Vote No on S. 5653, a Scam That Dismantles Environmental Law

Vote no on S. 5653 before the Senate takes it up after November 9. This bill is a scam. It guts NEPA, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act in a single blow, strips courts of the power to stop illegal projects, and cuts the public's window to sue from six years to 150 days. The premise is a lie. Fewer than one percent of federal environmental reviews require a full environmental impact statement, and agencies win about 80 percent of NEPA cases in federal appeals courts. The real bottleneck is underfunding. When Biden's Inflation Reduction Act invested in permitting staff, median review times dropped from 3.1 years to 2.4. Fund the agencies. Hire the scientists. That is the fix. This bill does nothing to ensure green energy gets permitted and built. It hands the extraction industry permanent legal advantages no future administration can undo, and the American Petroleum Institute called it a "generational" opportunity. That is a betrayal. Vote no.