One of the non-negotiables for Senate Democrats in putting together a bipartisan permitting bill was to limit the president’s ability to reverse federal project approvals or otherwise gum up the works for developments they simply dislike. The authors’ goal was to prevent a situation like the one we’re in now, where Trump has revoked permits for wind farms, refused to permit new ones, and tried to stop construction of fully permitted offshore wind projects.
But the language on “project certainty” in the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is technology neutral — it would protect fossil fuels as much as clean energy. While Trump has perhaps gone the furthest of any president in using the authorities of the executive branch to enact his preferences, his Democratic predecessors have taken similar steps to stop mines, pipelines, and oil and gas drilling — often in the name of stopping climate change.
“This bill is clearly looking backwards at five to 10 years of case studies in how an executive branch can delay or revoke permits, and it is targeted at those case studies,” Travis Annatoyn, the former deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources at the Interior Department under Biden, told me.
The bill section in question contains two key provisions. The first would make it illegal for a federal agency to rescind, terminate, or alter a federal authorization or permit, or to prevent the construction or operation of a project that has all of its necessary federal approvals — though there are exceptions for cases involving a court ruling, violation of a permit’s terms, fraud, or new environmental harms or threats to national security.
The second big provision would give companies a course of action if they suspect the federal government is discriminating against certain types of projects or unduly dragging out the permitting process. An applicant can sue the government for displaying a “pattern of disparate treatment,” defined as a “substantial increase” in delays or “improper” denials for a given project type compared to the previous five years. Applicants also have the right to sue if the government takes longer than a year to issue a decision on a permit after all of the applicant’s paperwork is deemed complete.
Environmental nonprofits, particularly those that work on public lands issues, are extremely worried about these provisions, as illustrated by a transcript of several groups discussing the bill on a conference call that was leaked to Punchbowl News last week. “A future administration will not be able to challenge anything that is in fact permitted during the presidency of the Trump administration,” Erik Shlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center said on the call, “which is going to create an incentive for all these data centers and fossil fuel companies to rush through a process, hoard leases, permits and authorizations, and then basically tell a future administration to go fly a kite.”
But constraining the power of the executive branch is tricky. Even if the bill passes as written, and its provisions work as intended, there will probably still be some ways by which a president could throttle permits if they are motivated enough to do so, Annatoyn said.
Case in point: The laws as written haven’t stopped Trump from testing their limits. The main advantage to these provisions would be clearer consequences in the courts, giving affected parties more confidence to file a suit, and compensation if they win. On the other hand, those affected parties would still need to have the resources to sue the government.
It’s helpful to apply BAAJA to past examples of executive energy decisions to see how they would fare under the law. I walked through some case studies with Annatoyn and Ben Schiffman, the former attorney-adviser at the Interior Department’s Office of the Solicitor under Biden, to get a better understanding of what these provisions would do.
Biden could still have revoked the Keystone XL pipeline’s presidential permit
First proposed in 2008, the Keystone XL pipeline would have brought Canadian crude oil from the Alberta tar sands into the U.S. Almost immediately it attracted fierce opposition from environmental advocates, indigenous groups, and even Midwestern farmers, who eventually formed a coalition that staged attention-grabbing protests aimed at convincing the federal government not to approve the plans.
In a presidency-defining move, Barack Obama sided with opponents and rejected the project’s permit in 2015, stating that to prevent the worst of climate change, “we're going to have to keep some fossil fuels in the ground.” Trump later reversed that decision, however, approving Keystone in 2019. Then the project got held up in litigation brought by the Northern Plains Resource Council, a Montana environmental group, over one of its Clean Water Act permits.
When Biden took office in 2021, he signed an executive order reversing Trump’s reversal. Leaving the permit in place, he wrote, “would not be consistent with my Administration’s economic and climate imperatives.” A few months later, Keystone XL’s developer, TC Energy, officially canceled the pipeline.
Keystone is unique, however, because it would have crossed an international border, which requires direct presidential approval. Had BAAJA been in effect, Biden still would have been able to revoke the permit, Schiffman told me. “Keystone is a really unusual example,” he said. “The president is not considered an agency under the Administrative Procedure Act, so it’s just not subject to review in the way an action by the Secretary of Interior or other agencies are,” he said.
Biden could maybe have canceled Arctic National Wildlife Refuge oil and gas leases
This bill’s effect is more ambiguous in this example. Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act required the Interior Department to hold two oil and gas lease sales on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain. Trump held a sale in January 2021, just before he left the White House, issuing nine leases. When Biden took office later that month, he signed an executive order directing his Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, to conduct a new environmental analysis of the entire leasing program, citing “alleged legal deficiencies underlying the program.”
That June, Haaland concluded that there had been “insufficient analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, including failure to adequately analyze a reasonable range of alternatives in the environmental impact statement,” and suspended the previously sold leases. Two years later, after completing a new environmental review, she canceled all the remaining leases in the Refuge. Biden’s Bureau of Land Management also later issued a new Record of Decision significantly downsizing the leasing program from 1.6 million acres to the minimum 400,000 required under the law.
