The Democrats’ First Move After Their Big Win? A Giveaway to Big Oil.

Last week, Democrats won historic majorities in the House and Senate, receiving an extraordinary mandate to take on the bad actors they campaigned against: President Donald Trump, the Republican Party, data centers, and Big Tech. This week, in their first major action since then, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and 21 other Democratic senators voted to fast-track a Republican bill that would eviscerate America’s bedrock environmental laws in order to, in Trump’s words, “codify our America First Energy Agenda” of building “Pipelines, Mines, and Power Plants faster than ever before” so that America remains “Number One” in data center construction. So what can explain this almost unimaginable betrayal—and can it be stopped? The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA, which the Senate is expected to vote on next week, has been framed as a compromise to make it easier to build both clean energy and fossil fuel infrastructure. It was developed behind closed doors by Senate Republicans and two Democrats, Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich. But there was a fundamental mismatch in this secretive drafting process. The fossil fuel industry has been all in for permitting reform—indeed, it has long been the top priority of the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying arm and political face of major oil and gas corporations. So Big Oil was involved in BAAJA’s drafting. Whitehouse and Heinrich, by contrast, kept Democrats’ traditional allies in the dark—not just environmental groups, which are uniformly opposed to the legislation, but tribal organizations (many of which released a joint statement condemning BAAJA provisions that “fundamentally undermine Tribal sovereignty” and “threaten sacred sites and cultural resources”); racial justice organizations like NAACP (which warned that BAAJA “directly threatens the health, safety, and future of Black and frontline communities”); and anti-ICE groups like Detention Watch Network (which condemned how BAAJA will “pave a path for detention expansion by making immigration detention facilities easier to build and much harder to stop”). The upshot is that the staff of two Democratic senatorial offices were alone at the negotiating table, while Republicans had the full lobbying, analyzing, and bill-drafting capacity of the entire fossil fuel industry. So of course the Democrats got rolled. And BAAJA reflects this asymmetry in the severe lopsidedness of its ostensible “compromise.” The positive pitch from BAAJA’s Democratic-leaning cheerleaders, like Democratic strategist Adam Jentleson’s Searchlight Institute, is that the legislation will be a huge boon to Democrats’ affordability and climate goals by lowering energy costs and supercharging the build-out of renewables. These claims are dubious at best. It’s essentially impossible to confidently model the full climate effects of a legislative package like BAAJA, but current analyses include predictions out of Purdue University that BAAJA will actually increase both “domestic energy-related greenhouse gas emissions” and “domestic mortality attributable to air pollution from fossil fuels.” The most optimistic modeling, from Rhodium Group, predicts a range: from BAAJA having zero effect on greenhouse gas emissions to a best-case scenario of reducing U.S. emissions by a negligible 4 percent by 2040. Rhodium’s modeling on affordability is similarly laughable, with a best-case scenario reduction of energy bills by $4–$7 a month by 2040.So that’s what Democrats stand to gain from supporting this Republican bill. What are they giving up? From an environmental perspective, the costs are almost unimaginable. BAAJA severely weakens the Clean Water Act, robbing states and tribes of their ability to protect water quality and require adequate safeguards for activities that pollute or destroy water resources. It practically nullifies the Endangered Species Act by delegating its core responsibilities to the states, most of which either oppose the act’s wildlife protections or lack the expertise and resources to adequately fulfill these obligations. And it essentially repeals the National Environmental Policy Act, the bedrock environmental law that gives the public a voice in decisions that impact the environment, by prohibiting the enforcement of NEPA violations. These three legal frameworks are responsible for most the improvements in water quality, green space, and wildlife recovery in our country over the last half-century.And that’s just the beginning. Other provisions of BAAJA go to even greater lengths to radically lock in fossil fuel development far into the future. The “disparate treatment” section of the bill effectively makes the permitting decisions of the Trump administration permanent. In the words of David Bookbinder, an environmental lawyer who has worked for both the left-leaning Sierra Club and the libertarian Niskanen Center, “The result of making these energy permitting policies permanent is that future administrations will be unable to effectively reduce GHG emissions.” BAAJA also guarantees not just the construction of fossil fuel projects but also their “operation at full capacity,” permanently blocking any future administration from regulating energy infrastructure.If you’re thinking this legislative assault on the environment sounds like it was pulled straight out of Project 2025, well, you’re right—and the authors of Project 2025 are strong supporters of the bill. BAAJA is also the top legislative priority of API, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, and other