Save Jackson Park

A data center company wants to build on land inside a national park. So they handed the park's top official a map of how to divide it up, and NPS's official boundary lines changed to match it. Here's the plan. Highland Digital wants to build four 100 foot data centers and a substation in Triangle, Virginia, right next to Quantico Creek, a waterway that feeds directly into the Potomac River. Their genius move? Swap 73 acres of wetlands they can't build on anyway, for 36 acres of forest they actually can, forest that's currently protected federal parkland. Call it an even trade if you want. It isn't. Nobody's said how much water four data centers this size would need, where it would come from, or where the wastewater would go. That's not a detail. That's an open question nobody in charge has bothered to answer yet. Why this land specifically? Existing high voltage transmission lines already run through the area. For a data center, that's the expensive part solved for free, so they're trading wetlands they can't build on anyway for forest they can clear. Can you believe this isn't even their first attempt? Highland Digital already tried this exact same data center, on this exact same site, at the county level. Severe public backlash forced them to withdraw their special use permit in May. So instead of taking no for an answer, they went straight to the federal government instead. Here's what it looks like from where I sit: when the public got a say, they said no. So now it's happening somewhere the public doesn't get a say. Nobody's going to come out and admit that's the strategy. But that's exactly what's happened so far. To make that happen, they hired Jeff Small, a former senior Interior Department official from Trump's first term, as their lobbyist. Meetings between Highland Digital and the park's top official started back in May 2025. By the time the story broke, Rep. Vindman (D-VA) had already been asking the Park Service whether it even has the legal authority to make this exchange without congressional approval at all. An independent analyst who reviewed the deal said: even though the Park Service technically gains more acreage, "the developer comes out ahead." That's not just about acreage. It's about what's actually on that acreage. This park is a designated Important Birding Area, home to 129 species of birds. Doesn't matter anymore. Not to this administration. A mother bird could come back to find her nest gone, her chicks gone, the whole tree gone, and legally, under the rule they just finalized, that's not "harm." Not anymore. Long before any of this, this park was called Chopawamsic, an Algonquian word meaning "divided streams." The Doeg people lived along these waters, and archaeologists have found their camps and tools along Quantico Creek, buried in the soil for over 10,000 years. They never got a say in what happened to this land either. This isn't happening in isolation. In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to put data centers on federal land, and to skip full environmental review, the same review that would normally catch exactly these kinds of water and habitat concerns. One year later, this same administration finalized a rule removing "harm" from the ESA. And they plan on using both of those tools right here, at Prince William Forest Park. This is how it works. Quiet meetings, informal agreements, deals shaped long before the public ever gets a say. We've seen this exact playbook before, water rights secured, meters tampered with, all before anyone outside the room even knew to ask a question. It's the same playbook in Texas right now, where Musk's SpaceX is angling for 775 acres of a wildlife refuge that's home to endangered ocelots. Prince William Forest Park may be next in line. We have to guard our public lands, because this administration is attacking them, one quiet meeting at a time. #DemsUnited