The Bureau of Land Management is required to manage the public lands it oversees so as to "best meet the present and future needs of the American people," balancing productivity against environmental quality, and not necessarily prioritizing economic return.

It has now asked its state directors to go find pieces of that land ripe for data center development.

They were given three days.

Three days, and it was marked a top priority

The Washington Sun reported the request on September 11, based on two people familiar with it and a former bureau official who was in the discussions. State directors compiled the lists and sent them up to Interior Department leadership.

The three-day deadline is the detail worth sitting with. Identifying which pieces of federal land can carry an industrial facility is not a question you answer in three days. It involves water, transmission capacity, wildlife, cultural sites, existing leases and the people who live nearby.

Interior told its directors this was a top priority. The instruction was not to study whether public land is a good place for data centers. It was to produce a list.

The people who would have to do the review are gone

Here is the part that turns a bad policy into an unworkable one.

The bureau has shed nearly half its staff under Trump, through a hiring freeze and a series of separation incentives. The employees still there have already been pointed at other priorities — oil and gas, grazing, mining.

One former official said their state was carrying 50% vacancy rates in its land and realty divisions, which are precisely the offices that would have to oversee data center development. The staff who remain would have to be trained on how to run an environmental review for a technology new to the agency.

"In the midst of the loss of hundreds of employees from BLM over the last couple years, it's another demand on land and realty staff that are already hugely taxed," the former official said.

Mary Jo Rugwell ran one of the bureau's state offices until 2019 and now presides over the Public Lands Foundation. She put the capacity problem as a question nobody at Interior has answered.

"Where are they going to get people to do the analysis especially when you have a technology that's relatively new and not well defined? It's a headache BLM doesn't need."

She was careful to say she is not against development. "I'm not against development or progress but I think there are too many questions about this and nobody is asking them," she said. "I think we're just bending knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do."

And the administration is not adding capacity to fix this. It is proposing further cuts to the bureau, while its most recent budget blueprint tells the bureau to refocus its efforts on building out AI data centers. Fewer people, new mission.

No environmental review has been finished, and a judge has already stopped one project

The administration has not completed a single environmental review for a data center on public lands.

The first one approved on bureau land, near Boulder City, Nevada, was halted on September 1. The reason is instructive: the bureau treated an environmental study done earlier for a proposed solar array on the same site as good enough, and approved the switch to a data center without a new one. A study of a solar farm is not a study of a data center. Interior's own appeals board said so: administrative judge David Gunter of the Interior Board of Land Appeals stayed the project, finding evidence the bureau "acted arbitrarily or capriciously when it determined that the data center project is 'substantially the same' as the solar plant project for purposes of its NEPA analysis," and that the objectors would "likely prevail". It is a stay while the appeal is heard, not a final ruling.

A couple of other projects are earlier in the pipeline. The bureau has approved a developer's request to do geological and groundwater testing on public land near Silver Springs, Nevada, without full reviews having been done.

And in Virginia, the National Park Service is weighing a land swap that would hand a data center developer 36 acres of federally owned park land inside Prince William Forest Park.

That last one is not remote rangeland. It is a unit of the National Park System.

The reason public land is attractive is that the public can't stop it

The most honest explanation for this whole push came from the Sierra Club's Nevada director, Olivia Tanager, and it has nothing to do with public land being well suited to the job.

"A lot of elected officials in Nevada on both sides of the aisle are really hesitant to approve data centers in their local jurisdiction. I would imagine in some cases, despite the environmental review being heightened in a lot of instances being sited on federal public land, there's more political will to move those projects forward."

Local resistance is now the industry's biggest obstacle. We have documented what it looks like: in Texas, lifelong Republicans in small towns called Greg Abbott's election-year data center pause "smoke and mirrors", and his approval with rural voters fell 15 points. Trump's answer to the seven in ten Americans who don't want one nearby was to tell them they want to be "backwards and poor" — thirteen months after signing the very executive order that hands data centers federal land and fast-tracked permits.

