For Native people in the Golden State, it’s going to be an autumn of mixed messages from the governor’s mansion. This month, Gavin Newsom will decide whether a bill confers California’s 109 Native nations with a government-to-government seat at the table on water policy, the same month it’s anticipated he’ll sign data center legislation—a pair of bills named S.B. 886 and S.B. 887—that gives them no seat at all.
The Karuk Tribe, one of the water bill’s (also known as A.B. 2218) co-sponsors, has actively pushed Newsom to sign it specifically because of the difference it was built to make: The bill “would statutorily require state agencies to both recognize and address water-related inequities caused by state-sanctioned acts of termination, removal, and assimilation, and to consult with tribes when contemplating water-related decisions, regardless of whether environmental review is otherwise required,” said Kenneth Brink, the tribe’s vice chairman.
But the enhanced standing that tribes are set to receive with the passage of A.B. 2218 is set to be eroded by the forthcoming data center bills. Honor the Earth’s data center tracker has mapped at least 106 proposed or operational data centers on or near Native land—exposure reaching a meaningful slice of the country’s 575 federally recognized tribes. California’s tribal consultation gap is a preview of what other tribes can expect elsewhere, and Newsom’s handling of it is being watched by Native voters nationally, not just in-state. Native voters are a significant bloc in swing states like Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada.
Some tribes aren’t waiting to find out how this plays out. The Cherokee Nation, Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Seminole Nation have already banned hyperscale data centers outright, using their own sovereign authority rather than a tribal consultation process that assumes a seat at someone else’s table.
“California’s laws will create a national model,” says Thad Kousser, a UC San Diego political science professor. That means whatever gap exists in the state’s approach to tribal consultation won’t stay contained to California.
If you want a close-up view of how that structural gap in tribal consultation actually works on the ground, California’s wranglings serve as a prime example. A data center headed for a city goes through a public permitting process with built-in entry points—hearings, comments periods, a mayor’s office to lobby. A project destined for land near a reservation has no equivalent forcing function: Consultation happens government to government, tribe by tribe, and only when a company or agency initiates it—ex post. “By the time that Tribes and the public know what’s going on, these companies have already put way too much money into it,” says Jessie Barrington, an attorney whose firm works on tribal consultation law. “The consultation is just an afterthought. It’s just to check a box.”
Barrington poses a question that is simpler than anything in the data center bills’ actual text: What’s the downside of working with tribes from day one—ex ante? As it stands, by the time tribes even catch wind of a project, it’s already a fait accompli.
In 2025 in San Benito, California Attorney General Rob Bonta intervened in a lawsuit that challenged a massive 108,425-square-foot development approved without tribal consultation. The chosen site sits within Juristac, a tribal cultural landscape meaningful to the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band. Bonta actually argued that the county’s environmental review violated the California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, along with the tribal consultation requirement mandated by law. No data center in the state has faced that fight yet, but every one of the state’s dozens of pending projects sits one skipped consultation away from that very same legal exposure.
It’s not that the state has no framework for this. California has, de jure, a tribal consultation framework; tribes experience it as an afterthought when a project triggers environmental review.
This year’s water bill arrives alongside the broader reckoning set in motion by Newsom’s 2019 California Truth and Healing Council, or CTHC. But it appears to do something the environmental-review trigger doesn’t: It builds government-to-government consultation directly in its own text.
To his credit, that Newsom created the CTHC paved the way for a number of meaningful land returns with outsize positive impacts on the environment. In 2024, Newsom returned 2,800 acres to the Shasta Indian Nation, rehabilitating 300 miles of salmon habitat. The following year, he conferred on the Tule River Indian Tribe control over 17,000 acres of their ancestral territory and reintroduced tule elk. There are also pending land returns to the Washoe Tribe and Esselen Tribe.
But the pending data center legislation cuts against this established trend. Today, tribes receive no mention in State Senator Steve Padilla’s own account of what these bills do. He describes them as protecting ratepayers and communities from an industry he says shouldn’t get “zero regulation.” But nowhere in that framing, or the bills themselves, do the words “Native American,” “Indigenous,” or “government-to-government” appear. That’s notable given his own district: Padilla represents Imperial County, home to the Fort Yuma Quechan and Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, where a proposed one million-square-foot data center on former farmland is now tied up in litigation over exactly the kind of issue that environmental review consultation is supposed to strengthen.
It’s also one of the two California sites that a Next10–Santa Clara University study flagged as having the most acute overlap of water scarcity and social vulnerability from data center development. The county draws from the already-strained Colorado River, the identical water source at the center of decades of tribal water rights disputes in the region. The industry Padilla is trying to regulate is already generating the very fights for which his bills fail to account.
Neither bill closes the actual gap. S.B. 887 does actually close a real loophole: It bars data centers from using categorical exemptions to skip environmental review altogether, which should mean more projects, not fewer, run through the CEQA process that can trigger tribal consultation under A.B. 52. But A.B. 52 is only invoked if a tribe finds out about a project and requests review, project by project, tribe by tribe. Neither of the data center bills really builds anything like what the water bill accomplishes, which establishes a standing government-to-government consultation requirement, written into the statute itself, that isn’t contingent upon catching a filing in time. That the data center legislation closes a loophole is laudable; that it leaves the basic architecture of consultation exactly as passive as it’s always been is not.
S.B. 886, meanwhile, would force data centers over 25 megawatts to cover the full cost they put on utility customers, including a share of the fees that fund wildfire mitigation and environmental programs, a tacit admission that the industry’s power demands carry real fire risk on a grid with a documented history of igniting some of the state’s deadliest wildfires. But nowhere in that legislation is that risk connected to Native nations, whose traditional fire stewardship practices California has spent years, and other legislation, trying to reincorporate.
Why talk with tribes so late in the process? Doing so doesn’t just hurt Native communities and worsen environmental outcomes; it corrodes already fragile public trust in data centers in a state that already leans pro-environment and, to a lesser extent, pro–Native sovereignty. According to a July 2026 Public Policy Institute of California poll, 73 percent of Californians oppose data center construction in their own communities, rendering data centers about as popular in the state Newsom governs as ICE or the ongoing immigration crackdown.
Addressing tribal consultation almost entirely after the fact doesn’t merely reflect a moral failing; it’s a real financial risk to companies, as well. Bad-faith assumptions about what consultation will produce tend to be a more expensive bet: Companies that skip the chance to broker a détente early are gambling on one being forced on them later, in court, on worse terms.
A seat at the table isn’t a courtesy. Standing Rock showed the country what happens when Natives don’t receive their due. And while Native voters may not be tracking a California data center bill today, a governor who may want their trust in a potential presidential run in 2028 is building his California record in front of the same movement—moratoriums in Oklahoma, organizing in Arizona and Nevada, land defense everywhere data centers touch tribal ground—that’s already treating this fight as a national concern. That’s friction a presidential campaign can’t outrun forever. If Newsom ignores 109 tribes by leaving tribal consultation out of this bill that otherwise protects ratepayers, along the way to pursuing his well-known presidential ambitions, he may end up hoist with his own petard.
