WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Air Force fighter jets intercepted a civilian aircraft flying in the temporarily restricted airspace near Donald Trump’s Florida home Sunday, bringing the number of violations to more than 20 since the president took office on Jan. 20.

North American Aerospace Defense Command said in a statement that Sunday’s incident, which took place as Trump finished a round of golf at his West Palm Beach golf course, saw F-16s deploy flares to get the attention of the civilian pilot. Jets also conducted an intercept on Saturday morning shortly after Trump arrived at the course from his private Mar-a-Lago club and residence.

The airspace intrusions in the heavily congested south Florida airspace have prompted fighter jet intercepts but did not alter Trump’s schedule or impact his security, officials said. NORAD says the flares may have been visible from the ground but that they burn out quickly and don’t pose danger.

Federal officials maintain a permanent flight restriction over Trump’s club that expands to a radius of 30 nautical miles when the president is in residence.

Violations, and intercepts, are relatively routine, but NORAD is raising alarm over the frequency of the intrusions since Trump’s inauguration, saying it has responded to more than 20 incidents and blames civilian pilots for not following regulations requiring them to check for airspace restrictions before taking off.

“Adherence to TFR procedures is essential to ensure flight safety, national security, and the security of the President,” Gen. Gregory Guillot, the commander of NORAD and US Northern Command said in a statement. “The procedures are not optional, and the excessive number of recent TFR violations indicates many civil aviators are not reading Notice to Airmen, or NOTAMS, before each flight as required by the FAA, and has resulted in multiple responses by NORAD fighter aircraft to guide offending aircraft out of the TFR.”

Zeke Miller, The Associated Press

DENVER (AP) — For decades, conservatives in Congress have talked about the need to cut government deeply, but they have always pulled back from mandating specific reductions, fearful of voter backlash.

Now, President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to make major cuts in government through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, run by billionaire Elon Musk — an initiative led by an unelected businessman who’s unlikely to ever run for office and was appointed by a termed-out president who no longer needs to face voters again.

The dynamic of cutting government while also cutting out those who answer to voters has alarmed even some fiscal conservatives who have long pushed for Congress to reduce spending through the means laid out in the Constitution: a system of checks and balances that includes lawmakers elected across the country working with the president.

“Some members of the Trump administration got frustrated that Congress won’t cut spending and decided to go around them,” said Jessica Reidl of the conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute. Now, she said, “no one who has to face voters again is determining spending levels.”

That may be changing.

On Thursday, facing mounting court challenges to the legality of Musk ordering layoffs, Trump told his Cabinet that Musk could only make recommendations about government reductions. And there were more signs that Congress, after sitting on the sidelines for nearly the first two months of Trump’s administration, is slowly getting back into the game.

On Wednesday, Republican senators told Musk that he needed to ask Congress to approve specific cuts, which they can do on an up-or-down, filibuster-free vote through a process known as recission.

Senators said Musk had never heard of the process before. That was a striking admission given that it’s the only way for the executive branch to legally refuse to spend money that Congress has given it.

“To make it real, to make it go beyond the moment of the day, it needs to come back in the form of a rescission package,” said Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, a longtime advocate of spending reductions who said he introduced the idea of recission to Musk during the lunch meeting of the GOP caucus.

Of course, letting Congress have the final word may be constitutional, but it would open up the process to individual representatives or senators balking at cuts because of home-state interests or other concerns, as some have already. But Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and an economist in George W. Bush’s administration, said that “messy” process is a superior one.

“There’s always this instinct in people to insulate decisions from politics,” Holtz-Eakin said. “It’s a mistake in a democracy. It’s really messy. You’re not going to get the cleanliness of a corporate reorganization.”

Riedl noted she has advocated for deep cuts for decades, but there’s a reason Congress has balked.

“If Congress won’t pass certain spending cuts, it’s because the American people don’t want it enough,” she said. “If I want spending levels to be cut, it’s my job to persuade the people of America to agree with me.”

