public Records Act in making the decision, contending that an officer’s separation information is subject to disclosure under state law. It asks the court to order the release of the records and to require the state to pay attorney fees.

“Our reporting exposed serious harm to incarcerated women — and the state’s answer was to dismantle the very records that allowed us to do that work,” said Jacob Fries, InvestigateWest’s executive director. “Suing the government is time consuming and costly, but we felt compelled to take this step because the public has a right to know who is policing their communities.”

News outlets and researchers have used officer employment data to research and track “wandering cops” — officers who commit misconduct at one agency and are able to obtain employment with another that may be unaware of the indiscretion. Before this year, Idaho’s police certification agency — a division of state police called Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) — provided that data to those who asked for it in public records requests. The Invisible Institute, a nonprofit public accountability journalism organization based in Chicago, uses the data for its National Police Index, a searchable database of certified police and correctional officers by state and where they’ve worked. 

“So-called ‘wandering officers’ have presented a significant danger to residents of every state and an impediment to lasting police accountability,” said Chaclyn Hunt, legal director of Invisible Institute. 

Last year, InvestigateWest also requested a list of Idaho correctional officers’ employment histories from the agency. Reporters then combined the information with Idaho Department of Correction data — obtained in separate requests — that showed officers who left the department and their terms of departure. Doing so helped InvestigateWest identify 37 prison workers who were accused of sexually abusing incarcerated women, at least 18 of whom resigned after the alleged misconduct or after it was reported. In October, InvestigateWest published a series of reports outlining those findings.

The award-winning series prompted Idaho lawmakers to remove a loophole in its prison sex abuse law that made it more difficult for prosecutors to bring charges against sexually abusive prison staff. Lawmakers also ordered an independent investigation of how women’s prisons in Idaho handle staff sexual abuse allegations. That investigation is ongoing. 

But when reporters from both news organizations sought updated officer employment data from Idaho POST, the agency in January denied the requests. A records clerk told Invisible Institute that state police leadership decided to “dismantle” their ability to search the employment database, and she told InvestigateWest that leadership “made the decision to disable the function.” 

The same day, POST denied an InvestigateWest request seeking the dates and reasons for separation of two former Department of Correction officers who had been accused of sexual misconduct at women’s prisons. The agency said the information was covered under a “personnel records” exemption to the public records law. The Department of Correction also redacted the reason that those two officers had separated from the agency from other records, citing the same exemption. 

The news organizations called the decision to disable access to records in order to avoid producing them “indefensible.” 

“This response is repugnant and conflicts with the very purpose of the [Public Records Act], and its mandate that government be transparent to the citizens it was created to serve,” the lawsuit states. 

InvestigateWest is also asking the court to remove unwarranted redactions from email communications and sexual misconduct incident reports, including the names of employees accused of misconduct, where the incidents occurred and summaries of the allegations.

On a recent Saturday afternoon in May, a head-on collision on a main highway in southwest Idaho required two ambulances and all of the staff that Payette County Paramedics had available.

Then another call came in. A woman in another part of the county was having a seizure. 

Seizures can be stopped with medications, and intervening quickly can prevent life-threatening conditions or death. But David Morris, an emergency medical technician who responded to the three-car crash, said they were busy tending to four patients, so they called in an outside EMS service for help.

That day was busy, but not uncommon for Payette County Paramedics, a small ambulance district that serves a county of nearly 26,000 people. Its chief, Rick Funk, said his agency is struggling to afford enough staff and increasingly calling for help with emergencies. Sometimes that means paramedics can’t make it to people in crisis for half an hour or longer.

The agency and other ambulance services had asked Idaho lawmakers to help two years earlier, by passing a bill to fund emergency medical services. Funk testified that without state funding, soon people would be calling 911 and no paramedics would be able to respond. 

But lawmakers didn’t pass the bill — and now Funk has had to cut an ambulance from his fleet, leaving Payette County with just one staffed vehicle.

“We’ve always just kind of made do and figured out ways to keep ambulances up and keep staffing up and going, and unfortunately, we’re at a point right now where everything is increasing and the revenue is not keeping up,” said Funk, who took over as chief in Payette County in 2020.

For decades, emergency services agencies in Idaho have relied on a patchwork of resources, including volunteer EMS workers, local property taxes and reimbursement rates from insurance companies. As Idaho’s population has grown — it has ranked among the fastest-growing states in the country for the past five years — EMS providers across the state say they’re seeing a culmination of long-running problems: the number of people who want to volunteer for rural EMS agencies has declined, the cost of equipment and wages for staff is increasing, and agencies have little consistent funding to meet the rising needs. As of October 2025, just 28% of Idaho’s 44 counties had a full-time EMS position. 

Payette County Paramedics, along with at least two other ambulance districts in Idaho, asked voters in May to approve property tax increases, known as levy overrides, in order to help with budget constraints. Only one of them passed, while the ballot measure in Payette County failed. 

Funk and other providers have pushed Idaho lawmakers for years to make emergency medical services an essential service alongside police and fire departments, which would also require the state to fund it. An independent state auditor also recommended the same in its 2010 report, which found most counties did not have the funding to maintain adequate response times. Then in 2021, the auditor surveyed EMS providers and found the same result, that the service was underfunded and at risk of longer response times if the state didn’t provide funding. But their requests have failed to garner support from a majority of lawmakers.

Now some state officials hope the federal government can fill in the gap, but EMS agency chiefs say federal grants aren’t a long-term solution.  

President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act promises to pour $500 million in federal funding into rural healthcare in Idaho over five years. Idaho Bureau of Emergency Services Bureau Chief Wayne Denny said there is “unease” in the Legislature about how much it would cost the state to designate EMS an essential service, but believes the millions of dollars the state will receive from the bill is part of the solution.  

“I have really turned our focus to the Rural Healthcare Transformation Grant,” said Denny, referring to the federal grant.  

Funk said Payette County Paramedics already has the equipment, like ambulances, that grants typically pay for. What the agency really needs is long-term funding to pay its workers.

“The grant does look like it would help to get funding for ambulances and maybe some workforce development, but what we really need is help with operations,” Funk said. “If we don’t get something to maintain staffing levels, the system is going to fail. We are already seeing that.” 

A system reliant on volunteers 

On a recent Tuesday morning, after checking the supplies in the ambulance, Morris asked his partner, paramedic Christy McMillan, what she wanted for breakfast. 

“Biscuits and gravy?” she asked. He got started on breakfast in the team’s modest kitchen, inside a portable trailer that’s equipped with two bedrooms. But then a call came across the radio. He stopped, turned off all the burners and rushed to the ambulance with McMillan to drive to a nearby assisted care facility. There, they found an elderly man with lower back pain who needed to be taken to the hospital. 

