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AI First: How the Federal Government is Prioritizing AI Over People and Planet
(stopgreedbuildgreen.climateandcommunity.org)
We reject the “AI race” as a productive and socially beneficial use of resources. Instead, we advocate for a “race” toward a liveable world (ecologically and economically) where abundance is not measured in asset prices alone, but in a more capacious, multi-dimensional sense of what working people actually need and want.
Across the United States, there is robust, well-organized, and successful organizing in local fights against AI data centers. In 2025 alone, local opposition contributed to the blocking or stalling of 48 projects worth $156 billion, often on the grounds of opposing additional pollution and lavish public subsidies to feed corporate profits. The alignment between public consciousness and the early but already widely documented harms of unfettered AI and data center deployment means the moment is ripe for a more transformative vision that drastically increases the federal government’s capacity to make choices for working people as opposed to working for AI and elite investors. CCI’s “Green Economic Populism” framework is an example of such an approach, one which aligns policies that bring immediate relief to working people with building a dynamic public sector that can enact the robust regulations and enormous green investments needed to realize a better future for all.2
As the data center boom shows, a state-capital partnership can rapidly roll out massive, world-shaping infrastructure when interests and motivations align. We want a government that directs collective resources and energy toward an agenda that serves people and the planet. This will require governing power and authority wielded for the public interest, with a focus on jobs with dignity, environmental stewardship and a green transition, and robust social welfare programs. This can only be accomplished with a means of democratizing investment decisions and developing a planning calculus that is insulated from corporate influence and so as to balance multiple, sometimes conflicting, objectives.