The “Abundance” agenda took a major step forward last week when four U.S. Senators introduced the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026.”  At 417 pages, the proposed legislation takes a huge whack at our bedrock federal environmental laws – the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act – in the name of “permit reform,” promising to “deliver cheaper energy, more jobs, and responsible growth across the United States.”  In California, a similar effort crafted by the Chamber of Commerce and allied development interests is coming at us in the form of Proposition 45 on the November ballot.  Occupying 17 pages of single-spaced, densely-packed lawyerly language in the official election guide, Prop 45 asks voters to dramatically overhaul the California Environmental Quality Act.

In a recent essay, I suggest that we need a nuanced, evidence-based approach to environmental law reform for the twenty-first century, one that preserves the core of participatory democracy.  Neither the new Senate proposal nor Prop 45 is that.  Both are heavy-handed attempts to radically re-write half a century of legal precedent and, ultimately, restrain community voices.  While the California Democratic Party opposes the power grab of Prop 45, two prominent Democrats – U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico – co-sponsored the federal bill alongside Republican Senators Shelly Moore and Mike Lee.  Lee, some may remember, is the Utah Senator who has championed such ideas as selling off millions of acres of federal public lands and dismantling protections for beloved national monuments.

The details of the proposed new federal legislation are too numerous and complex to cover in this post, but let’s single out a few for closer scrutiny.  The bill’s proposed NEPA amendments are the most audacious.  Many of them are borrowed from concepts articulated in proposed companion House bill H.R. 4776, introduced by Arkansas Republican Bruce Westerman in 2025.  And they build on some other recent NEPA streamlining changes already enacted in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023.  The 2023 revisions shortening environmental review in both length and time have barely had time to take hold or prove their value, but developers keep clamoring for more.  Additional tightening of deadlines and more pressure on agencies could, theoretically, expedite project decisions, although the Trump Administration’s wholesale slashing of agency employees who review project applications and oversee project review cuts in the opposite direction.

The biggest bombshell in the Senate bill is found in its new “Judicial Review” section for NEPA claims.  Presently, NEPA challenges are brought in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (there is no citizen suit provision in NEPA) and are subject to the six-year federal default statute of limitations.  The new judicial review section in the Senate proposal, like H.R. 4776, would shorten that period to 150 days from the date of the agency decision and vest original jurisdiction in the courts of appeal.  These changes may incrementally expedite judicial review, but most NEPA challenges are currently filed within a few months of a final agency decision and timely resolved on cross motions for summary judgment.  So here, they feel more like window dressing than anything else.

The real impact of this new judicial review section is tucked away in two seemingly innocuous provisions.  First, the proposed bill would limit challengers to those who can show “an actual or imminent injury in fact amounting to a direct harm.”  The “actual or imminent injury in fact” language is not problematic, as it simply mirrors existing jurisprudence around constitutional standing.  What does the real work in this clause is the “direct harm” language, which potentially eliminates claims over indirect or cumulative impacts that have long been part of NEPA’s “hard look” requirement (although recently downplayed by the Trump Administration’s revised NEPA regulations).  For instance, if a project would cause air emissions that add to the already unhealthful local pollution burden but are not large enough, in and of themselves, to cause health effects, would affected community members have standing to challenge the adequacy of the agency’s analysis and disclosure?  If the bill passes and is signed into law, courts may be adjudicating such questions for years to come.

Most concerning, however, is the bill’s “remedy” provision.  Even when a reviewing court finds that NEPA compliance or the environmental impacts evaluation is legally flawed, “the only remedy the court may order to redress that violation is to remand, without vacatur or issuance of an injunction.”  And notwithstanding the remand, the challenged agency authorization “shall remain in effect while the Federal agency corrects any errors or deficiencies found by the reviewing court,” and the authorized activity may “be carried out, including during the time prescribed by the applicable court to correct the applicable errors or deficiencies.”  This language, if enacted, effectively guts the core purpose and effect of NEPA.  As the Supreme Court recently reiterated in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, NEPA is “purely procedural” and its sole purpose is to compel agency decisionmakers to consider and potentially mitigate a project’s environmental effects before activity goes forward.  If projects can be completed before agencies have fully and adequately considered their impacts, NEPA becomes a meaningless paper exercise – the very thing that developers and Abundance enthusiasts rail against.