It’s one of the more common types of calls the EMS agency receives: transporting someone from an assisted care facility to the hospital.

“We’re like a spare tire,” Morris said. “You don’t think about us until you absolutely need us.” 

Nationwide, state funding for EMS varies widely. According to a 2024 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just three states spend more than $10 per person on funding for statewide EMS offices. The study found that funding problems hit rural EMS agencies harder than their urban counterparts: Rural agencies relied more on volunteers and part-time staff, their response times were longer and their paramedics were certified to provide lower levels of care. 

At least 21 states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws deeming emergency medical services an essential service. Those laws establish requirements for data reporting and response times, while some also provide funding, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.  

In Idaho, EMS agencies rely on billing insurance companies or Medicaid and property taxes for funding. But that’s not enough: Reimbursement rates are much lower than the cost of services, and the property tax revenue they can get is capped by local laws to limit tax increases, making it an unreliable solution. 

Rural areas also have smaller tax bases, forcing many of those providers to still rely on volunteers. In the 2021 study, the Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations found that four out of 10 EMS workers in the state were volunteers, and in rural areas that jumps to seven in 10. 

While relying on volunteers may have worked in the 1960s when many EMS agencies first popped up in Idaho, today fewer people are willing to volunteer. EMS personnel are now required to perform intensive medical procedures instead of simply transporting people to the hospital, which requires medical certifications that many volunteers don’t have. Volunteers can often provide only immediate care on scene to stabilize patients, like CPR. But intermediate and advanced life support — like administering IVs, medication, chest compressions and airway management to help someone experiencing cardiac arrest or respiratory failure — require a higher level of training and care. 

More than 30 years ago, when Michael Stowell, chief of the Canyon County Paramedics, started his career as a volunteer EMT, he spent up to three hours each day transporting patients. But that is nothing compared to the volume of calls that EMS agencies, even rural ones, get today. 

In Canyon County, he said call volume has gone “through the roof,” increasing by nearly a fifth since 2020. The populations of Ada and Canyon counties, Idaho’s most populous, have grown by 150,000 people since then “but our funding didn’t,” said Stowell. According to the agency’s website, about 30 percent of its budget comes from property taxes, while the remainder of its budget is funded by fees and reimbursements. 

The Office of Performance Evaluations surveyed EMS officials in 2021, and heard back from about half of Idaho’s agencies. Nearly two-thirds of the agency directors reported that a lack of staff delayed responses to calls by more than 15 minutes or kept them from responding entirely. More recent data provided by the Idaho EMS Bureau to InvestigateWest, based on numbers self-reported by local agencies, also shows a number of Idaho counties still lag in their average response times. 

National standards suggest that, in most instances, an ambulance should be on scene within eight minutes, but 61% of Idaho counties had average response times longer than that in 2025. The national average for response times in rural areas nearly doubles to 14 minutes, according to a 2017 study by researchers and  the U.S Department of Health and Human Services. Camas, Custer and Benewah counties had the longest average response times in 2025, with Camas taking 21 minutes to respond and Custer and Benewah an average of 17 minutes. All three are some of Idaho’s lowest populated counties. 

Even counties that, on average, met those national benchmarks reported instances in which their response was delayed by as long as four hours. 

Some of Idaho’s fastest growing counties, like Ada, Canyon and Kootenai, saw a surge in their longest reported response times between 2023 and 2025, according to the EMS Bureau data. Canyon County’s longest response time in 2023 was 55 minutes. Both of the following two years included calls that the county reported had response times stretching longer than four hours. 

Funk, in Payette, cautioned that the reports offer a limited snapshot of an agency’s performance and don’t take into account when EMS agencies have to call in support from outside agencies, which he said happens every shift. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, other agencies took nearly 11 percent of total calls, according to Payette County Paramedics’ website. 

Responding to what officials deem “time sensitive emergencies,” which include heart attacks, strokes and seizures, in under an hour are crucial. For patients who suffer heart attacks, paramedics have to get them to the hospital for care within an hour to save their lives, Funk said. And Stowell added that even if a person’s life isn’t at risk, getting them to the hospital quickly can improve their health outcomes. 

Since 2020, Stowell said Canyon County has shut down ambulances every day because they didn’t have enough people to staff them — each ambulance has to have at least two people on board. The station had nine ambulances, but they could regularly staff just six. 

Stowell said his agency is consistently losing staff to fire departments, which are able to pay more and offer better benefits because of state funding that EMS does not receive. Nationwide, the average salary for an EMS employee was $34,300 in 2024, according to the CDC. 

Payette County pays its EMTs, who can provide basic levels of care, $14 an hour, while paramedics start at $20. That’s at least $5 to $6 per hour behind most other EMS agencies in the state, Funk said. 

Katlyn Wake, who has worked as an EMS worker in Idaho for the past eight years, has seen staffing shortages get worse. She works part-time for agencies in Elmore and Payette counties, which have struggled to fill open roles. 

“Eight years ago we were getting paid the exact same that we are now,” Wake said. “But the cost of everything has gone up, so we frequently lose people to better jobs, different careers and different counties who can pay more.” 

Temporary funding solutions 

Idaho lawmakers, wary of spending any more money on government services, have thus far resisted measures to increase funding for EMS. 

In 2024, the last time the Idaho Legislature heard a proposal to do so, a swath of Republicans pushed back on the added costs to the state — $2.2 million for EMS agencies for the first year of funding — and argued it would result in a loss of local control over emergency medical services. While the bill passed the Senate, it never got a hearing in the House. 

Former Sen. Chris Trakel, R-Caldwell, said during the Senate debate that he had “a hard time increasing the size of government” if taxpayers are still paying out of their own pockets for ambulance services.  

“If I still utilize an ambulance, this can still cost me anywhere from $500 depending on the ambulance ride,” Trakel said.

Instead, the following year lawmakers passed a measure to move the Idaho EMS Bureau from the Department of Health and Welfare to the Idaho Military Division, which they said would help to better coordinate the state’s emergency management system.

In an emailed statement to InvestigateWest, Idaho Gov. Brad Little said he supported the transfer and said it marked “the first step in a multi-year process to enhance Idaho’s emergency response.” The Governor’s Office did not answer questions about what that response would look like and what funding mechanisms he would support.

Denny, the state EMS bureau chief, hopes the federal Rural Health Transformation Grant will help EMS agencies hire more staff, “at least for the short term.” 

According to budget estimates, the state plans to spend around $60 million of the grant on emergency medical services. The state’s grant application said it aims to have one full-time EMS position in every Idaho county by 2030. 