fossil fuel giants. So no wonder climate advocates have been sounding the alarm—and not just progressive leaders like Bill McKibben, but moderate climate advocates like Jody Freeman, John Podesta, and Al Gore, who recently warned that “now is not the time to give the Trump administration freer rein to double down on fossil fuels—which is what President Trump would surely do.” This point is crucial: Trump will be implementing BAAJA if it passes, and he very clearly has no intention of allowing the “supercharge clean energy” side of the bargain to move forward. Indeed, just this week Trump reiterated that he is not going to approve any wind turbines, even if Democrats submit to his desire to “codify our America First Energy Agenda” by passing BAAJA. Of course, Big Oil companies aren’t the only villains that want to see this Republican legislation pass. Big Tech is also all in, from Marc Andreessen’s tech venture firm to ITI, the trade association for OpenAI, Nvidia, Meta, Amazon, Google, and other tech giants, which praised BAAJA as “essential to America’s ability to build, compete, and lead—especially in the AI era.” Advocates of BAAJA, including Trump, have tried to obscure this support by pointing to provisions in the legislation that would require data center developers to pay for the grid and transmission upgrades their projects require. But Americans have made overwhelmingly clear—not least through the massive victories they just handed to Democrats who pledged to support data center bans and moratoriums—that they don’t just want AI data centers to help pay for some of their own costs. More than anything, they want the ability to say “no” to these monstrosities coming into their communities. They want to be able to decide their own futures, rather than having Big Tech billionaires make those decisions for them.BAAJA is a direct response to this democratic backlash. AI corporations want to cut the public out of these decision-making processes, and BAAJA is laser-focused on overcoming the two most important roadblocks the public can use to check the explosion of Big Tech’s data center build-out: permitting and easy access to fossil gas. (Abigail Dillen, the president of Earthjustice, recently explained exactly how BAAJA enables “the dirtiest version of the data center build-out to move even faster.”) The antidemocratic betrayal here really cannot be overstated. Democrats just won their biggest congressional majorities in 50 years—to say nothing of victories in places like Texas, where Democrats swept every single statewide office and flipped the state House—in large part by promising to respond to the massive voter backlash against the AI industry’s out-of-control expansion of hyperscale data centers. Just a week later, Democrats’ Senate leadership team—not just Schumer but incoming Majority Whip Brian Schatz and DSCC chair Kirsten Gillibrand—joined Trump and the GOP to pass a catastrophic giveaway to the Big Tech billionaires who spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat their incoming colleagues, directly rebuking the massive voter mandate their party just received to stand up to those billionaires.And that, maybe more than anything, helps explain the timing of this push. It’s not just that BAAJA was developed without hearings or any of the other review procedures that a bill of this magnitude would normally go through. It’s that Democrats like Whitehouse, Heinrich, Schumer, and Schatz are trying to ram this Project 2025 atrocity through a GOP-controlled lame-duck session weeks before Democrats take control. BAAJA advocates have argued that the legislation needs to move now because Trump would never sign a bill passed by a Democratic Congress, but that’s an absurd claim. We have no idea how Trump will respond to the Democratic majority. There are myriad ways he could be brought to the table on a clean transmission bill—name the legislation after him, insert some shady Trump Organization business opportunity in the text, send in Zohran Mamdani to sell it ... The reason top Senate Democrats are working to pass BAAJA now, before their majority is seated, is that this rotten handout to Big Oil and Big Tech—and massive “screw you” to the voters who just gave Democrats their majority—would never pass in a Democratic Congress. BAAJA is a radical MAGA bill that takes a sledgehammer to America’s most important environmental laws, permanently locks us into an expansion of fossil fuels, disempowers local communities’ ability to decide their own futures, and opens the door to a radical expansion of methane-powered hyperscale data centers. It needs to pass now because it is fundamentally a Republican bill. BAAJA is on a fast track through the Senate, with a final vote only days away. But we must not accept this as a done deal. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which represents more than 100 members of Congress, just announced its opposition to the legislation. So did the Democratic attorneys general from California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Washington, D.C., who sent a letter asking Senate leadership to halt the upcoming votes on BAAJA in order to “protect our natural resources, historic and tribal sites, and state regulatory prerogatives.” And it’s not just elected officials who can weigh in. Everyone can make a difference by calling and emailing their representatives and senators and looking out for further mobilization opportunities. If all else fails, at the very least, we must make sure that Democrats understand that their voters are paying attention to who is selling out our futures to Big Oil and Big Tech—and that 2028 is not so far away.