AUDIO:

"The EcoNews Report," Oct. 31, 2026.

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TOM WHEELER:

Welcome to the Econews Report. I'm your host this week, Tom Wheeler, executive director of EPIC, the Environmental Protection Information Center. And this week we are going to be talking about the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026.

And if you didn't catch it, that is the letters B-A-A-J-A, which folks are calling Baja. So the Baja bill, Baja blast. It is a massive bill that would fundamentally change the way federal environmental law is applied across the country on a variety of projects. And to help me and you understand the consequences of this bill, we have Marlyn Twitchell from the Western Environmental Law Center joining us. Welcome to the show.

MARLYN TWITCHELL:

Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having me.

WHEELER:

All right, so I love a dumb acronym. I'm just gonna start at the beginning here. So again, is the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, BAAJA. So people are calling it things like Baja Blast. So my first question to you, Marlyn, is have you ever had a Baja Blast soda and what did you think of it?

TWITCHELL:

Sadly, I have not, or maybe not so sadly, but I have not.

WHEELER:

All right, well, you know what to do on the way home from work today. I guess so. Stop at the corner store and then have one and then report back to me. All right, so silliness aside, let's start big picture.

How would you describe this bill to someone who you were stuck in an elevator with for one minute?

TWITCHELL:

Well, basically this bill, it's a bill in disguise. It's permitting, it's described as permitting reform, a permitting deal that's supposedly going to open the doors to renewable energy. But in fact, the bill remakes our bedrock environmental laws and takes the public out of most decision-making about projects that affect people and place across the country. It hands more power that already exists to major industries, particularly the fossil fuel industry and increasingly the AI industry.

WHEELER:

All right, so it is called a bipartisan bill, and there are both Democrats and Republicans in support of this bill. There are also Democrats and Republicans in opposition to this bill. So it is bipartisan splitting in both directions. Can you tell me a little bit about the process by which this bill was developed and why that process was a concern for you and for environmental organizations?

TWITCHELL:

The concern was that it was negotiated in private. There are elements in the bill that were part of other pieces of legislation that have been introduced in Congress over the last year. Some of those provisions have had hearings, some of them have not, but this particular bill and some of the most significant changes to law in this bill were negotiated in private. Senators did not and would not hear environmental concerns.

They released the language for this bill just a day or two before the Senate left for the midterm recess, and they're planning their procedural vote on how to proceed with a formal vote the day that they return after the midterm. So there's basically been no public process. It's all been done in secret.

WHEELER:

I will note our Congressman Jared Huffman is opposed to this bill, and one of the things that he said is that this process for Democrats is, it's kind of messed up, right? So we are looking to pass this in what's called the kind of lame duck session after the midterms, but before the new Congress is seated. And if you look at any polling site, it is predicted that Democrats are going to take at least the House and potentially the Senate. And so we are in, as Democrats, a weaker negotiating position on this bill. And his suggestion to Senate leadership and for the folks who are pushing for this on the Democratic side is to wait until the new Congress is seated, and then we will be able to improve the bill should it need to be, if it could be improved. I know that there are some folks who like some components of this bill, and maybe there is a way to resuscitate it in the minds of some environmental groups. Okay, so we have a bad process by which this bill was developed, and bad process often yields bad results.

So you said that this is the gutting of federal environmental law under the guise of permitting reform. Which federal environmental laws are we talking about here? And then we can drill into each in turn.

TWITCHELL:

The laws that are affected are, first, the Clean Water Act, second, the Endangered Species Act, third, the National Environmental Policy Act, and fourth, the National Historic Preservation Act, which includes Section 106 that gives tribal nations an ability to participate and have a say about how projects will impact cultural and sacred places. It's a process that's similar to the National Environmental Policy Act, but gives tribes the ability to protect their cultural resources.

WHEELER:

So let's start perhaps with the NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act, because I think that NEPA is the fundamental law in which we often talk about project permitting and project review. It is the opportunity for the public to be involved as well. What does BAAJA do to NEPA?

TWITCHELL:

Well, there's a number of changes. Basically, it effectively makes NEPA ineffective in the way that the law has operated in the past. It characterizes NEPA as a procedure and it eliminates NEPA's ability to force better decisions or force agencies to make better decisions to meet the law's purpose to, quote, prevent or eliminate environmental impacts. And it does this in several ways. First, the law changes public participation.

For those of us who have been steeped in NEPA and NEPA processes for years, there's, you know, agencies develop an environmental review, either a shortened one called an environmental assessment or a long one called an environmental impact statement. They announce it to the public. They have drafts. We comment. The agency makes changes. This law would put into statute many of the restrictions that the Trump administration has already made just by administrative change in their processes.

And that would mean that the public would no longer have an opportunity to comment except for an EIS, the longest review, and only at the very beginning stage, what's called scoping, before all the details of a project are even known. So we've all been able to comment on the details of a project and participate and try to get the agencies to make better decisions. Now we have no ability to do that. Second, it speeds up the timelines for doing all of this, every environmental review.

Speeding up processes may work for some projects if they're small, but if it's a complex multi-state pipeline, for example, or offshore oil and gas development, it may be really impossible to complete an environmental, a thorough environmental review and truly understand environmental impacts in a very short amount of time.