The Department of Health and Welfare said it will prioritize rural agencies with volunteer-only and part-time staff for funding. Then, “possibly if there is funding still available,” the state will consider helping agencies with full-time staff add community health workers who help patients make follow-up appointments after their emergency to try to reduce repeat 911 calls, according to AJ McWhorter, a spokesperson for the department. 

The state plans to open applications for funding within the next two months, McWhorter said. 

The Idaho Legislature would need to change state law in order to fund emergency medical services. But with state lawmakers unlikely to do that soon, county EMS agencies are relying on their one option to increase funding: property taxes.

Canyon County Paramedics was able to bump up salaries over the past year thanks to a voter-approved levy override — a temporary property tax increase — that passed in 2025.

Although the measure is just a two-year funding source, Stowell said it was life-changing for Canyon County Paramedics. It allowed the agency to increase staff pay and build their first new station in 23 years. 

“That was a turning point, literally, for us in the history of the ambulance district,” he said.

But support for a tax increase is difficult to get in Idaho. 

It was the agency’s third attempt to get a levy passed. Canyon County tried twice to get a permanent levy override, which requires a two-thirds majority to pass, but failed to get enough support. 

In May, Blaine County managed to get a majority of votes for a temporary two-year property tax increase. But ambulance districts in Washington and Payette Counties didn’t get the two-thirds support needed for a permanent levy override. The ballot measure in Payette did not even receive a majority of support, with just 42% of voters supporting it. 

The levy override would have been a lifeline for Payette County Paramedics, but Funk said he knew it would be a big ask for taxpayers in the rural county. 

“Unfortunately, right now, which I think is incredibly unfair, this is all put back on the taxpayers of Payette County,” he said. “The problem with that is I have Interstate 84 out here, and we see a lot of crashes of residents in other counties and even other states. It isn’t right that we have to put this back on the county residents.”

That is why he thinks state legislators should help foot the bill. 

“I think we could come up with something,” he said, “if we had some legislators that were willing to work with us.”

Most Americans loathe data centers. Recent polling found that Democrats and Republicans alike would oppose having one in their neighborhood, and hundreds of communities across the country have fought against them, citing fears about noise, water contamination, and energy bills. After years spent courting tech companies, many politicians are now vowing to protect their constituents from their development. In just the past month, policymakers in New York, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Utah have proposed limits on the facilities. For the AI startups and others racing to secure more computing power, the question seems to be not which projects will face opposition, but which won’t.

A project unveiled this week in California’s Central Valley suggests a potential answer. California Resources Corporation, the state’s largest oil company, wants to build a 600,000-square-foot data center campus in the Elk Hills oil field about two hours north of Los Angeles. It hopes to avoid the nationwide backlash from communities that have watched the outfits developing these sprawling operations swallow up farmland or install diesel generators near residential neighborhoods. 

It’s part of a new trend in the AI boom. More developers are proposing to build data centers in or near active oil and gas fields, which tend to sit far from densely populated areas and boast ready access to power. Projects are being planned in Texas, where the prolific Permian Basin oil patch has an abundance of natural gas, which can be used to generate electricity, and in Pennsylvania, which is already a leading producer of natural gas from shale. These projects are seen as a way of juicing revenues for legacy producers, even as the California project is unfolding in a state that has been trying to phase out fossil fuels.

California Resources Corporation executives have framed the deal, announced Monday, as a “responsible development” approach to the AI buildout.

“By repurposing an existing industrial site, creating jobs and tax revenue in Kern County, utilizing dedicated on-site power, and employing one of the industry’s most water-efficient cooling systems, the project is designed to support California’s growing digital infrastructure needs while minimizing impacts on local communities,” said Chris Gould, the company’s chief sustainability officer and the head of its carbon capture venture, in a statement to Grist.

The Elk Hills location has an obvious strategic benefit for CRC and Beacon, the data center developer collaborating on the project. The proposed Golden Valley Technology Hub will sit on 100 acres within an oil field that stretches across tens of thousands of acres, and will sit more than a mile from the nearest homes. The project will also face strict environmental review, which could take about a year. CRC has already held a number of community meetings with residents of nearby Taft and Buttonwillow and has promised to provide financial support for community groups and public infrastructure like roads.

Building in a century-old oil zone could sidestep the common furor over the impacts of data centers, which can require massive amounts of electricity and water and can also emit a lot of noise, said Gabriel Collins, an expert on energy and water issues who serves as a research fellow at Rice University’s Center for Energy Studies.

“Where you stand on these things depends on where you sit,” said Collins, who has studied the potential of Texas’ enormous Permian Basin to support data centers. “If you’re already out in the middle of an area that’s seen heavy industrial activity for a long time, there’s already a precedent, and folks there will probably find it easier to deal with.” In its permit application for the project, CRC included around 150 signatures from nearby residents who support the data center. At least five names on the list are affiliated with the local oil industry.

Ready access to electricity is the most important asset for these operations, something CRC’s oil field already has. It runs on a 550-megawatt natural gas power plant that has long been used to generate steam for drilling operations. Elk Hills no longer produces as much crude as it once did, so the power plant is running below capacity. The proposed data center will be able to run almost exclusively on that excess energy. (As for water, the company says the data center will use a closed-loop cooling system that will consume enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool over the course of 10 years. It also plans to erect noise barriers around the site.)

While the Kern County data center will rely on fossil fuels when many others draw power from the wind or sun, CRC is expanding its business to focus on carbon capture. Just this year it launched a first-of-its-kind system that captures CO2 emitted by another oilfield gas plant and stores it in depleted wells, and plans to build such a system for the plant that will supply the data center. Although the existing system absorbs about 7 percent of the plant’s total emissions, CRC has the storage space to capture several hundred times as much carbon underground. 

For oil producers in the Permian, data centers represent a market for natural gas that might otherwise be burned or vented to the atmosphere as a byproduct of drilling. Chevron signed a deal to supply methane to a Microsoft data center in west Texas, and oil service companies Schlumberger and Halliburton assist data center developers with energy and construction. Collins said the model makes even more sense for a declining field like Elk Hills, where production has fallen and CRC no longer needs as much electricity.

“In the Permian Basin, it’s a different dynamic, because the oil field and the data centers are gonna compete with each other for power,” said Collins. “If you have a declining oil field and you had that big captive asset there, then plugging it in to run digital infrastructure instead makes a lot of sense.”

California has seen gasoline demand fall about 15 percent over the last decade, and crude production has fallen by more than half during that time, due in part to strict regulations rolled out by Governor Gavin Newsom. State lawmakers struck a deal last year to stabilize in-state production as part of an effort to avoid gasoline price spikes, but few experts expect production to reach previous levels. 

