In a 73-25 vote Monday, the U.S. Senate advanced the controversial Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, which would overhaul environmental laws and make it easier to build energy infrastructure, transmission lines and data centers
The Senate is expected to hold additional votes on the bill, referred to as “BAAJA,” next week.
Lawmakers will address amendments and vote on a final passage in the week to come, Reuters reported Wednesday.
The New York Times reported that nearly every Republican and 22 Democrats voted to advance the measure.
As that vote was unfolding, President Donald Trump said that despite supporting the permitting bill, his administration would not approve permits for wind turbines, a key component of the proposal.
The bill has Democrats split including in Arizona – Senator Mark Kelly voted no on the procedural motion to advance it, while Senator Ruben Gallego voted yes.
Democrats affiliated with the New Democrat Coalition – a center-left group made up of 114 House Democrats including Arizona Rep. Greg Stanton – argue that the legislation is a necessary compromise to lower energy costs, modernize the power grid and create thousands of new jobs.
“Our priorities have not changed: make it easier to build transmission lines, ensure permit certainty and parity for all forms of energy – particularly clean energy – and protect consumers from price hikes,” the coalition said in a press release.
During a press call last week, Democratic Congresswoman Adelita Grijalva said the bill goes beyond abstract debate about federal permitting.
“Consider the proposed Copper World Mine near the Santa Rita Mountains, south of Tucson. This project could generate approximately 1.9 billion tons of mine waste. The company has sought to use more than 2,000 acres of the Coronado National Forest for waste disposal. A judge blocked the forest's approval of that proposal in 2019,” Grijalva said.
Grijalva said BAAJA would reverse that decision by allowing the dumping of toxic mine tailings on public lands, not just in southern Arizona’s Coronado National Forest , but throughout the country.
The bill would nullify two federal court rulings that stopped Hudbay Minerals Inc. – the developer of the Copper World mine – from depositing the mine’s waste rock and tailings in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson.
“I believe we can create good-paying jobs, invest in infrastructure and grow our economy without sacrificing our public lands, our water, our people, our climate and our health,” Grijalva said.
Experts say if the permitting reform bill passes, it would be the biggest change to environmental permitting in decades.
Environmental policies that would be scaled back include the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires projects involved with the federal government to undergo a lengthy review process to discover potential impacts to the environment and air; section 404 of the Clean Water Act which protects state water quality standards; and the National Historic Preservation Act, which studies how infrastructure projects could affect historically or cultural important sites which impacts tribal nations.
Tracy Stone-Manning, a conservationist with the Wilderness Society who served as the former director of the Bureau of Land Management in the Biden Administration, said if BAAJA becomes law, it would hand over public lands to oil and gas drilling, mining and AI data centers.
“On top of that ,it silences public input and, of course, erodes tribal sovereignty,” she said during a press call on Friday.