WHEELER:

Yeah, so perhaps we can use a local example here in northwest California for that. We have a proposed transmission line to connect Humboldt County better with the larger statewide grid, and this is necessary for a variety of reasons. One, there is hope to develop renewable energy off of Humboldt County's coast and floating offshore wind farm that would generate a lot, a lot, a lot of power, enough to power San Francisco. And we have undersized lines, and so it would be necessary to have improved transmission to connect this to the larger grid. And generally, we can't decarbonize our area until we have better connections, period. So right now, we don't have import-export capacity necessary to power Humboldt County, and so we are reliant on a fracked natural gas burning power plant.

So this transmission line, though, it's going to cross national forest land and private forest land. It's going to cross rivers and streams that have salmon in them. It's going to cross northern spotted owl habitat. So it is a supremely complicated project, and under BAAJA, we would both have tighter timelines for review of this project in such a way that I don't think we could actually meaningfully investigate the environmental impacts from this project, and the public would not have an adequate opportunity to weigh in on the effects of this project. And public participation is critical to the performance of NEPA because members of the public have valuable information that they can share with the government.

And when we have more information on a project, we're able to better design a project. We're better able to avoid potential environmental impacts and mitigate those impacts that can't be avoided. And it also potentially allows for the opportunity for government decision makers to wholesale reject projects that are going to be too impactful.

So having adequate environmental impact analysis is critical to doing good work.

TWITCHELL:

OK.

WHEELER:

I'm off my soapbox now.

TWITCHELL:

Yes, I was just going to say, and in addition to speeding timelines, the other big change with NEPA is they changed the definition of what actually even gets an environmental review. So fewer projects, many projects are actually excluded from review, like any existing project in an existing transmission line corridor, for example, or pipeline corridor. It also allows for what are called categorical exclusion.

Agencies often decide that certain projects they think won't have an impact, and so they say they're excluded from review. Well, this bill says you can not only apply a categorical exclusion, but you can stack them. In other words, you can apply five separate categorical exclusions to a single project. That is going to allow many, many projects to avoid NEPA's environmental review altogether.

WHEELER:

Well, so perhaps I know that I said that we could go through different environmental laws, but perhaps we should talk about the kinds of projects that would be permitted under this. So there are some proponents from the left who are in support of this bill, climate hawk type groups who think that permitting and the layers of environmental law have unnecessarily restricted the growth of renewable energy in this company and have hindered our ability to meet the climate crisis. So assuming for the sake of the argument that this is true, is this bill just related to renewable energy or what are the kinds of projects that would be permitted under BAAJA?

TWITCHELL:

Everything. Basically, because this bill is energy and tech neutral, it does not promote renewable energy.

It allows every form of energy project, or any, not just energy project, any project that goes before a federal agency for a permit or authorization. Offshore drilling, a dam, anything.

WHEELER:

data centers, ICE detention facilities, all those would also be included?

TWITCHELL:

They could be if there are federal lands involved.

And for data centers, there is a push by the current administration to open up public lands to data centers to be located there. ICE detention centers, oftentimes they are located on federal lands. This bill will speed the process for all of those permit authorizations.

WHEELER:

Okay, so there's good and bad. And so I think that then the political context in which this bill is being passed is important because I could foresee in a reasonable administration, one that is trying to fast track our clean energy future, that maybe this could be done and implemented in a way that might be reasonable.

And yet we have the Trump administration, which is repeatedly being sued for using its power illegally to stop renewable energy development and using its power illegally to subsidize and promote offshore energy expansion, or I shouldn't say energy, offshore drilling, oil and gas drilling, and new nuclear facilities and the like. So I think one thing that is important here is that this is going to be implemented by Trump for at least two more years.

So even if it is energy neutral, the world in which this would be applied is not energy neutral. It is pro-fossil fuel, right?

TWITCHELL:

Correct. And I think the other key thing to think about this as we think about this bill is there are people who are looking at just one section, like the transmission section. There are some good things in there about changing how multi-jurisdiction planning happens and allowing FERC to step in when state and local governments are having a hard time reaching decisions and speeding the process along. There are good provisions in there on transmission, but this bill needs to be looked at as a whole because we've been talking about, beginning to talk about the environmental laws.

But one of the key problems with this bill is Section 1401 that relates to or addresses what they call permitting certainty. And the intent, allegedly, was to address the Trump administration's revocation and blocking of offshore wind projects that had been previously approved, were in the final stages of construction or even operational. Problem is, the way the bill is written, it bars the government from revoking any permit after September 16th of 2026, which is an odd date, or constraining a project that's operational in any way.

That means any future administration couldn't impose higher restrictions. So a power plant has air permitting restrictions. The way the bill is written, a future administration could not, as technology and science becomes available, they could not impose higher restrictions. If they did, that project could go to court and get up to 50% of their project paid for out of the U.S. Treasury.

WHEELER:

So let's perhaps hit one or two more changes to the law. I have said on this program before that the Endangered Species Act is my favorite of all environmental laws. So I'm curious how this bill may affect the ESA.

