Opponents say Baaja would accelerate gas pipelines and ICE detention centers
The dispute over the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act centers on a trade built into the 417-page Senate bill. It would make it easier to build large infrastructure projects in the United States, everything from fossil fuel pipelines to transmission lines that would add more clean energy to the grid, by narrowing the environmental and social protections that govern federal permitting. The Guardian described climate advocates as torn over a measure that would boost infrastructure projects while weakening environmental laws.
Baaja would narrow the definition of a major federal action that triggers review under the National Environmental Policy Act and effectively eliminate the authority of courts to enforce NEPA compliance. Earthjustice Action president Abbie Dillen said the bill would take the last pieces of NEPA that are very relevant in an administration like this. The measure would also limit the federal obligation to consult tribes on projects that affect them.
Proponents say large projects take too long to build in the United States. Baaja would simplify federal rules for building interstate transmission lines, narrow what gets reviewed under the National Historic Preservation Act, limit tribal consultation, limit the use of the Clean Water Act, shorten timelines for the Endangered Species Act, limit how the executive branch can interfere with federal permitting, and change what requires NEPA review and who has standing to sue.
Indigenous groups held a press conference on Friday and called on senators to vote against Baaja because it would weaken the federal government’s legal obligation to consult tribes. “This is such an existential threat to Indian country,” said Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, expected to be the House speaker in the new Congress, said the bill “falls short in several areas,” including its failure to protect tribal sovereignty, and that he would not “rubber-stamp legislation without more constructive involvement with our caucus.”
Models disagree about the effect on emissions. Rhodium Group’s analysis found that domestic emissions go down if Baaja passes, while a model by Purdue engineering professor Kevin Kircher found the bill would increase domestic emissions. Many experts have modeled the question, and Kircher emphasized that the various models have not had time for peer review since the bill was first introduced on 30 September. “We need to have some humility in recognizing that the process of taking that 417 pages of super dense legal text and mapping it … is extremely complicated and full of uncertainties,” he said.
What the bill does to emissions partly depends on what type of energy gets connected to the grid. Rhodium Group assumed, based on a report from 2025, that 85% of the capacity added to the grid would be renewables. Kircher said some grid operators have updated their queues this year to remove redundant and speculative offers. The Guardian reported that PJM’s queue as of 3 August looks quite gassy.
Ben King, energy and climate director at Rhodium Group, said the economics show an impressive decrease in the cost of renewables, while fossil fuels are not getting any cheaper. “Some of it is just a bet on what’s going to win out in the future,” he said. “Our modeling suggests that clean stuff is going to dominate energy expansion for the foreseeable future, and there might be people who have a different view on that,” King said, noting the American Petroleum Institute might bet that there is more room for fossil fuels to grow.
Kircher said the optimistic case for Baaja is that there is a huge amount of clean energy ready to go and that if long queues and regulations were removed, “level the playing field and let it rip,” clean energy wins on the economics. “I think that understanding is outdated,” he said.
Some clean energy advocates want the bill to pass because it would connect renewables to the grid. Wind, solar and battery storage are now cheap to build, but the country lacks the transmission lines needed to bring clean energy where it is needed. Interstate transmission lines can take a decade to get built, and energy projects face a bottleneck in connecting to the grid. At the end of 2025, 2,060 GW of total generation and storage capacity were waiting in a queue to connect to the grid. King said Baaja would reform the interconnection queue process and unlock the ability to build the transmission that is needed. “We’re at a pretty low point for policy support for clean [energy],” he said, referring to Trump’s repeal of clean energy tax credits, adding that the bill “sets up the ability to build stuff more quickly for when the next wave of climate policy happens.”
The NEPA changes would reach beyond energy projects. In a letter to senators, the ACLU wrote, “As written, this bill would hamper, if not altogether thwart, critical work by the ACLU and our partners to halt ICE’s dangerous expansion of immigrant detention.” Attorneys had used NEPA to block the Trump administration’s plans to convert 11 mega-warehouses into massive ICE detention centers, and the ACLU said Baaja could accelerate those development plans.
The fossil-fuel industry backs Baaja. The American Petroleum Institute hailed the bill as “a historic opportunity” and called on Congress to “finish permitting reform this year.” Dillen said the measure “creates a very accelerated fast track for gas pipelines,” pointing to gas companies’ interest in expanding existing pipeline capacity to get more liquefied natural gas out for export and to feed power-hungry datacenters with gas.
The Constitution gas pipeline that Williams Companies is trying to build through New York could benefit from the bill’s changes to the Clean Water Act. New York denied the project’s water quality permit in 2016, but the company revived the project under the Trump administration. Western States and Tribal Nations also wants to build gas pipelines to feed domestic datacenters and export LNG from the West Coast. During a 3 November election-day meeting with the Sweetwater County Board of Commissioners, the group’s president, Andrew Browning, said he was talking to lawmakers about the bill: “The permitting bill’s a huge thing … We’re going to need that for everything we’re envisioning and building out.”
Protesters rallied outside Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s building on 6 November, calling out his support for rolling back environmental laws that would increase datacenter projects. “It would be highly ironic if, having won an election where datacenter opposition was at the front and center, the first act of Congress was to make it easier to build datacenters,” said Bill McKibben.
The measure is sponsored by two Republicans and two Democrats, and Donald Trump urged all senators to vote for it. On Monday, the bill’s Democratic sponsors, Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, said they had the votes to pass it, ahead of an initial procedural Senate vote scheduled for Monday. Heinrich said the sponsors had made last-minute changes to ensure tribal consultation and believed the bill would favor renewables over fossil fuels. “If we can create an open, competitive level playing field, clean is cheap, and cheap wins in the marketplace,” he said. Whitehouse, who wore a tie with wind turbines on it, argued that passing the bill would set the stage for Democrats to work on clean energy policies next year with majorities in the House and Senate. “People should just cool their jets and have a little faith that this is not the end of the story,” he said.
After last week’s historic “blue wave” elections, some environmental and tribal advocates called on Democratic leadership to pump the brakes on the bill. Democrats elected in the blue wave will not take their seats until January, so the bill’s proponents still have time to rush it through the Senate, and technically there is time for it to pass in the House before the new Congress takes office and go to Trump. The Guardian reported that the election success for the Democrats is dialing up the political friction over the measure.
Dillen called Baaja’s passage “the single biggest overhaul” of American environmental laws since the 1970s. She acknowledged there are legitimate concerns that NEPA has been weaponized to slow down important projects, but said people have recognized that problem for years, that the law has been reformed and weakened very significantly by the Supreme Court, and that the bill would take the last pieces of it that are very relevant in an administration like this. She said further weakening of environmental regulations would embolden Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda, and pointed to his plan to allow drilling near Chaco Culture National Historic Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “Chaco Canyon is in the crosshairs,” she said. Dillen said Earthjustice remains committed to building clean energy on a meaningful timetable, but not by “running over tribes” or emboldening a president whom voters had just come out in a historic turnout to push back on.