Trump rides to Musk’s rescue

The Trump administration has moved to stop an air pollution lawsuit against xAI before it chokes Musk’s Memphis AI monster.
According to Al Jazeera the DoJ asked for the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing xAI of illegally running dozens of natural gas turbines. The turbines were built to power the Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis, Tennessee.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed the lawsuit in April under the 1963 Clean Air Act. The law allows citizens to seek injunctions and civil penalties against alleged polluters.
The NAACP claims xAI built the turbines in nearby Southaven, Mississippi, without the required permits. It says hundreds of thousands of residents face pollutants linked to “increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers”.
The lawsuit notes that a “much larger share” of residents in the area are Black compared with the US general population.
In its motion, filed in a US District Court on 15 June 2026, the Justice Department accused the NAACP of threatening “national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War (sic) military operations”.
The motion claims the US constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to seek civil penalties. It says that includes the “discretion to decide when such an enforcement action is unwarranted or inconsistent with federal enforcement priorities”.
Justice Department Environment and Natural Resources Division top prosecutor Adam Gustafson said the government would “not sit idly by while private organisations use environmental laws to undermine our national security”.
Earthjustice director of enforcement Laura Thoms called the intervention a “massive power grab” by US president Donald Trump’s administration.
“Trump’s Justice Department wants to shield Elon Musk’s data center company, xAI, from being held accountable for its illegal pollution – and it’s attempting to grab power from impacted communities, the courts, and Congress to do so,” Thoms said.
“There is no moral or legal precedent for this.”
University of California, Los Angeles School of Law professor of environmental law Ann Carlson described the argument as a “brazen attempt” to limit enforcement of the Clean Air Act.
“It’s based on a radical notion that the executive branch can dismiss lawsuits brought by citizen groups that Congress has authorised based on no rationale at all,” Carlson said.
Carlson said the Justice Department’s position would let “polluters off the hook even for blatant violations of the law”.
The Trump administration has kept close ties with Musk, the world’s richest man and first trillionaire. It made him a temporary cost-cutting tsar and plugged xAI’s Grok into the Pentagon’s march towards an “AI-enabled fighting force”.
Pentagon top AI official Cameron Stanley said in testimony that Grok had been used to launch more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 targets within the first 96 hours of the US-Israel war on Iran.
If Grok cannot be deployed and upgraded because of “limitations in energy supply or limited reserve compute capability”, Stanley said numerous Pentagon tools would be “severely impacted”.