That order, from July 2025, is where this directive comes from.

A county commission can vote a project down. A federal parcel has no county commission.

Federal land also has, right now, almost nobody left to examine what gets built on it. Those two facts are the appeal, taken together.

Burgum's calendar

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum calls data centers "intelligence factories." He told a podcast this year that an AI facility means "it's the first time in human history we can take a kilowatt of electricity and instead of turning it into light or heat, we can turn it into intelligence. And that's just a complete game changer."

The Washington Sun reviewed his 2025 calendar. Some of what is on it:

• Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, in the spring of 2025, on permitting, infrastructure and technology "to support data center growth."
• Brendan Bechtel, July 2025, on permitting reform. Bechtel's company designs and builds AI data centers and works with Nvidia.
• Shell CEO Wael Sawan, February 2025, for an hour. Then, across three days in March, the chief executives of Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP — each of which has invested in data center technology or signed agreements to help power the facilities.
• A March dinner with Baker Hughes CEO Lorenzo Simonelli, whose company announced a data center technology collaboration with Google this year, alongside the CEOs of Coterra Energy, Williams Companies and Sempra Infrastructure.
• About a week later, SpaceX executives including President Gwynne Shotwell, who has pitched building data centers in space as soon as next year. SpaceX acquired xAI in 2026; xAI has built some of the largest data centers in the country on the Tennessee–Mississippi border.
• NextEra's then-CEO Armando Pimentel and a vice president, seated at Burgum's table at a reception supporting the Everglades. NextEra is part of a $100 billion project to build a data center at an Energy Department site in Kentucky.

Burgum's 2026 calendars are not public yet.

Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady said Burgum leads the National Energy Dominance Council and that his duties include "engagement with various energy companies and key industry partners." She added: "The Trump administration's successful work will only persist as we continue to work on behalf of the American people to ensure a strong energy future that puts them and their best interests first."

The bureau did not respond to a request for comment.

The housing task force is the tell

There is a control group for this experiment, and it already ran.

Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner set up a task force last year to identify federal land to develop for housing. It has yet to share any results. The former bureau official told the Sun that the data center search has met the same fate, for the same reason: bureau lands turn out to be poorly equipped for either.

Bureau land is mostly remote. It is often far from the electricity and the water that a data center consumes in enormous quantities. The agency's own people said so. The lists got compiled anyway.

This is the same agency, doing the same thing, in the same year

The same bureau wants to erase the 10-mile no-drilling buffer around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, opening 336,400 protected acres to oil, gas and uranium extraction beside a World Heritage Site.

And the push to transfer federal land out of federal hands has champions in Congress. Idaho Republican Russ Fulcher used a telephone town hall to defend transferring Idaho's federal public lands to the state — which conservation groups warn is a route to privatization.

What the reporting shows

The Bureau of Land Management asked its state directors to identify public land "ripe for data center development" and gave them three days, calling it a top priority, under a July 2025 executive order directing the government to find federal land for data centers. It has lost nearly half its staff under Trump, one state reported 50% vacancy rates in the divisions that would oversee such development, and the administration is proposing further cuts while its budget blueprint tells the bureau to refocus on AI buildout. No environmental review of a data center on public land has been completed; the first project approved, near Boulder City, Nevada, was stayed by Interior's own appeals board after the bureau relied on an old study for a solar array at the same site; and the National Park Service is considering handing a developer 36 acres inside Prince William Forest Park in Virginia. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's 2025 calendar shows meetings with executives from Amazon, Bechtel, Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Baker Hughes, SpaceX and NextEra. His 2026 calendar is not public.

Source

Eric Katz and Mara Hoplamazian, Inside Trump's Aggressive Push to Build Data Centers on Public Lands, The Washington Sun, September 11, 2026, surfaced by Common Dreams. Photo: Mike Stewart / Associated Press.