As a result, CRC is looking beyond oil for its future. It has invested billions in carbon capture projects across the state, and executives have said that they expect revenue from such efforts to become essential as oil demand declines in California. The company acquired two of its largest competitors, Aera and Berry, over the past two years, and now accounts for nearly two-thirds of the state’s production. A senior executive last year likened the company to Equinor, the Norwegian state oil company that produces both oil and wind power.

The data center could advance this transition. CRC says the project would create at least 1,500 union construction jobs, as many as 250 permanent jobs, and ample tax revenues. The number of oil and gas jobs in Kern County has declined from around 12,000 to around 6,000 since 2015, and oil assets account for around 10 percent of its property tax income, compared to 30 percent a decade ago. CRC’s previous carbon capture project earned a stamp of approval from Newsom, long an opponent of oil, who called it “proof that innovation and ambition are the California way.” (His office said decisions about the data center should be left to Kern County.)

Many climate groups in California have opposed CRC’s carbon capture push. The environmental law firm Earthjustice has said the carbon storage project would “open the door to a range of new polluting facilities that could be built from scratch.” It also said carbon capture could increase emissions by prolonging the life of the Elk Hills oil field or leading to more gas power production. Earthjustice, the Center for Biological Diversity, and a number of other groups sued the county over its approval of the carbon capture project. Neither organization responded to a request for comment on the data center.

But CRC seems to see tech and oil as natural partners. It signed an agreement last year to capture carbon from a nearby gas power plant owned by a Canadian company. That power plant, which can produce twice as much electricity as the one at Elk Hills, could in theory support another data center.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A solution to data center backlash? Put them in oil fields. on Jun 18, 2026.

Solar energy just provided more electricity in the United States than coal for the first time on record — marking a milestone for the rise of renewables in America. 

While gas and nuclear plants still lead the country’s energy mix, solar contributed 12.8 percent of the nation’s electrons in May, according to an analysis of government data by Ember, an energy think tank. Coal, meanwhile, provided just 12.2 percent. Just five years ago, solar was less than half of its current levels and coal was at 20 percent. 

“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the U.S. electricity system,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember, in a press release. “From Texas to California, markets across the U.S. are betting on solar to meet rising power needs.”

The turnaround comes even as political headwinds have shifted against renewable energy. 

Last summer, Congress passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” which rolled back enormous swaths of former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate change legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. And President Donald Trump has actively sought to hinder renewable energy development, even offering to pay at least one oil company $1 billion to stop building its offshore wind projects. 

The latest electricity data comes the same month that the Trump administration announced $700 million in funding for investments in the coal industry. It included money for what would be the country’s first new coal-fired power plants in 13 years — sourced from funds previously dedicated to reducing the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, not deepening it. 

“Today we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” said Trump, who campaigned on the coal-friendly slogan ‘dig, baby, dig.” 

Ember’s analysis found that coal generation in May was actually up slightly from April, when it hit an all-time low. Its share of the grid will also likely tick up in the summer, as cooling needs peak. But the steady downward trend over the last several years suggests that even all the president’s men might not be able to put the coal industry back together again. 

“Spending $700 million to bail out the coal industry is like throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of the environmental group Evergreen Action, told the Associated Press. Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association disagreed, telling the AP that coal generation helps shield consumers from the impacts of volatile energy prices and supply challenges exacerbated by AI.

Regardless of what coal does, experts believe the solar market will continue its upward march. While installations dropped in 2025 compared to 2024, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association, it still accounted for more than half of all newly installed electricity capacity. Even MAGA influencers are promoting it. 

“We’re going to just keep seeing more and more renewables brought onto the grid,” said Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy at the Sierra Club. “That’s good for people’s wallets, it’s good for their health, it’s good for the planet.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline For first time, Americans are getting more of their electricity from solar than coal on Jun 10, 2026.

In April 2026, California farmer Terri McCall stood on the steps of the Supreme Court at a rally protesting pesticide use, telling the story of how her husband and dog both died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease she believes was caused by pesticides. Her husband, Jack, had used Roundup for more than three decades on their 20-acre ranch before dying of cancer in 2016.

Over 57,000 pesticide products are currently registered for use in the United States, ranging from powerful chemicals used in conventional agriculture, to common insect repellents approved for use on children. Scientific evidence is accumulating that some of them are linked to illnesses ranging from cancer to Parkinson’s disease. 

But beginning in 2024, a powerful coalition of chemical manufacturers and industry groups launched a coordinated national effort to pass “immunity laws,” bills designed to shield companies from potential legal claims tied to harms from their pesticide products. Over the past three years alone, industry lobbyists attempted to pass pesticide immunity legislation in 15 different states.

The battle over ‘failure to warn’

At the center of the industry’s lobbying effort is a key legal question: What responsibility do pesticide companies have to warn users and consumers about potential health risks from their products? In many states, individuals can currently bring “failure to warn” claims if they believe a company withheld information about harms associated with a pesticide.

The chemical makers advocating for pesticide immunity laws argue that companies should be protected from those lawsuits as long as they use labels approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But opponents say that standard is dangerously inadequate.

There are longstanding concerns about the EPA’s pesticide review process. For example, the official EPA labels for glyphosate still do not carry a cancer warning, despite mounting evidence that it may cause cancer and other groups like the World Health Organization calling it “probably carcinogenic.” 

“The science is pretty clear,” said Daniel Hinkle, the senior counsel for policy and state affairs at the American Association for Justice. “The evidence continues to accumulate, and the pesticide makers continue to lose in the courtroom.”

Meanwhile, a growing body of research links a broad range of health harms to commonly used pesticides, including neurodevelopmental impacts, respiratory problems and reduced IQ in children, health problems like liver and metabolic diseases, and cancer.

The pesticide lobbyist’s playbook

Several landmark court cases have found chemical makers responsible for illnesses like cancers and neurological diseases, resulting in billions of dollars in payments from pesticide makers. Bayer alone has paid over $11 billion in cancer settlements linked to its products. In response, the chemical industry has poured millions of dollars into lobbying for pesticide immunity laws at the state and federal levels, and in the courts. “It’s very clear that this is a coordinated campaign by the industry to absolve themselves of legal liability for health harms from these chemicals,” said Hinkle.

In the last three years, advocates fought against proposed immunity bills in 15 different states. While defeated in a dozen states, the bills passed in Georgia, North Dakota and Kentucky. “The states where these bills are passing have some of the highest cancer rates in the nation,” said Joy Reeves, the director of policy and strategic development at the Rachel Carson Council. “The reality now is, if you’re a farmer and get sick, you have fewer options to hold the pesticide companies accountable.”

Environmental and legal advocates say the campaign behind the pesticide immunity laws is both sophisticated and well-funded. Hinkle says a central driver of the effort is the Modern Ag Alliance (MAA), a lobbying and public relations group founded by Bayer, the maker of Roundup, in 2024. 