Trump and his supporters argue they did just that in the last presidential election when he promised to shake up Washington: “The people elected me to do the job and I’m doing it,” Trump said during his address to Congress last week.

A corporate-style approach to government has long been the goal of conservatives, especially one segment that has recently called for a more CEO-style leader who is less tied down by democratic commitments to voters. Musk has embodied that, bringing the same disruptive, cost-cutting zeal he brought to his private companies. Some of his DOGE moves mirrored steps he took to slash the social media site Twitter, including the email offering buyouts, both times called “Fork in the Road.”

Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, said the effort seems more destructive than just an attempt to shrink government in ways conservatives have long advocated.

“It is usurping the role of Congress on spending and program design, using cuts as a backdoor way to impound and close agencies created by Congress,” Moynihan said. “It is implementing an unprecedented scale of disruption.”

Grover Norquist, an anti-tax activist whose pledge to make government small enough to “drown it in a bathtub” has made him an icon for small-government conservatives, cheered the DOGE project. He said Congress has to authorize any real reductions, but hoped that DOGE’s cuts show the legislative branch that voters will not panic when government is shrunk.

“If we do something for three years, they’ll make it the law,” Norquist said of Congress. “They’ll see it’s safe, they’ll see it’s successful. They’ll come in and put their name on it.”

Norquist acknowledged that Congress has repeatedly balked at the level of cuts that he would like to see, even under unified Republican control. He asserted that “95%” of Republicans support such reductions but “that wasn’t enough to get it across the finish line” in an era where the majority party usually only has a razor-thin margin of control in either chamber.

The past nearly half-century of politics has been defined by conservatives pledging to cut government spending, only to see it continue to grow. Republican Ronald Reagan swept into the presidency in 1980 pledging to cut government, but when he left eight years later its size had increased. The trend continued through Trump’s first term and during Democrat Joe Biden’s presidency.

Now, however, Trump will not face voters again, despite occasional quips about seeking a constitutionally prohibited third term. He has been open about his grudge against the federal bureaucracy, which he blames for many of his troubles during his initial four years in office.

“I don’t think previous presidents have had the same animus towards the federal government this one has,” Holtz-Eakin said.

He noted that Trump has launched a second cost-cutting initiative through traditional channels — his own Office of Management and Budget, which asked agencies to prepare for mass layoffs. That, Holtz-Eakin said, makes those coming reductions likelier to stick than DOGE cuts.

Holtz-Eakin said there are initial signs of voter discontent over the pace, depth and chaos of the cuts. “The usual way you visit that on a president is you wipe out his party in the midterms,” Holtz-Eakin said. “You never evade the voters.”

Nicholas Riccardi, The Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Facing projections of spiking energy demand, U.S. states are pressing for ways to build new power plants faster as policymakers increasingly worry about protecting their residents and economies from rising electric bills, power outages and other consequences of falling behind Big Tech in a race for electricity.

Some states are dangling financial incentives. Others are undoing decades of regulatory structures in what they frame as a race to serve the basic needs of residents, avoid a catastrophe and keep their economies on track in a fast-electrifying society.

“I don’t think we’ve seen anything quite like this,” said Todd Snitchler, president and CEO of the Electric Power Supply Association, which represents independent power plant owners.

The spike in demand for electricity is being driven, in large part, by the artificial intelligence race as tech companies are snapping up real estate and seeking power to feed their energy-hungry data centers. Federal incentives to rebuild the manufacturing sector also are helping drive demand.

In some cases, Big Tech is arranging its own power projects.

But energy companies also are searching for ways to capitalize on opportunities afforded by the first big increase in electricity consumption in a couple of decades, and that is pitting state political leaders against each other for the new jobs and investment that come with new power plants.

Governors want to fast-track power plants

Moves by states come as a fossil fuel – friendly President Donald Trump and Republican-controlled Congress take power in Washington, D.C., slashing regulations around oil and gas, boostingdrilling opportunities and encouraging the construction of pipelines and refineries that can export liquefied natural gas.

