The four senators behind a 417-page permitting overhaul call it a hard-won compromise; Rep. Jared Huffman says it does too little to protect clean energy and advises Democrats to wait for the midterms.
When four senators from both parties unveiled a 417-page rewrite of the nation’s permitting laws on Sept. 30, the reaction from the senior Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee came the same day, and it was cool.
Rep. Jared Huffman, the North Coast Democrat who has represented California’s Second District since 2013 and is the committee’s ranking member, said in a written statement that Democratic negotiators had done “some good work, but they’ve been negotiating from a position of weakness.” He then laid out a list of objections that, nearly four weeks later, still marks the main House Democratic resistance to the bill as the Senate prepares to take it up after the election.
What the Senate bill would do
The measure, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, or S. 5653, was introduced by the chairs and ranking members of the two Senate committees with jurisdiction: Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, who lead the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Mike Lee of Utah and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, who lead Energy and Natural Resources.
According to the sponsors’ joint announcement, the bill would shorten environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, narrow the window for court challenges, speed the planning and siting of interstate transmission lines, and give projects “permit certainty,” meaning a permit, once issued, could not be pulled except in extraordinary circumstances, a violation of law or a court order. Heinrich’s office highlighted a provision requiring large data centers to pay the full cost of the transmission built to serve them.
The bill also includes language aimed at what Democrats have called discrimination against wind and solar projects. If an agency’s approvals for a type of energy fall below a rolling five-year baseline, developers could seek damages paid from the federal Judgment Fund.
The sponsors framed the bill as a long-overdue bargain. “We once built projects like the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge,” Lee said in the announcement. Heinrich said the goal was to “get to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on energy projects faster.” Capito said the bill would speed construction “while continuing to protect the land, water, and wildlife we all cherish.” Whitehouse called it “a compromise.”
The Trump administration supports the bill, according to a client analysis by the law firm WilmerHale cited by TIJ News. Huffman’s Republican counterpart, Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, called the bill “an encouraging step” in a Sept. 30 statement and said he applauded “Senators Capito, Lee, Heinrich and Whitehouse and the Trump administration” for their work.
Huffman’s objections
Huffman’s statement set three conditions. Any deal, he wrote, must “end Trump’s war on renewables,” his term for the administration’s actions against wind and solar projects. It must not weaken the Endangered Species Act, and he objected specifically to provisions on delegating authority and on definitions in the law. And, he wrote, “we can’t throw states, tribes, impacted communities, and threatened and endangered wildlife under the bus.”
He called the bill’s protections for renewables “novel, untested,” and closed with a political argument: “November 3rd is coming and we are likely to soon have a far better negotiating position.”
On social media he was blunter. “A serious permitting deal must start with an end to the war on clean energy, and this cheap window dressing doesn’t even come close to cutting it,” he wrote, as quoted by Roll Call.
In an interview with Heatmap, Huffman focused on the Judgment Fund mechanism, which he said needed “close scrutiny and consideration because we have seen this gamed already to the tune of $4 billion to buy out offshore wind developers.” The approach, he argued, could compensate clean-energy developers without getting their projects built.
He was careful not to oppose everything in the package. “I’m not going to hold up a chance to improve our grid just because I have big concerns about data centers,” he told Heatmap, adding that the country needs “a more functional and robust grid.”
The road to Nov. 9
The bill’s next test is in the Senate, which is holding only pro forma sessions until after the election. According to the Senate schedule summarized by TIJ News, senators return on Monday, Nov. 9, and are set to vote at about 5:30 p.m. on cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 2347, a House bill that will serve as the legislative vehicle.
That vote needs 60 senators. Aides to the four sponsors told an American Council on Renewable Energy conference that industry feedback had shaped the bill, and the senators have said they expect to offer a manager’s amendment reflecting comments received before the vote, Roll Call reported. Industry groups led by the American Petroleum Institute have urged passage, as have the clean-energy trade groups ACORE, American Clean Power and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Environmental groups, some tribes concerned about changes affecting historic-preservation review, and some utilities have raised objections.
Even if the Senate moves, the bill would need to clear a House where Huffman’s committee holds a large share of the jurisdiction. His statement suggested he would prefer to bargain after the midterms, when Democrats hope to have more leverage. Republicans and the bill’s Democratic sponsors argue the moment for a bipartisan deal is now.
A California case study: geothermal
Huffman has paired his criticism with a more granular argument about how federal permitting already works for clean energy in California. On Oct. 8 he released a Government Accountability Office report, GAO-26-108040, that he had requested with Democratic Reps. Susie Lee of Nevada, Joe Neguse of Colorado, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico.
The watchdog found that the Bureau of Land Management’s geothermal permitting handbooks have been in draft form since at least 2022; that the system the bureau used to track geothermal permits was shut down in 2021, and its replacement cannot track them; and that the acreage nominated for geothermal leasing grew from about 25,000 acres in 2020 to more than one million in 2025. GAO recommended that the bureau finalize the handbooks, build a tracking system and set processing-time goals. The House passed a separate measure, the Geothermal Energy Advancement Act, H.R. 5631, in June.
The stakes are concrete in Northern California. The Geysers, in the Mayacamas Mountains north of San Francisco, is the world’s largest complex of geothermal power plants, with about 725 megawatts of capacity, according to its operator, Calpine, which says the complex supplies about half of the geothermal power generated in California. The Imperial Valley, around the Salton Sea, is the state’s other major geothermal region.
What to watch
Huffman, first elected in 2012, faces Republican Robin Littau on Nov. 3. Nationally, the fight for control of the House will determine whether Democrats gain the leverage Huffman says they should wait for.
The near-term questions are whether the manager’s amendment addresses any of the concerns about the Endangered Species Act and the renewables provisions, whether 60 senators vote to proceed on Nov. 9, and whether House Democratic leaders follow their Natural Resources ranking member or the Senate Democrats who helped write the bill.
Ingrid Lindqvist covers Northern California’s members of Congress on Capitol Hill, from committee rooms and floor votes to the bills and spending that reach the region, for The Delegation. More from Ingrid Lindqvist