While many states do not make lobbying expenditures easy to track, those that do show huge sums are being spent on pesticide immunity legislation. According to public filings, MAA spent roughly $1.6M lobbying in Tennessee in 2025. Reporting by the Idaho Sun found that MAA was the top outside spender in Idaho politics that same year. 

What pesticide immunity could mean for families

As industry groups push for legal protections around pesticide injury, there are growing concerns about what these bills could mean for public health, accountability, and local input.

In 2012, on a warm July afternoon in Iowa, organic farmer Rob Faux was working in his poultry yard. He heard an airplane roar overhead, and then droplets began raining over him and his chickens and turkeys. A crop duster kept the sprayer on as it passed over Faux’s farm twice, covering them with fungicides and insecticides. 

Subsequently, Faux was diagnosed with cancer. Recent data shows that Iowa, which has one of the highest rates of pesticide use in the country — in 2025, 53 million pounds of pesticides were used in the state — also has the second-highest cancer rate in the nation.

Faux is now the communications manager and resident farm expert for the Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network (PAN). He says that many products that people use every day, from ant bait to mosquito repellent, will similarly fall under the scope of the new immunity laws. 

“If these laws pass, and someone sells a mosquito repellent for children that makes them sick, for example, these pesticide immunity bills will eliminate pathways for families to hold the makers accountable,” he said. 

He also points to the loss of local control as a key concern. “If I live in a town where the drinking water comes from a local lake, but pesticide applicators are using chemicals that are getting into the water, the community should be able to protect people,” he said. Many of the proposed immunity bills would prevent that, because local or state governments wouldn’t be allowed to set pesticide rules that are stricter than federal standards.

A pivotal moment in the pesticide immunity fight

These concerns brought together a broad coalition spanning left-leaning environmental advocates and members of the Make America Healthy Again network. Protestors gathered outside the Supreme Court for a rally the last week of April as the justices inside heard opening arguments in Monsanto v. Durnell. The closely-watched case could reshape the future of pesticide litigation nationwide.

The case centers on whether federal pesticide labeling laws and EPA labels override state-level failure-to-warn lawsuits. A ruling in Monsanto’s favor could dramatically weaken legal pathways for people alleging harm from pesticide exposure. “This is a case that is largely about states’ rights,” said Reeves. “It will affect states’ ability to regulate pesticides.”

Just a few days later, federal lawmakers overwhelmingly rejected an effort to insert pesticide immunity language into the Farm Bill. Seventy-three Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the pesticide immunity provision. 

“It was a pretty astounding defeat,” said Max Sano, a senior policy and coalitions associate with Beyond Pesticides who helps organize a national coalition of farmers, farmworkers, scientists, and advocacy groups. “But these bills are still popping up everywhere [on a state level], so we can’t afford to slow down.” His organization is currently monitoring newly proposed pesticide immunity legislation in 10 states.

The rise of a new pesticide reform movement

As momentum grows against pesticide immunity laws, Reeves described the current moment as “today’s Silent Spring movement,” referencing Rachel Carson’s landmark 1962 book that helped ignite the modern environmental movement. “Today, the pesticide reform movement is diverse,” Reeves said. “It’s cross-partisan. It’s far-reaching.” 

Advocates like Reeves, Sano, and Hinkle are taking a multi-pronged approach to fighting pesticide immunity laws: organizing national coalition calls, educating lawmakers, tracking bills across states, mobilizing grassroots campaigns, and coordinating legal and public awareness efforts.

And individuals can have a deep impact on the fight, too, Hinkle said. “It is incredibly important to be in communication with your lawmaker,” he said. “Every single call or email matters. Concerned constituents and grassroots organizing have really been the decisive forces in holding off this onslaught.”

Reeves echoes him, saying, “If you care about your family and your community, you should engage on this issue. It affects us all.”

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The Rachel Carson Council (RCC), founded in 1965, is the national environmental organization envisioned by Rachel Carson to carry on her work after her death. We promote Carson’s ecological ethic that combines scientific concern for the environment and human health with a sense of wonder and reverence for all forms of life in order to build a more sustainable, just, and peaceful future. The Rachel Carson Council is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The quiet push to shield pesticide makers from lawsuits on Jun 9, 2026.

This story is made possible through a partnership between Grist and The Flatwater Free Press, Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories.

Standing before the Otoe County Board and a room of neighbors, Wynee Benedict ticked through a long list of concerns.

Do we have enough water for them? Who pays for their power? What if they create a heat island?

The source of Benedict’s worries: data centers. Since learning earlier this year that their county, south of Omaha and a little east of Lincoln, could become home to a new data center, Otoe residents have been abuzz with questions and concerns like Benedict’s, leading some residents to call for a temporary ban on the industry. 

That’s effectively what the board did last month, voting to suspend the permits needed for a new data center for up to a year, according to commissioner Chuck Cole. The pause is intended to give county officials more time to study how the developments fit into the county’s future plans and to update its regulations accordingly. 

Around the country, opposition to data centers is growing. The massive, resource-guzzling buildings needed to power artificial intelligence and our digital infrastructure have emerged as a galvanizing issue. Local governments from California to Maine have adopted or are considering temporary bans. And at least 14 states so far this year have weighed statewide moratoriums.  

Elsewhere in Nebraska, Madison County set requirements for data centers to get a special permit, which allows added oversight and public input. In Gage County, the planning and zoning commission will hold a hearing on a data center moratorium later this month.

And more will likely follow suit thanks to a recent change in state law forcing counties to make a decision on certain development projects within a specific amount of time, said Jon Cannon, executive director of Nebraska Association of County Officials. The goal, according to the bill’s supporters, was to prevent counties from needlessly delaying projects. But the law could have an unintended consequence. 

“I think that you’re likely to see a number of counties that say, ‘We need to get our regulations in order,’ and … they may put moratoriums on a lot of things, not just data centers,” Cannon said.

Data centers are just the latest in a long line of controversial developments, like wind and solar, that counties in Nebraska and other states have grappled with. And much like those other developments, attitudes toward data centers could vary from county to county, Cannon said. He advises developers to communicate with residents in rural Nebraska early and transparently about large projects.

“When people are aware of something coming to town, because, ‘Oh, my neighbor told me that he just signed this big contract for a right of way’ — when people find out that way, they get very excited, and not in a good way,” Cannon said.

From an environmental standpoint, it’s hard to know how much data centers are impacting Nebraska. There’s no centralized information source for their location, ownership, and water usage. 

