What Will BAAJA Do? Whatever the Trump Administration Wants

If you are following the hot debate over the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 (BAAJA), you are likely thinking more than usual about howitzers. As reported in Heatmap, John Podesta is cutting through the noise and sounding the decisive alarm: Why would Democrats hand over more power for President Trump to abuse? Or in other words, don’t give Trump a loaded howitzer!

Over the next two years, BAAJA would create more legal runway for this president to make corrupt deals and greenlight harmful projects of all kinds, and it would constrain any future president from repairing the damage. People can reasonably differ on long-term projections. But once you know what’s in this bill, how BAAJA plays under Trump should be clear as glass.

In the short time that’s left before a vote in the Senate, a responsible debate over BAAJA must be real about who is running the country and specific about the immediate dangers that are very predictable.

What could go wrong over the next two years if BAAJA passes?

It’s hard to imagine a president more fixated on fast-tracking projects that advance his own interests over the public interest. From relatively “small” projects, like bulldozing the East Wing for his ballroom, to bigger ones – for example, steering $1.6 billion in federal financing to a Kazakh tungsten mine partly owned by his sons – deal-making that enriches the Trump circle is the president’s specialty. More fundamentally, the Trump administration’s playbook is to move fast and break things, and that applies to everything, from mass firings to mass deportations.

BAAJA would supercharge that playbook in four principal ways:

1. The bill would make it faster and easier for the president to hand out federal approvals and financial assistance without transparency or meaningful review, courtesy of provisions that would significantly limit or even dispense with requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), and the Clean Water Act (CWA). Notably, the bill would exempt from NEPA and NHPA review all federal loans, loan guarantees, and other forms of federal financial assistance, giving the president the ability to provide federal backing that would speed the financing for major capital projects.
2. BAAJA would insulate Trump actions from the many successful lawsuits that are currently operating as a check on the abuse of power. The bill is designed to make it harder to (1) get into court, (2) win, and (3) get meaningful relief, and it expressly prohibits judges from issuing injunctions or vacating decisions in NEPA and NHPA cases. Even if a court found that the Trump administration was issuing permits in clear violation of NEPA and NHPA, the projects could still go forward. In other words, the Trump administration could violate the law without consequences.
3. BAAJA includes many provisions that would bar consideration of new information and science, while significantly increasing deference to federal agencies to define the scope of their reviews. Taken together, these provisions would legitimize the Trump administration’s efforts to suppress science and exclude consideration of the best available data.
4. Most sweepingly, the bill’s certainty provisions would render Trump permitting decisions irrevocable with very limited exceptions.[1] The next administration would likely inherit a raft of destructive and unpopular projects, and BAAJA would make it wildly risky financially and even impossible for the next president to revisit them. To be clear, the damage would not be confined to energy-related projects. Think detention centers, petrochemical complexes, data centers on public lands – whatever kinds of projects appeal to this president.

In short, BAAJA would help President Trump to move even faster and break more things, trading on the high leverage promise of project certainty. Over the next two years, favored industries would rush to lock in as many federal approvals as possible.

To picture what could go down, it’s worth looking back at the president’s executive orders on data centers, oil and gas, mining, logging, and Alaska. They vividly convey the scale of this administration’s ambition to leave no acre untrampled. Regarding AI and data centers, Order 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” lays out the plan for building data centers on public lands, which Secretary of Interior Doug Burgum describes this way: “We’re going to ‘map, baby, map’ to figure out where all these resources are and then we’re going to ‘mine, baby, mine’ so we can ‘build, baby, build’ because we got to build AI data centers.” In the rush to loot the country, expect no exceptions for special places like the Boundary Waters, the Arctic, or Chaco Canyon.

Beyond public lands, BAAJA’s “certainty” provisions apply to any project that requires federal authorizations or permits. The oil and gas industry is beyond ready to secure federal permits and financing for long-lived infrastructure projects including gas pipelines, LNG export terminals, and gas-fired power plants. BAAJA would not only provide certainty for individual projects, it would drive future administrations to keep up the Trump pace of permitting. Specifically, the bill creates a right to sue over “disparate treatment” if permit denials and delays increase relative to a five-year lookback.

Looking across our docket and the growing inventory of bad decisions we know are coming, it’s terrible to contemplate how many of them could become irrevocable under BAAJA, and how many people would be hurt as a result. I think of the Trump administration’s shocking moves to exempt many of the most dangerous petrochemical plants in the country from pollution control requirements, and I anticipate the “forever” permits it could issue for sprawling new complexes in communities where cancer rates are already unconscionable. I imagine the many sacred places that would be sold out as Tribes are cut out of federal decision-making.  At a time when so many Americans are feeling abandoned by leaders and run over by mega-corporations, I hope Members of Congress are tracking how this deal would land for people who are rightly demanding more transparency, more accountability and more agency.

Meanwhile, the prospect of losing tools to slow down and stop the cruelest projects should be  haunting everyone. For example, if NEPA becomes utterly toothless, as it would under BAAJA, I wonder how state Attorneys General and our lawyers at Earthjustice could stop ICE from detaining thousands of people in Amazon-style warehouses as we have so far been able to do. I wonder whether we can even imagine the awful things this administration will try to do over the two long years ahead of us.

We need new transmission, and also a new permitting deal

Many people I deeply respect are pushing for passage of BAAJA because its transmission package is genuinely excellent. At Earthjustice, the single biggest bet we have made organizationally is building an energy practice to deploy clean energy faster. A more livable future depends on clean energy transition, and that transition depends on grid expansion. That is why my colleagues and I have been working in earnest to try to improve the bill. But tinkering at the edges is not going to fix the problem at BAAJA’s core.

Absolutely, we need a path for clean energy, but no deal is worth taking if it makes a dire situation worse. In every way, including election interference and the latest deal-making with Putin, the president is reminding us of who he is. (Among other things, it’s impossible to take his word that he will end his war on wind, which, in fact, he is escalating).

When democracies are at the cliff’s edge, among the most important guardrails are the law and the people’s ability to go to court and challenge the government that is turning against them. All of this to say, taking down the guardrails is a dangerously bad idea.

[1] While there is one exception for court orders that expressly direct agencies to revoke or amend permits, the next administration would not be able to secure such orders against itself, and for litigants other than project developers, BAAJA is expressly designed to make it much harder, and in some cases impossible, to secure such orders as noted in point (1).