Key facts
- The Senate was set to hold an initial procedural vote on Monday, November 9, 2026, on the 417-page Baaja bill.
- The bill is sponsored by two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate.
- Trump urged all senators to vote for the bill.
- Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse said they had the votes to pass the bill.
- The bill would narrow reviews under Nepa, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act.
- Rhodium Group analysis found domestic emissions would fall if Baaja passes; Purdue's Kevin Kircher found they would rise.
The US Senate was set on Monday, November 9, 2026, to hold an initial procedural vote on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs act (Baaja), a 417-page bill aimed at speeding up construction of large infrastructure projects, from fossil fuel pipelines to transmission lines that would add more clean energy to the grid. The bill would roll back environmental and social protections, including changes to the National Environmental Policy Act (Nepa), the National Historic Preservation Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act, and would limit tribal consultation. Climate advocates were split over the bill.
Trump urged all senators to vote for the measure, which is sponsored by two Republicans and two Democrats. After last week's "blue wave" elections, some environmental and tribal advocates called on Democratic leadership to slow the bill. Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, and the ACLU came out against it. Indigenous groups held a press conference on Friday calling on senators to vote against Baaja because it would weaken the federal government's legal obligation to consult tribes on projects affecting them.
"This is such an existential threat to Indian country," said Mark Macarro, president of the National Congress of American Indians. Protesters rallied outside Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer's building on Friday over concerns that the bill could boost datacenters. "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 bill's proponents still have time to push it through the Senate because Democrats elected in the blue wave will not take their seats until January. House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, expected to be House speaker in the new Congress, said the bill "falls short in several areas", including failing to protect tribal sovereignty, and said he would not "rubber-stamp legislation without more constructive involvement with our caucus".
On Monday, Democratic sponsors Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse said they had the votes to pass the bill. Heinrich said they 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," Heinrich said. Whitehouse 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.
Baaja's proponents say it is needed because building large projects in America takes too long and the bill shortens timelines. The bill simplifies federal rules for building interstate transmission lines, narrows what gets reviewed under the National Historic Preservation Act, limits tribal consultation, limits the use of the Clean Water Act, shortens timelines for the Endangered Species Act, limits how the executive branch can interfere with federal permitting, and makes big changes to Nepa, including what requires Nepa review and who has standing to sue.
The fossil fuel industry is backing Baaja. The American Petroleum Institute (API) hailed the bill as "a historic opportunity" and called on Congress to "finish permitting reform this year". "It creates a very accelerated fast track for gas pipelines," said Earthjustice Action's president, Abbie Dillen. "The gas industry is extraordinarily excited about this because they are interested in expanding existing pipeline capacity to get more liquefied natural gas out for export, and to be feeding power-hungry datacenters with gas."
The bill could help pave the way for the Constitution gas pipeline that Williams Companies is trying to build through New York. The state denied the project's water quality permit in 2016, but the company has revived the project under the Trump administration. The proposed pipeline could benefit from the bill's changes to the Clean Water Act. Baaja could also enable construction of gas pipelines in the west; fossil fuel advocacy group Western States and Tribal Nations wants to build gas pipelines to feed domestic datacenters and export LNG from the west coast. During a 3 November election day meeting with New York's Sweetwater county board of commissioners, the advocacy 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."
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 necessary transmission lines to bring clean energy where it is needed. Interstate transmission lines can take a decade to get built, and projects also 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. Ben King, energy and climate director at Rhodium Group, said Baaja would reform the interconnection queue process and unlock the ability to build needed transmission. "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. "[Baaja] sets up the ability to build stuff more quickly for when the next wave of climate policy happens."
Many experts have modeled what the bill would do to emissions, but there is uncertainty. Rhodium Group's analysis found that domestic emissions go down if Baaja passes. Another model by Purdue engineering professor Kevin Kircher found it would increase domestic emissions. Kircher said the optimistic case for Baaja is that a huge amount of clean energy is ready to go, and if long queues and regulations are removed, clean energy wins on economics. "I think that understanding is outdated," 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. (PJM's queue as of 3 August looked quite gassy.)
King 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. API might have a different perspective – they might bet that there's more room for them to grow." Kircher emphasized that the various models have not had time for peer review since the bill was first introduced on 30 October 2026. The report did not give an outcome for the Monday vote.