The Senate bill also takes bites out of other core environmental statutes, including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act, and makes substantive changes to the permitting of energy projects.  These changes are a mixed bag, many designed to wrest authority away from states and local communities in favor of top-down federal control, but some proposing to devolve regulatory oversight to state agencies that have little capacity to wield it.  The thing they all have in common is shortening deadlines for judicial challenges and narrowing who can bring such suits.

As this AI analysis by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center shows, the Senate bill draws primarily on the earlier work of the conservative Republican lawmakers who drafted H.R. 4776.  It is therefore not surprising that even some Abundance supporters have expressed dismay that two Democratic Senators would support its more draconian provisions.  The question going forward is whether environmental advocates and their supporters can help broker a compromise that eliminates the most radical and environmentally-detrimental provisions while preserving some of the more reasonable process changes.

A parallel attempt in California is finding less traction among traditional liberals.  Drafted by lawyers for the Chamber of Commerce and development interests, Prop 45 would expedite review under CEQA for “essential projects.”  These include, broadly, housing projects of any size, road-building and other transportation projects, and water projects such as reservoirs and pipelines, as well as projects that can be characterized as involving public health, public safety, broadband, educational, and clean energy, with only a few exceptions.  For any project falling into one of these capacious categories, the initiative would shift declared state policy from one of maintaining “a high-quality environment now and in the future” and taking “all action necessary to project, rehabilitate, and enhance the environmental quality of the state,” to one that affords “the fullest possible weight to the interest of, and the approval and realization of, essential projects.”

More specifically, Prop 45 would: (1) narrow existing tribal consultation requirements to only federally recognized tribes, eliminating existing consultation mandates for dozens of California tribes; (2) impose tight new deadlines, judicially enforceable by project developers, for public agency consideration of project applications and completion of environmental impact evaluations; (3) require CEQA lead agencies to develop and publish new standards or rules for determining the significance of environmental impacts; (4) severely constrain the time for public comment on draft environmental review documents; (5) allow developers to select a single alternative for consideration in lieu of the existing requirement to develop and study a “reasonable range of alternatives”; and (6) limit the scope of judicial review for CEQA violations.  Much like the proposed NEPA reforms, Prop 45 prevent courts from setting aside an agency approval even when they find a CEQA violation.

In short, Prop 45 would radically rewrite CEQA for many or most projects.  The Chamber of Commerce touts the initiative as helping “lower housing costs by getting homes built faster and more affordably.”  But nothing in Prop 45 requires or even incentivizes affordable housing.  Moreover, in 2025, California enacted AB 130 and SB 131, which collectively exempt most infill housing development – and many other community projects – from CEQA.  Prop 45 is an attempt to shift the balance of power even further toward developers and limit community input for a broad array of commercial and industrial developments that may well have significant adverse environmental and public health impacts.  Particularly concerning, Prop 45 would prohibit future statutory amendments unless they are passed with a two-thirds vote of the Legislature and, even then, only if any such amendment “is consistent with, and furthers” the newly declared statutory purpose of “streamlining and speeding approval of essential projects.”  That is, the initiative’s sponsors not only want to largely bypass meaningful environmental review and community input today, they also hope to lock in that regime in perpetuity.

Unlike the “bipartisan” reform legislation moving through Congress, Prop 45 faces opposition from the California Democratic Party and a wide swath of labor, environmental, and other progressive organizations.  Many of those groups likely support some aspects of the Abundance agenda and project permitting reform, but not the overreach of Prop 45.  As my recent essay argues, eviscerating established environmental laws that have markedly reduced pollution and human health impacts over the last half century is not justified by the empirical evidence, which shows that they are not the source of most project delays.  Nor is it likely to be politically durable in a moment of populist backlash against the perceived elite.  Disenfranchising communities and eroding participatory democracy hardly seems like the right course in 2026.  Instead, social science teaches that creating trust, transparency, and shared benefit is the way forward to expediting a more abundant and just future.  That requires a careful surgeon’s scalpel, not a meat axe.

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Deborah Sivas is a leading environmental litigator, co-director of the Stanford Environmental Law Clinic, Director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program, Luke W. Cole Professor of Environmental Law at Stanford Law School, and Professor at Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability.

This blog post represents the views of the individual author(s) and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program or Stanford Law School or University.