States are seeking action, with the National Governors Association asking Congress to make it easier and faster to build power plants and criticizing the U.S. as among the slowest developed nations in approving energy projects.

But there may be less that the federal government can do right away about a looming power shortage, since greenlighting power plants to feed the electric grid is largely the province of state regulators and regional grid operators.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro wants to establish an agency to fast-track the construction of big power plants and dangle hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks for projects providing electricity to the grid.

The state, and the country, needs more power plants to win the artificial intelligence race and provide reliable and affordable power to residents, said Shapiro, who suggested Pennsylvania may leave the regional grid operated by PJM Interconnection in favor of “going it alone.”

“It has proven over the last number of years too darn hard to get enough new generation projects off the ground because of how slow PJM‘s queue is,” Shapiro told a news conference on Feb. 27.

Indiana, Michigan and Louisiana are exploring ideas to attract nuclear power while Maryland lawmakers are floating ideas about commissioning the construction of a new power plant there.

In Ohio, a lawmaker wants to restrict the influence of electric utilities in hopes of giving independent power producers more incentive to build power plants to feed the state’s fast-growing tech sector.

The bill, which awaits a vote, won the support of the Ohio Consumers’ Counsel, the state’s residential ratepayer watchdog, and business groups whose members care about electric prices. However, it split the energy sector between companies operating in competitive markets and those operating under state utility monopolies.

States competing against each other

In Missouri, utilities including Ameren and Evergy, as well as the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, labor unions and the state’s top utility regulator are backing legislation to repeal a nearly half-century old law preventing utilities from charging customers to build a power plant until it is operational.

The law was approved in a 1976 voter referendum when states were looking to hedge against utilities saddling ratepayers with financing upfront, potentially bloated, inefficient or, worse, aborted power projects.

Consumer and environmental groups protested the bill, saying it would result in new natural gas plants that are likelier to be more costly to ratepayers.

Last year, similar legislation passed almost unanimously in Kansas, along with companion legislation extending tax breaks to new power plants.

Within months, Evergy announced alongside the state’s leaders that it would build two 705-megawatt natural gas plants and said the legislation will “help Kansas compete with other states for investment and ultimately save customers money.”

John Coffman, the utility consumer counsel for the Consumers Council of Missouri, said utilities are playing the two states, Missouri and Kansas, against each other and were planning to build the power plants anyway.

But, he said, “They’re just looking for opportunities to squeeze more money out of the process.”

Energy companies see an opportunity

Snitchler said action is being spurred by states realizing that longstanding power reserves are dwindling, especially as coal-fired and nuclear power plants retire, and now all sorts of power companies are leaping at the chance to make money.

A pitfall he sees in the race to build plants is an undoing of protections that some states once adopted to shield ratepayers and put the risk of building expensive power projects onto corporate shareholders.

“The problem, of course, is it shifts the risk back on the people who perhaps should not be bearing it,” Snitchler said.

A Pennsylvania state lawmaker, Sen. Gene Yaw, wants to set up a massive power plant-financing fund like Texas, which established a $10 billion low-interest loan program after the state was wracked by a deadly winter blackout in 2021.

Yaw, a Republican, has no misgivings about Pennsylvania helping finance power plants. Even by conservative estimates, the state will need dozens more power plants to meet projections of rising demand, he said.

“And what do we have underway or planned right now? Nothing,” Yaw said. “And we haven’t built anything since 2019. So we’ve got to do something to encourage people to come here and build in Pennsylvania just to maintain the status quo.”

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Follow Marc Levy on X at https://x.com/timelywriter.

Marc Levy, The Associated Press

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — A new law in South Dakota prohibiting the use of eminent domain to acquire land for carbon capture pipelines raises questions about the viability of a proposed 2,500 mile (4,023-kilometer) project snaking through five Midwest states.