Leah Atwood was rattled. It was the tail end of March, and for days she and her colleagues at Agroecology Commons had been fielding dozens of emails alerting them to grant terminations targeting a $300 million U.S. Department of Agriculture program. One after another, within a single week, 49 of the 50 grantees received notices from the USDA informing them that their grants were cancelled. 

By the end of the month, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t gotten a notice from the USDA. While their peers were figuring out how to pick up the pieces, it seemed as though their $2.5 million grant, structured largely to help farmers of color acquire and sustain land, remained untouched. All they could do was wait. Resignation settled in — after all, they’d been in this position before.

Shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office last January, his administration launched a sweeping campaign to eliminate initiatives it has deemed wasteful or misaligned with its political agenda. At the USDA, that has meant slashing billions in grants and gutting a mix of newer and longstanding federal programs that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has repeatedly framed as the administration’s attempt to “stop wasteful spending.”

During the administration’s first year, Agroecology Commons lost multiple grants amidst the USDA’s funding purge. In response, the nonprofit filed a joint lawsuit against the agency, claiming that the grants were terminated unlawfully. In August, a judge granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction that restored their access to some of the money until the court makes its final determination based on the merits of the case. 

All 49 other recipients of the Increasing Land, Capital, and Market Access grants received termination emails from the USDA during that week in March. In their written cancellations, which gave grantees two business days’ notice, Steven Peterson, the associate administrator of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, explained to the grantees that their programming doesn’t align with the agency’s priorities and that its funding structure was not in keeping with the intent of Congress. He used the same language about cutting waste and discontinuing DEI efforts that had become routine for the administration. But whereas the administration tended to be vague about its claims of waste and fraud, Peterson’s letter was surprisingly specific. 

“Instances of excessive or frivolous expenditures,” he wrote, “such as purchasing gazebos, massages, a camper/RV, and oversized office supply budgets (in one case, over $130,000) — instead of land are an affront to taxpayers.” 

Through it all, Agroecology Commons still hadn’t heard a thing. 

Questions swirled throughout the grantee network, but no one could explain why Agroecology Commons’ project alone was spared. Atwood’s team presumed their grant wasn’t terminated because of the ongoing litigation. Now, they continue to wait to see whether their funding will abruptly disappear, too. 

“We are trying to accomplish as much as we can in the time that we have, because we don’t know when it’s going to be canceled,” said Atwood. “It’s a strange reality.” 

Neither Agroecology Commons nor any of the other grant recipients that Grist spoke to seems to know who may have made those expenditures. 

Kavita Koppa helps run RAFI, a farming organization based in North Carolina that was one of the 49 grants that was cancelled; they’d been awarded $8.5 million to help agricultural producers in North Carolina, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. 

Koppa says RAFI was just about halfway through its five-year contract with USDA and had spent roughly $1.1 million when the termination notice came. From the beginning, almost $2.3 million of their total award had been set aside for grants to support farmer land acquisition and market access, with around $400,000 of that set aside for RAFI to acquire land parcels on behalf of farmers. Another $1.9 million was budgeted for project management costs, which included the fees associated with verifying financial compliance in federal audits, attorneys for farmland acquisition, and translation fees; and then $350k for a bucket of miscellaneous project activities, such as paying guest speakers at workshops, contracting report writers, and mass distributing hard-copies of farmer resources. The last $3.9 million was budgeted for technical assistance, a figure that encompassed the full budgets of the five subawardees that RAFI was working with on the project. 

“Under the guise of increasing land access for producers, the ILA program included no minimum requirement for direct producer support,” a USDA spokesperson told Civil Eats in March. “Instead, the program permitted the abuse of federal funds, including expenditures on the purchasing of a barbeque smoker, construction of a gazebo, massages, and for one awardee, a $20,000 budget for ink pens alone. To no surprise, a peek behind the curtain of this Biden-era program revealed the egregious misuse of taxpayer dollars to the tune of nearly $300 million dollars.” 

Koppa says she has never seen the budget items that the USDA cited. “The details were shocking,” she said. “We didn’t do those things. Why are we being treated as if we did something unethical or wasteful?”

Breanna Horsey, executive director of Sustainable Iowa Land Trust, who led another land access project working to expand Iowa’s fruit and vegetable farmers ability to secure permanent and affordable land access, is also adamant that her $1.8 million grant had no carve-outs for the expenditures detailed in their termination notice. Viva Farms’ Anna Chotzen, project manager of another ILCMA project that was awarded a $2.5 million grant to help beginning and historically underserved farmers in two Washington counties access farmland, said the same. Her team has no idea where those budget items came from. All she knows is that it wasn’t them.

Gloria Montaño Greene, former Deputy Undersecretary of the USDA’s Farm Production and Conservation in the Biden administration who helped oversee the creation of the ILCMA program, questions the validity of the excessive spending claims. 

“If that dollar amount for $20,000 in pens was put in there, did they show proof of that?” said Montaño Greene. “Show the proof, right?”

Throughout April, at least 45 of the 49 terminated grantees — including two subgrantees — filed appeals against the termination to the National Appeals Division, an independent office of the USDA, Grist has learned. According to Amanda Koehler, a consultant on the land access program, all but two were informed that their award terminations are not appealable because the decision to terminate “was a matter of general applicability and not based on the individual application of specific program criteria.” (The outstanding two, says Koehler, have not heard back yet.) 

That finding by NAD should put the USDA’s justification for cancellation under closer scrutiny, she added, because it “underscores, in my opinion, that terminations were not based on anything the awardees did or didn’t do.” To her knowledge, none of the grantees — including Agroecology Commons — had budgets that included any of the claims USDA has made concerning wasteful or fraudulent spending. 

“This termination doesn’t seem like it was rooted in anything about our conduct with this grant,” said RAFI’s Koppa. “It seems to be part of some sort of larger motivation where we were not being treated fairly.”

JohnElla Holmes, who oversees the Kansas Black Farmers Association, which was awarded a land access grant of $8.4 million to help Black producers acquire farmland across Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, says that roughly 62 percent of the organization’s grant was intended to go directly to farmers. She alleges that, following the administration change, the USDA took nearly a year to supply her team with the necessary approvals required by the grant’s built-in budgetary structure to award payments to farmers. Last November, Holmes says they finally heard from FSA staffers who requested changes to their paperwork. Over the next two months, she worked with them to submit all the revisions and additional documentation the agency asked for. Then, after another period of waiting on USDA, the grant was cancelled.

Other grantees and sources close to the program also say that the USDA obstructed the distributions of funding to farmers with its scarce and severely delayed communication, lack of institutional support, and, crucially, the absence of necessary budgetary approvals over the last year. 

The USDA declined to comment for this story. 

On Tuesday, 24 other ILCMA grantees joined the lawsuit that Agroecology Commons filed last year. The plaintiffs are seeking another preliminary injunction, with the aim of reversing the grant cancellations and restoring grantees’ access to the funds. 