TWITCHELL:

There are two big changes to the ESA in addition to what I just mentioned about the project certainty not being able to go back and amend projects. That means potentially future ESA or species-related impact. The two changes are, one, it changes the definition of best available science in a way that constrains that term to allow agencies to avoid taking a precautionary approach to species protection when science is a little unclear or there's a lack of full information.

The second, it allows states to take over Section 7, what's called consultation functions from the federal government, which means states would now determine whether or not a particular project would harm and potentially jeopardize a species. States would then also be determining what they believe best available science means. Across the West, if all of the states took over Section 7 consultation, there could be a patchwork of different approaches and for species that roam among states, there could be significant effects.

WHEELER:

So for a state like California, I would have faith and trust in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to do an adequate job protecting California's wildlife because we are a progressive state that cares about the environment. I would be terrified of a state like Utah, which has seemingly a state policy, a desire to get rid of federal public lands, to increase oil and gas development to the maximum extent possible. A state like that, then applying and interpreting the Endangered Species Act in a way that then gets locked in because of these changes to permit certainty. That is horrifying to me. There goes Bears Ears and all sorts of sacred, important places and wild landscapes. Okay, so let's maybe close on Clean Water Act and then let's do a call to action.

So tell me about how this law might change the Clean Water Act because here in California, we're often a water-limited state and we have a number of issues with drinking water across the West. So tell me about how this might impact free-flowing rivers and drinking water.

TWITCHELL:

The Clean Water Act right now gives states and tribes the authority to reject a project if it violates state or tribal Clean Water Act protection laws. This bill would limit the scope of that certification process. First, it would limit it to only direct water quality limits. In the past, or currently, states and tribes can reject or impose conditions on a permit that have, regarding riparian or other watershed-level impacts. The provision in BAAJA relating to the Clean Water Act would sharply limit state and tribal authority to protect their resources, their clean water resources.

Right now, states and tribes can review projects to ensure that they meet state or tribal water quality standards and can impose conditions to protect not just the exact water quality, but riparian resources and watershed-level impacts. This bill would limit that certification to just water quality and require states and tribes to prove by a really high standard, clear and convincing evidence standard, that permit conditions would be the least burdensome possible and have to be consistent with the permit, which nobody really knows what that phrase means. The bottom line is, it effectively guts state and tribal ability to protect their water resources.

WHEELER:

So I also want to draw a parallel. So this bill is on the federal side, obviously, and would touch on federal environmental laws. Here in California, California voters are going to be asked to vote on Prop 45. And we've had shows previously on the effect of Prop 45, which would be very similar. It would fundamentally change the way the California Environmental Quality Act is applied for a variety of what the law deems to be essential projects, which could include data centers, and would remove public participation, would shorten timelines in a very similar manner.

So I want folks to remember, one, to vote. Your ballot is due on November 3, and needs to be postmarked by November 3. If you haven't registered to vote in California, you can register to vote on Election Day. Be sure to make it out to the polls to vote, and to vote no on Prop 45.

So this bill is coming before the Senate. We know Jared Huffman is opposed. I think the positions of Schiff and Padilla are still somewhat unknown. So we are asking folks to reach out to our two state senators to let them know that their constituency, their voters are concerned about BAAJA.

So, Marlyn, when contacting our federal officials, or our state senators, our state senators, not state senators, what should people say? How should folks engage with this in a way that would be productive and helpful to stop this from moving forward?

TWITCHELL:

I think people need to speak up and raise concerns about the changes to bedrock environmental laws. Even if this bill was advancing renewable energy, there is no reason there should be that at the same time they need to cut environmental laws. Those laws can stay in place, projects could be moved forward. The bill doesn't do what it basically is designed to do. I think the other key point people need to think about and talk to their elected members of Congress is the extent to which this bill locks in fossil fuel for the foreseeable future.

The project certainty provisions, there's another section of the project certainty that allows any existing energy category to claim disparate treatment, a term from the Civil Rights Act. And part of the way they prove that is if there has been a reduction in the number of projects approved over the prior five years, considering the Trump administration, you talked about context in the Trump administration, this administration is going to be and is approving as many fossil fuel projects as it can, as fast as it can. A future administration could not come in with a clean energy policy. One of the other provisions of the bill says evidence of disparate treatment is statements by the executive branch.

So a new president coming in and saying, I have a renewable energy policy, that would be evidence of disparate treatment. And disparate treatment gets you an injunction, you get your permit, and you get 50 to 100 percent of your project paid out of the U.S. Treasury. Basically, the bill locks out the public, silences the public, and locks in fossil fuel for the foreseeable future.

WHEELER:

So, if folks want to take action, you can go to lostcoastoutpost.com and click on the show notes for this episode, and there will be a link to an action that you can take through EPIC's web portal. So, go online, check it out on lostcoastoutpost.com, or if you're listening to this as a podcast, it will be in your podcast notes. Marlyn, thank you so much for coming on the Econews Report and sharing about BAAJA with us.

TWITCHELL:

Thank you so much for the opportunity, Tom.

WHEELER:

All right, join us again this time and channel next week for more environmental news from the north coast of California.