Kathryn Guerra

By Kathryn Guerra For nearly a year, Public Citizen’s TCEQ Watchdog Campaign has tracked the enforcement case backlog of the state’s environmental regulator. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) has an extensive backlog of delayed, unresolved cases alleging environmental harm spanning 10 years, leaving communities waiting for accountability that may never come. The enforcement backlog began steadily growing in 2021 and reached a peak of 1,700 cases in early 2024.

On enforcement, the picture is no less grim. TCEQ entered 2025 with a backlog of 1,432 enforcement cases. It resolved 39. At that pace, the backlog would take 35 years to clear. TCEQ leaders acknowledge this is the result of batching together different complaints against the same company so they’re all resolved at once — a process that can delay the outcome by years.

The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene on Sept. 23. Contributor Kathryn Guerra writes that state regulators aren’t keeping up with the pace of data center construction. (Shelby Tauber/REUTERS) Artificial intelligence data center development is rapidly expanding in Texas, but so too are concerns about whether the state’s environmental agency, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, can effectively regulate the industry.