Its a pretty egregious procedural oversight if you want to chalk it up to that.

For sure this is being politicized, for example claiming that the area was reduced to sand due to an overheated data center market. But to clear the land before doing legally required environmental impact studies is a pretty obvious mistake, and frankly I'm not sure how you'd even have landed on a plan for land clearing before doing said study if its required. How would you know what areas to clear, for example?

Yeah, that is not procedural oversight. That's simply not following the law, plain and simple.