While it still has its money, Agroecology Commons plans to move forward with the land access grant. Atwood’s team, though, is proceeding cautiously — holding off on making longer-term investments into hiring or programming, and scrambling to fundraise against the possibility of a sudden cutoff. 

“When you talk about wasteful spending — the years and years that went into getting this program to even exist, and then to just terminate it,” Atwood said incredulously. That, to her, “seems like the real waste.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The USDA canceled $300M in farm grants, citing fraud. Did it make up the evidence? on Jun 1, 2026.

Changes to the Columbia Area Transit (CAT) budget since the previous budget committee meeting include the loss of a grant to build bus stops in Cascade Locks, more money to […]

The post High gas prices stretch Hood River’s transit budget appeared first on Uplift Local.

Democrats and Republicans agree on virtually nothing at this point, except the desperate need to build more housing in the United States. Depending on your viewpoint, the country needs new domiciles because it puts people to work and stimulates local economies, or because it creates affordable homes and drives down housing costs, thus reducing homelessness. Affordability, including in housing, is now one of the biggest political issues in America.

Neither party, though, is talking about the secret superpower of new apartment buildings: They’re much better for the planet than constructing single-family homes. According to a new report, these units are “an almost automatic form of building decarbonization,” because three-quarters of new apartments are heated electrically. That means they can run on rooftop solar panels or tap into grids humming with clean energy, instead of burning plant-warming natural gas in furnaces or boilers. 

While the Trump administration and the Republican Party at large try to roll back as much climate progress as they can, they’re inadvertently bolstering that progress by calling for new construction. Deep-red Montana, for instance, recently passed a flurry of bills to get more multi-family housing built. “Apartments are the climate solution hiding in plain sight,” said Alan Durning, executive director of the nonprofit Sightline Institute, which authored the report. 

Nothing against single-family homes, but apartment buildings and condos are much more efficient for a number of reasons. For one, residents share walls, floors, and ceilings with their neighbors, surrounding them with excellent insulation. Secondly, the square footage of each unit tends to be smaller than detached homes, so there’s less air to manage. Accordingly, it takes less energy to climate-control apartment units and keep people comfortable: The typical resident of a downtown high-rise emits one-third as much greenhouse gases as a resident of a detached house in the suburbs.

Because of this inherent efficiency, apartment builders have for decades opted to install what’s called electric resistance heating, like baseboard heaters, instead of gas furnaces. That’s because wiring them up is cheaper than piping in all that methane. “If I am building something with the intention of renting it, I really want to minimize my upfront costs,” said Amanda D. Smith, senior scientist at the climate solutions nonprofit Project Drawdown, who studies the built environment but wasn’t involved in the new report. “Often electric water heaters and electric heaters for space heating make sense from that perspective.”

Economic forces, then, have long encouraged the adoption of such systems: 68 percent of apartments built since the early 1970s have been heated with electricity, the report notes. Half a century ago, no one was campaigning to decarbonize buildings to fight climate change — going electric was just the better option. Today, if you live in an apartment, you’re 60 percent more likely to be all-electric than your neighbor living in a house.

And apartments can get even greener. Heat pumps — which move warmth from outdoor air inside, instead of generating it like a gas furnace does — are around three times more efficient than space heaters. Over the past few decades, the technology has gotten more powerful, capable of extracting heat from even freezing outdoor air. That’s helped heat pumps proliferate across even the chilliest climes: Maine installed 100,000 of the appliances two years ahead of schedule, and almost two-thirds of households in Norway use them. Heat pumps are increasingly popping up in American apartment buildings, too: While quite rare in the decades after the 1950s, heat pumps have been incorporated into 18 percent of these structures in the Northwest since 2010, the report notes. (Overall, heat pumps have outsold gas furnaces in the U.S. for several years now.)

While traditional electric heat pumps work like air conditioners, in that you need an outdoor unit that connects to an indoor one, new varieties are easier to incorporate into apartments and condos. One from a company called Gradient fits like a saddle over a window sill and plugs into a regular outlet, with installation taking less than a half hour. (Think of it like those old-school AC units jutting out of city apartment windows, only much cooler looking.) Another launching this winter combines the two units into one attached to an interior wall, where it exchanges air with the outside. “Making retrofits simpler will be a game-changer,” Smith said.

If new buildings in hotter parts of the U.S. rely upon gas heating, they’d still need an air conditioning system. The beauty of a heat pump is that it can reverse in the summer to fill a home with cool air. As temperatures rise across the country, heat pumps will not only work more efficiently than space heaters and gas furnaces to warm apartments, but to provide invaluable cooling to keep people healthy. Already in the U.S., heat kills more people every year than all other forms of extreme weather combined.

Making a building’s heating fully electric encourages the adoption of another appliance critical for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: the induction stove. “If you’re building a building and you’re heating and cooling with heat pumps, it doesn’t really make sense to hook it up to the gas system to pipe a tiny bit of gas in for people to cook on their gas stoves a couple of times a week,” said Matt Casale, managing director of states and regions at the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition, which wasn’t involved in the report.

All this electrification could potentially slot into a burgeoning technology known as networked geothermal. Instead of a building’s heat pump using outdoor air, it uses liquid pumping underground. Because the earth’s temperature remains a more consistent temperature year-round than the air, these heat pumps are even more efficient at warming a space. If all of an area’s buildings — apartments or otherwise — are hooked into a networked geothermal system, there’s no need to pipe gas into the neighborhood at all. “It’s a real community-based energy system, and you’re using energy that’s literally homegrown,” Casale said. “It’s right under your feet.”

Beyond their superior energy efficiency and tendency to go electric, apartment buildings provide denser housing, fitting far more people into a footprint than a single-family home could manage. If located near daily essentials, like grocery stores, residents can walk instead of drive, further reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Ideally, robust public transportation systems can get those apartment-dwellers anywhere they can’t walk to. 

Building big apartment buildings of just apartments, though, just won’t cut it, said Cécile Faraud, head of the clean construction program at C40, a global network of climate-focused mayors. These structures need mixed uses, where living spaces sit atop commercial spaces, like markets and doctors’ offices. “So you can access care, you can access education, you can access your needs in terms of shopping,” said Faraud, who wasn’t involved in the report. “But also in terms of health, so being able to exercise in parks, etc., and access to nature.” 

Indeed, what surrounds these apartment complexes matters too. Green spaces reduce temperatures, boost residents’ mental health, and provide habitats for native plant and animal species. Better yet, “agrihoods” surround working farms with multi-family housing, generating nutritious produce for residents to enjoy or sell. (Faraud stresses that in addition to creating more housing, cities need to retrofit existing buildings to be more energy efficient, like with double-paned windows and better insulation.)

