Sierra Club will be engaging with congressional champions over the next month to ensure that we can accelerate the deployment of clean energy without undermining key environmental and public health protections for communities.
Since last week’s Senate introduction of the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA), a 400+ page bill intended to speed the federal permitting process for infrastructure and energy projects, my Sierra Club colleagues and I, along with the rest of the clean energy and environmental community, have been poring over the text of the bill.
America’s energy demands are higher than ever and it’s never been more critical that we build as much clean energy as possible, as quickly as possible. At the Sierra Club, we work every day to remove barriers for clean energy, champion great projects, and ensure it’s clean energy, not fossil fuels, that grow to power our communities. We do the critical work of both unlocking new clean energy, like supporting offshore wind, while planning the phase out of harmful and polluting fossil fuels. This work literally saves lives and it’s work to be proud of.
We are evaluating BAAJA through the lens of what we are fighting for in the world: access to affordable clean energy, clean air, clean water, public lands, and thriving communities. Contained in the text are policies we’ve championed before, like stronger federal authority to approve much-needed transmission lines, as well as policies we’ve advocated against, like handing endangered species protections over to hostile states.
Our evaluation of this bill is happening in the context of the most antagonistic federal administration to our environmental values in history. The majority of Americans are concerned about climate change and support development of clean energy over fossil fuels, and yet, for the last 18 months, the Trump administration has engaged in a relentless onslaught of attacks, from shrinking public lands, opening them to more drilling and mining, cancelling or stalling clean energy projects, bailing out coal plants, revoking the Roadless Rule to put forests at risk, and using taxpayer funds to turn a wind farm into a gas project, just to name a few examples. The same Republicans touting BAAJA voted to withdraw federal tax credits and funding for the very kinds of clean energy projects that we need to lower costs and create jobs.
Despite this backdrop of attacks, we have every intention of staying in this conversation as we dive deeper into BAAJA and understand its impact, because nothing matters more than getting this right. Over the next month, Sierra Club will be actively engaging with members of Congress back in their home districts and with their staff on Capitol Hill to uplift the pieces of this bill that would help boost clean energy and lower energy bills, as well as working to address troubling provisions that go too far to weaken key protections for communities, water, and wildlife. Here’s what we’ll be discussing in those meetings:
Three Green Flags
Provisions in this bill would make long-overdue changes to protect consumers and level the playing field for proposed transmission so it would no longer be harder to build a multi-state transmission line than a methane gas pipeline.
- Transmission planning: For the first time ever, this bill would require regional grid operators to plan together, with a focus on reliability and affordability. It would create more efficient planning processes that run in parallel, which will lead to clean energy getting on the grid faster and fewer canceled projects, especially for the big, interregional lines that we need but are often undervalued by individual states or regions.
- FERC backstop authority: We will finally give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission authority to approve critical transmission lines if state processes fail to conclude after one year. Currently, multi-state transmission lines can often take more than 10 years to be planned, approved, and built. This would speed up that process, unlocking more clean energy, preventing states from exercising vetoes over critical infrastructure, connecting the areas where renewables produce electricity with the population centers that use it, and ensuring a more affordable and reliable grid for everyone. The Natural Gas Act streamlined interstate gas pipeline permitting at FERC many decades ago. It is long overdue to bring interstate transmission into closer alignment, especially as demand for electricity grows.
- Ratepayer protection: BAAJA would require data centers to pay the full cost of connecting to a grid, as well as the cost of using the grid, to ensure that regular customers won’t be stuck footing the bill. This is a meaningful approach to ratepayer protection that goes further than just paying for the incremental new infrastructure but also the costs of the existing grid that we all use.
Four Red Flags
It will be no surprise that we are concerned with the many ways BAAJA weakens environmental laws. It’s not simply that changes are suggested; there are actually some we think will, on balance, provide the kinds of certainty and speed that are missing from current permitting processes. But BAAJA does not just contain mere procedural adjustments. It includes the hollowing out of court authority, ever-higher burdens for states to protect their natural resources, and far-reaching consequences for the ability to govern energy infrastructure in the future.
- Eliminating the power of the Courts to act on legal violations: As written, BAAJA would make it harder for communities to provide input or challenge dangerous projects that could directly harm them. The most concerning changes to both the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act are new restrictions on the power of the courts at a time when they have proved to be a necessary backstop to a lawless administration. BAAJA would limit the court’s powers to stop a project that was allowed to move forward on the basis of an unlawful environmental review or faulty clean water act analysis. Thus, even if the environmental review was unlawful, the project would not be stopped, essentially rendering the environmental review process unnecessary as a prerequisite for construction.
- Removing states’ ability to protect their own waters: Currently, under the Clean Water Act, states have the power to say no to projects that would cause harm to local water quality, including sources of drinking water. BAAJA would limit states’ ability to protect their water quality by forcing them to rush these reviews and by shifting the burden to the state to demonstrate likely harm and the least burdensome mitigation, rather than requiring the developer to show that they won’t do damage.
- Handing endangered species consultation to states: The Endangered Species Act is one of the most successful environmental laws on the books, preventing 99 percent of listed species from going extinct. A key to that success is Section 7 of the law, which requires that a federal agency or permittee consult with US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Marine Fisheries Service, or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration when it funds or carries out an action affecting threatened or endangered species. This process is essential to ensuring an action does not jeopardize listed species and informs necessary steps to avoid or minimize impacts to species. Handing this process over to the states could have disastrous consequences, as state wildlife agencies often lack the required staff, funding, and expertise to undertake a federal consultation. Congress deliberately and expressly created Section 7 consultation as a federal process, and a state assumption program would only increase inefficiency and open up consultation to politicization.
- Permitting “certainty” at odds with environmental standards: Provisions of BAAJA aim to create certainty in permitting, which is a laudable goal in the face of permits and approvals revoked and stalled for clean energy projects, including those under construction and nearly complete. While these provisions may prohibit the Trump administration’s ability to revoke future permits for clean energy projects, they do not address projects already revoked and we fear these provisions could result in project lock-in for dangerous projects that receive a rubber stamp. BAAJA creates benchmarks against which to evaluate permitting discrimination, but it starts from a status quo that is deeply hostile to clean energy and favorable to fossil fuels, and creates pathways for new legal challenges by energy developers that allow for damages that can easily total billions of dollars that would be paid by taxpayers.
Right now, Congress should be doing everything it can to remove hurdles and barriers to clean energy, but we reject the premise that growing our clean energy economy can only come alongside weaker protections for water and wildlife. While orienting our organization and movement toward building the good, like wind, solar, geothermal, and batteries, we must be clear-eyed that these reforms can’t guarantee the transmission and clean energy outcomes we desperately need with an administration hell-bent on stopping affordable clean energy from winning the race for the future of the electric grid.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. If Congress fails to get this right, it could mean continued reliance on fossil fuels, higher costs for families, and ever-worsening extreme weather events. But with the right policies, we can accelerate the deployment of clean energy without undermining key environmental and public health protections for communities.