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Trump Promises ‘Fully Expedited’ Permitting in Exchange for $1 Billion of Investment

But ... how?

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday rocked the energy world when he promised “fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals” for “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America,”  in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.

“GET READY TO ROCK!!!” he added.

Trump has frequently derided regulatory barriers to development, including in his announcements of various economic and policy roles in his upcoming administration. His designee for Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, for instance, will also head a  National Energy Council that will “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape … by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”

When Trump  announced his nomination of Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, he said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American business.”

Current interpretations of existing laws dictate that any project constituting a major federal action (e.g. one that uses public lands)  must be reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act, the country’s signature permitting law. Federal courts are often asked in litigation to sign off on whether that review process — although not the outcome — was sufficient.

Regardless of any changes Trump may make to the federal regulatory system as president, that infrastructure is already in flux. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued a ruling that  throws into doubt decades of NEPA enforcement. Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard a separate case on the limits of NEPA as it relates to a proposed rail line expansion to transport oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Although the court is unlikely to issue a decision until next year, its current membership has shown itself plenty willing to scrap longstanding precedent in the name of cutting the regulatory state down to size.

Trump did not support his announcement with any additional materials laying out the legal authorities he plans to exercise to exempt these projects from regulation or proposed legislation, but it already attracted criticism from environmentalists, with the Sierra Club describing it as a “plan to sell out communities and environment to the highest bidder.It’s also unclear whether Trump was referring to foreign direct investment in the United States, of which there was $177 billion in 2022, according to the Department of Commerce.

Trump’s appointed co-deregulator-in-chief, for one, approved of his message today. “This is awesome 🚀🇺🇸,” Elon Musk wrote on X in response.

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Sparks

After Trump Phone Call, DOE Cancels $5 Billion for Grain Belt Express

The Department of Energy announced Wednesday that it was scrapping the loan guarantee.

A cut wire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Department of Energy canceled a nearly $5 billion loan guarantee for the Grain Belt Express, a transmission project intended to connect wind power in Kansas with demand in Illinois that would eventually stretch all the way to Indiana.

“After a thorough review of the project’s financials, DOE found that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project. To ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources, DOE has terminated its conditional commitment,” the Department of Energy said in a statement Wednesday.

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Sparks

Meta’s Major AI Energy Buildout

CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company’s expanding ambitions in a Threads post on Monday.

Electrical outlets and a computer chip
Justin Renteria/Getty Images

Meta is going big to power its ever-expanding artificial intelligence ambitions. It’s not just spending hundreds of millions of dollars luring engineers and executives from other top AI labs (including reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars for one engineer alone), but also investing hundreds of billions of dollars for data centers at the multi-gigawatt scale.

“Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online,” Meta founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote on the company’s Threads platform Monday, confirming a recent report by the semiconductor and artificial intelligence research service Semianalysis.

That first gigawatt-level project, Semianalysis wrote, will be a data center in New Albany, Ohio, called Prometheus, due to be online in 2026, Ashley Settle, a Meta spokesperson, confirmed to me. Ohio — and New Albany specifically — is the home of several large data center projects, including an existing Meta facility.

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Sparks

Trump Says He’s Going to Slap a Huge Tariff on Copper

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%.”

Donald Trump.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

President Trump announced Tuesday during a cabinet meeting that he plans to impose a hefty tax on U.S. copper imports.

“I believe the tariff on copper — we’re going to make it 50%,” he told reporters.

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