S. 5653 (the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026) fundamentally undermines bedrock environmental and civil rights protections by gutting the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). Billed under the guise of bureaucratic streamlining, the legislation imposes arbitrary one-to-two-year shot-clocks on environmental reviews, drastically shortens public comment windows, and weakens mandatory Tribal consultations under Section 106. For frontline, Indigenous, and low-income communities—who already bear the brunt of industrial pollution—these reviews are often the only democratic mechanism available to scrutinize dangerous projects. Ramming projects through without comprehensive evaluations silences local voices and shields developers from having to address cumulative toxic burdens.
Crucially, S. 5653 creates a dangerous liability shield that fuels the petrochemical and plastics buildout. The bill restricts judicial remedies—barring courts from pausing unlawful construction based on NEPA violations alone—and restricts federal authority to revoke or suspend flawed permits retroactively, even if serious ecological or public health harms are uncovered later. By curtailing Clean Water Act certifications and limiting agency oversight, the legislation provides an express lane for oil, gas, and chemical corporations to lock in massive ethylene crackers, plastics manufacturing plants, and pipelines in sacrifice zones like the Gulf Coast and Ohio River Valley. Instead of curbing the extraction-to-waste crisis, it subsidizes the linear plastics economy at the expense of fence-line neighborhoods.
True grid modernization and clean energy deployment do not require gutting community self-determination or handing fossil fuel giants regulatory immunity. Urge your senators to vote NO on S. 5653 because trading away public health, clean water protections, and civil rights for industrial shortcuts is an unacceptable concession that entrenches decades of toxic pollution.