Constructing apartments, though, is often way more difficult than it should be, housing advocates say. The new report notes that “apartment buildings of at least four stories are currently allowed on less than 1 percent of the residential land in all but 10 Oregon cities” — even in progressive Portland, that figure is 14 percent. “The main thing that we need to do is re-legalize apartments in a much larger area of our cities,” Durning said.

Cities and states are responsible for that, not the feds. But the growing national push from both parties to get more units built will be a win-win for people and the planet. “Even across a political landscape that’s as fractured and divided and as contentious as what we’re seeing now,” Smith said, “I think most people are willing to say: We want people to have homes.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The surprising climate fix that Democrats and Republicans both love on May 15, 2026.

All across Georgia, on the banks of the Coosa, Chattahoochee, and Ocmulgee and other rivers, sit large lagoons filled with coal ash, the toxic residue left behind after coal is burned. These massive impoundments hold millions of tons of toxic stew, and most are unlined. As a result, heavy metals in the coal ash — such as arsenic and mercury — quietly leach into the ground and nearby water bodies. 

In 2015, the Obama administration passed rules requiring utilities to clean up the ponds and implement monitoring requirements, transforming the Environmental Protection Agency into the chief regulator overseeing these sites. States were also given the opportunity to assume this regulatory role — as long as they met minimum federal requirements. 

Georgia was among the first to do so. In 2019, the EPA approved the state’s authority to oversee coal ash management. But in their first official act — a “bellwether” for future decisions —  regulators at the state’s Environmental Protection Division approved a permit to leave coal ash partly submerged in groundwater at one of Georgia Power’s plants. Despite outcry from communities and a rebuke by the EPA, the agency continues to hold its regulatory authority and has approved another 20 permits for coal ash ponds at roughly a dozen coal plants across the state. 

The Trump administration is now signaling it wants to transfer coal ash oversight to even more states and roll back federal protections. Five states currently have approved coal ash programs, including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Oklahoma and Georgia were approved during Trump’s first term, Texas received approval during the Biden administration, and North Dakota and Wyoming were approved in the last year. The Trump administration is also in the process of approving Virginia for local coal ash permitting.

“The state agencies that have programs where they can issue permits, we’ve seen, unfortunately, that they’ve not been rigorous in enforcing standards,” said Nick Torrey, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. “We know that they are underfunded, underresourced. The utilities are often the most powerful entity in the state and call the shots.”

The coal ash decision is part of a broader campaign to shift environmental regulation to the states. During Trump’s first term, the EPA handed over wetlands permitting in Florida to state regulators — the first state to apply for and receive the authority in 25 years. In January, the administration began the process of accepting so-called “Good Neighbor Plans” from eight states. These plans had previously been rejected by the Biden administration for failing to prevent ozone emissions from crossing state lines. And over the past year, the administration has expanded state authority over underground carbon sequestration, giving West Virginia, Arizona, and Texas supervisory authority of carbon injection wells. 

According to the EPA, there are more than 670 coal ash ponds across the country. The lagoons range in size from a few acres to a thousand or more. Over the years, many of these ponds have repeatedly spilled coal ash into waterways. One of the worst accidents took place in 2008 when a dike at a Tennessee Valley Authority pond failed, releasing more than a billion gallons of coal ash. The flood buried homes, and residents are still reporting health issues. Similar incidents have occurred on the Dan River in North Carolina and in eastern Kentucky.

The Obama administration’s 2015 rules — the first oversight of coal ash — required utilities to monitor groundwater near coal ash ponds for contamination and for new ponds to be lined. In cases where there was evidence coal ash was leaching into water, the companies were required to close the ponds, either by draining them or excavating the ash and moving it elsewhere. 

But the rule had major loopholes and didn’t cover all coal ash disposal sites. Lagoons that weren’t actively receiving new material and located at retired coal plants weren’t covered. And crucially, dump sites — where coal ash is collected before being moved into lagoons — were not included in the rule. As a result, when testing indicated heavy metals were leaching into groundwater, utilities could point to the dump sites and claim they were to blame. 

“Utilities would point to these areas and say, ‘We don’t have to clean up our groundwater pollution because we think the pollution is coming from these exempt areas. Therefore, the pollution is exempt,’” said Torrey. 

About six years ago, the Altamaha Riverkeeper, a local nonprofit, tested groundwater near the coal-fired Plant Scherer in Monroe County, Georgia, and began notifying residents that their well water was contaminated with compounds found in coal ash. The county eventually ran water lines, but some low-income residents unable to afford water bills still rely on church waterfilling stations, said Fletcher Sams, executive director of the Altamaha Riverkeeper. “This is an area where the median household income is $30,000,” said Sams. “It’s pretty rural, and some people can’t afford to run pipe from the road and the hookup and the monthly fee for the water.”

The EPA and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division did not respond to a request for comment. 

In 2024, the Biden EPA attempted to close these loopholes by expanding coverage with a new rule that applied to all coal ash disposal sites, including so-called “legacy ponds.” But the Trump administration is now attempting to unwind these protections. In April, the EPA proposed exempting older or inactive coal ash disposal sites from the rules and granting state officials more leeway in overseeing coal ash monitoring plans. In press releases announcing these plans and the EPA’s intent to overhaul how coal ash is managed, administrator Lee Zeldin said that the agency “will advance cooperative federalism to allow states to lead the charge on local issues, with federal support. This is just one of many examples where this agency can and will work with our state partners to deliver for the American people.” 

This move comes at a time when state legislatures have slashed budgets for environmental agencies. According to an analysis by the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit founded by former EPA enforcement officials under both parties, more than half of states have cut funding for environmental agencies in the last 15 years. Mississippi’s budget has dropped by more than 70 percent during this time period, while South Dakota had its budget slashed by 61 percent. Three of the five states overseeing coal ash disposal — Texas, Georgia, and Wyoming — have had budget cuts of at least 20 percent over this time. Georgia has reduced its staffing by about 16 percent. 

Not all states that have applied for coal ash authority have received it. In 2024, the EPA rejected Alabama’s application to manage its coal ash ponds because it did not meet standards set in federal law. “Alabama’s permit program does not require that groundwater contamination be adequately addressed during the closure of these coal ash units,” the agency noted in its decision.

Torrey said the Trump administration appears poised to rubber stamp state requests, putting public health and the environment at risk.

“There’s a real retreat from the EPA doing the job it was created to do,” Torrey said. “When you combine that with the weakening and choking of funds for state agencies, it means that people are getting dramatically less protection from pollution.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The EPA wants to shift monitoring of toxic coal ash to states on May 13, 2026.