When Trump began his second term, he directed his own Interior Secretary, Doug Burgum, to consider reversing the cancellation of the leases and to reinstate the Record of Decision that his first administration had issued in 2020. Ultimately, Burgum did not have to reverse the cancellations because the lessees had sued the government and a federal court sided with them, vacating the terminations in March 2025. (Alaska Native and environmental groups are currently appealing that decision.) Meanwhile, Trump’s Interior Department has issued a new Record of Decision reinstating the leasing program’s original 1.6 million acres.
There’s nothing in BAAJA that would seem to have prevented the Biden administration from conducting a new environmental analysis and issuing a new Record of Decision on the leasing program. It’s less clear whether it would have prohibited Haaland from terminating the leases. The word “lease” is conspicuously absent from the definition of a “federal authorization or permit” in this section of the bill, which would seem to have supported Haaland’s decision. But it’s an open question, Annatoyn told me, because the bill’s definition of federal authorization contains the catch-all phrase “or any other approval or order that is necessary … for the construction or operation at full capacity of a project.”
“I imagine if something like this gets passed, someone will make the argument that it includes leases,” Annatoyn said. It will be a question for the courts.
Obama could not have canceled the Spruce coal mine on the same grounds
In 2011, Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency rescinded a key Clean Water Act permit for Spruce No. 1, which would have been the largest mountaintop-removal coal mine in West Virginia. The type of permit, known as Section 404, was for the discharge of dredged material, and it had initially been approved by George Bush’s Army Corps of Engineers in 2007. Under that section of the Clean Air Act, however, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator has broad authority to reject the Corps’ decisions about discharge sites “whenever” he or she determines, after notice and public hearings, that there would be unacceptable adverse environmental effects. The move was extremely controversial, as the EPA’s reversal came four years after the Corps approved the permit.
BAAJA contains an amendment to Section 404 that would seem to prevent exactly this kind of thing from happening again. It establishes a limited window during which the EPA can review and veto a given site for a discharge permit, beginning when the applicant first submits their complete application for the permit, and ending when the Corps approves it. That means a Section 404 veto post-permit would have been off the table.
Trump probably couldn’t have rescinded the Lava Ridge wind farm’s right of way permit
BAAJA appears tailor-made to prevent what happened here. In December 2024, Biden’s Interior Department issued a Record of Decision to approve the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, set to be one of the largest such developments in the country. When Trump stepped into office in January, he issued an executive order asking his Interior Department to review that decision. Secretary Burgum canceled the permit last August, again citing unspecified “legal deficiencies in the issuance of the approval.”
Schiffman said the Interior Department would not have been able to do this if BAAJA was the law of the land unless it provided evidence that fit one of those exceptions I mentioned earlier, such as a court order, or if Lava Ridge violated its permit.
Annatoyn agreed, but added that this is not a totally foregone conclusion. “The agencies can still inadvertently or deliberately choose to press on the limits of that prohibition — you know, test it or even violate it outright,” he said. At the end of the day, he added, Trump could still do this under BAAJA, and the burden would fall on the project developer to undertake a lengthy, expensive court fight to undo it.
Trump’s offshore wind stop work orders would have been a lot less likely
In December 2025, Burgum ordered the five offshore wind farms that were already under construction off the east coast to pause their work. He cited “national security risks identified by the Department of War in recently completed classified reports.”
While the courts quickly rejected those orders, BAAJA may have prevented them in the first place. The bill prohibits agencies from taking any action “to interfere with or prevent the construction or operation” of a project that has all necessary permits. And if the administration had chosen to issue the orders anyway, BAAJA would have at least given the affected companies the right to recover costs attributed to the delay, which in this case was millions of dollars per day. On top of that, the companies would be entitled to payment of 25% to 50% of their project’s total costs up to the time the government intervened.
Another reason BAAJA would have likely prevented Burgum’s December order, Annatoyn said, is that it contains a provision to bar serial attempts of the same action. Burgum had issued stop work orders on two of the five wind farms earlier in the year, both of which were struck down by courts. Under BAAJA, the companies would be entitled to injunctive relief preventing the government from taking the same action again unless it obtained a court order condoning the action from the same judge.
A tacit freeze on permits would become challengeable
The Trump administration has stopped permitting offshore wind projects altogether, and has kept onshore wind projects in a holding pattern despite a court’s order to resume the permitting process. Under BAAJA, wind companies would have new ammo to challenge this inaction and delay. They might be able to identify a “pattern of disparate treatment” or cite other language in the bill that limits the number of days the government can sit on a permitting decision. At the same time, the discrimination language is a new area of law, Schiffman told me, so there’s some uncertainty as to how it would apply. And again, the burden would be on the company to bring a lawsuit.
Lula vs. Bolsonaro. Mauro PIMENTEL and Sergio LIMA / AFP via Getty Images