Senate Must Reject the Bill That Guts America’s Preservation Law for the AI Power Rush

Opinion

Watershed

By Juniper Hale

For sixty years, Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act has asked one modest thing of Washington: before you bulldoze, flood or pave over a battlefield, a burial ground or a pueblo, stop, look, and talk to the people who hold it dear. Two sentences of law. Now the Senate is poised to bury them under thousands of words of loopholes.

The vehicle is S. 5653, the “Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026,” introduced Sept. 30 by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, with Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). It runs 417 pages. It has not had a single hearing. Preservationists warn a floor vote could come as early as Nov. 9. I urge its authors to withdraw it, and every senator to vote no.

What the authors promise, and what the bill does

The sponsors’ case is not frivolous. Lee says America once built “projects like the Hoover Dam… in years, not decades.” Capito says the bill means “continuing to protect the land, water, and wildlife we all cherish” and looks forward to working with President Trump to sign it. Whitehouse says it will “flood the grid with clean, affordable energy and make data centers start paying their fair share,” and candidly calls it “a compromise.” Heinrich points to language “protecting the ability of Tribes to formally consult.” The administration, through Executive Order 14318, has made faster data-center permitting official policy, arguing that American leadership in AI depends on it.

Read the text, though, and “compromise” starts to look like surrender. An independent line-by-line analysis finds the bill replaces Section 106’s two sentences with roughly 5,700 words. A project would cause an “adverse effect” only if it “directly” alters a historic property; visual, atmospheric and audible harms would not count unless they “significantly diminish” it. Projects backed only by federal loans or grants would escape review, and an agency could end consultation in its “sole discretion.” According to Cultural Heritage Partners and the 106 Strong coalition, the bill would make consultation effectively optional, cut out state and tribal preservation officers who do not answer within 30 days, and give the public just 150 days to sue while stripping courts of the power to vacate an unlawful approval.

Kurt Dongoske, the Zuni Tribe’s historic preservation officer, asks: “How can Senator Heinrich defend legislation depriving Tribal Nations of meaningful notice and consultation…” Ira Matt of the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers calls it “paternalism dressed up as permitting reform.” More than 800 organizations and Tribal Nations have lined up against it. As Greg Werkheiser of Cultural Heritage Partners put it: “Congress cannot legislate away a burial ground.”

Nor does the damage stop at heritage. The package also loosens review under the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act, which guard the rivers, wetlands and wildlife of a fragile continent. The Southern Environmental Law Center says it “reads like total capitulation to the fossil fuel industry.” The oil lobby’s Mike Sommers calls it “a generational opportunity.”

Follow the power lines

To be fair, the bill does not fast-track data centers by name, and it does make new loads of 20 megawatts or more pay for the grid upgrades they trigger. But data centers do not run on press releases. They run on power plants, pipelines and transmission lines, exactly what this bill waves through. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found data centers used 4.4% of U.S. electricity in 2023 and could use 6.7% to 12% by 2028, and directly consumed some 66 billion liters of water that year.

Look who is in the room. The Data Center Coalition, whose members include Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Oracle, reported $480,000 in third-quarter lobbying that names this bill. Last year the coalition asked the White House to shrink Section 106’s reach and to cut the time to sue “from six years to 150 days.” This bill delivers the 150 days. The American Petroleum Institute disclosed lobbying on the bill and cheers it. The Edison Electric Institute, Entergy, EQT, the Business Roundtable and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy also filed disclosures naming S. 5653, though a filing alone does not show which side they took.

The billionaires’ bench

Leading the Future, the AI industry’s super PAC, is bankrolled in part by Andreessen Horowitz founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who Bloomberg reported committed $50 million between them, and by OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, who gave $25 million, FEC filings show. This month the PAC announced $1 million in support of four Republican Senate candidates, Capito among them. Its Republican-facing affiliate, American Mission, funded with $22.5 million from Leading the Future, has reported $210,193 in independent expenditures supporting Capito. I found no record tying that spending to this bill. But when the lead author of a bill clearing the way for the AI power buildout is on the receiving end of the AI industry’s largesse, voters are entitled to notice.

Silicon Valley, look in the mirror

Google’s 2025 environmental report shows its emissions up 51% since 2019, and that it replenished just 64% of the freshwater it consumed in 2024 even as consumption rose 28%. Microsoft, pledged to be carbon negative by 2030, reports emissions up 23.4% from its 2020 baseline. Meanwhile, last quarter, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta reported $5.88 million in lobbying, including on “energy policy and permitting reforms”; Amazon, $4.49 million; Google, $3.23 million, listing “Energy Permitting Reform” in the same filing as “Sustainability efforts”; and Larry Ellison’s Oracle, $2.89 million, including on the data-center permitting order. Microsoft hired outside lobbyists on “permitting reform.” None of their filings names S. 5653, and none has said a public word about it. That silence is a choice.

This is regulatory capture in a fleece vest: glossy sustainability reports for customers, lobbyists for the fine print, greenwashed branding to paper over the gap, and lobbying and campaign money to buy influence over the rules. A company serious about corporate social responsibility would not let its trade group ask Washington to shorten the time a tribe has to defend a burial ground. It would say, out loud, that its servers need not sit on battlefields or sacred sites, and lobby for that.

Manassas shows why the process matters

Consider Prince William County, Va., where developers proposed 37 data centers and 14 substations on about 2,100 acres beside Manassas National Battlefield Park, expected to draw up to 9 gigawatts. In March, Virginia’s Court of Appeals voided the rezonings because the public had not been properly notified; in July, Blackstone’s QTS terminated the project. That fight was won under state notice law, not Section 106. The lesson holds: when the public gets a real say, bad projects die. This bill is built to give the public, and tribes, less of one.

Vote no

Senators Capito, Lee, Whitehouse and Heinrich: withdraw this bill. Hold the hearing you skipped. Sit down with tribal nations and preservation officers before rewriting the law that protects their places. And to every other senator: no AI boom, no earnings call, no campaign check is worth a burial ground, a battlefield or a pueblo that has stood for a thousand years. Once those places are gone, no permitting reform brings them back. Reject S. 5653.

Featured image: Data centers near Ashburn, in Loudoun County, Va. Photo: Theodore Christopher, via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Juniper Hale is the pen name of a Washington Inquisitor opinion columnist writing from an environmentalist perspective. The views expressed are the author’s own and not those of The Washington Inquisitor.