Summit Carbon Solutions, the company behind the estimated $8.9 billion pipeline, vowed to keep pursuing the project despite South Dakota Gov. Larry Rhoden’s announcement Thursday that he had signed a bill into law that will make routing the line much more difficult. The law bans Summit from forcing South Dakota landowners to allow the pipeline through their property.

Plans call for the pipeline to carry greenhouse gas emissions from more than 50 ethanol plants in Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota to a spot in North Dakota, where it would be permanently stored underground.

Legal action is possible

It’s unclear whether Summit will pursue legal action but the company said in a statement that “all options are on the table” and the project “moves forward” in other states. The company promised it would have more news soon.

Large pipeline projects typically rely on eminent domain, with companies arguing that even if most landowners agree to grant access to their property, a project can be scuttled if only a few refuse.

Summit says the company, which has secured over 2,700 easements across the region, has approval for routes in Iowa and North Dakota and a leg in Minnesota.

Can the line be routed through Minnesota?

The current proposed route would cut through nearly 700 miles (1,126.5 kilometers) of South Dakota before entering North Dakota, so rerouting to the east through Minnesota would be a big challenge.

A Summit spokesperson did not respond to questions Friday about whether the company would consider a new route.

The sponsor of the South Dakota bill, Republican Rep. Karla Lems, said Summit could either reroute its pipeline through Minnesota into North Dakota or “negotiate with landowners in South Dakota” and go around opponents.

Gov. Rhoden said the South Dakota law wasn’t intended to kill the project and suggested Summit see it as “an opportunity to reset.”

Minnesota is a relatively small part of Summit’s overall project. The only segment approved in the state is a 28-mile (45-kilometer) leg from an ethanol plant near Fergus Falls to the North Dakota border. Summit’s project also includes two legs in southern Minnesota that would go into Iowa.

A Minnesota Public Utilities Commission spokesperson did not respond to phone or email messages.

The pipeline’s importance to the ethanol industry

The country’s transition to electric vehicles has been slower than many people expected, but most think a shift away from internal combustion engines will eventually happen.

Nearly 40% of the nation’s corn crop is brewed into ethanol, which is blended into most gasoline sold in the U.S. Midwest farmers and the ethanol industry therefore see it as essential to have new markets as less of the fuel additive goes to power cars.

They see passenger jet fuel as a potentially huge new market for ethanol. However, under current rules the process for turning ethanol into aviation fuel would need to emit less carbon dioxide to qualify for tax breaks intended to reduce greenhouses.

The carbon capture pipeline is a key part of achieving those goals, Iowa Renewable Fuels Association Executive Director Monte Shaw said.

Walt Wendland, who runs an ethanol plant in Onida, South Dakota, said the “ethanol industry is a margin business” and the new state law will put South Dakota ethanol producers at a disadvantage.

“Ever since I built a plant, I never wanted an advantage, just don’t put me at a disadvantage,” Wendland said.

Will the pipeline ever be built?

It has been four years since Summit proposed building the pipeline, along with two other companies that later abandoned their plans. It has been a challenging process for Summit, which dealt with lawsuits in Nebraska and elsewhere, opposition before a regulatory commission in Iowa and now the eminent domain ban in South Dakota.

In its statement, Summit expressed optimism about the future but didn’t offer specifics about how it could build a pipeline without eminent domain authority in South Dakota.

Since the pipeline was proposed, the federal government’s approach to climate change also has changed dramatically. Democratic President Joe Biden increased tax incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to encourage carbon capture as an effort to slow climate change.

However, Republican President Donald Trump has emphasized the need for more oil and gas drilling and coal mining, and has put far less emphasis on alternative energy. Trump has not indicated whether his views will lead to changing federal policy regarding carbon capture pipelines.

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Dura reported from Bismarck, North Dakota.

Sarah Raza And Jack Dura, The Associated Press