On behalf of Unitarian Universalists of faith and conscience, we oppose the version of Permitting Reform being advanced in Congress as S. 5653, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) of 2026. It fails to align with our faith teachings and values that call us to hold in love our recognition of interdependence, our need for justice, and our commitment to equity. We find the current proposal favors industry interests over the needs of people, communities, and ecosystems. It perpetuates the structural injustices of environmental racism and strikes at the foundations of the environmental policies that keep our communities safe from corporations more concerned with profit than people and planet. The bill sacrifices the sovereign rights and interests of Indigenous communities, as well as the preservation of sacred and cultural resources, at a time when the climate crisis is already forcing another generation of people from their homes. BAAJA runs counter to decades of Unitarian Universalist Social Witness statements: instead, we say, “But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream” (Amos 5:24).
BAAJA shifts away from permitting solutions that respect community needs, democracy, transparency, accountability, and environmental protections. Instead, it functions as a deregulatory push that prioritizes shareholder interests while jeopardizing community agency and prioritizing corporate interests. It locks in fossil fuel use, in exchange for transmission expansion, at the cost of community health and the legal tools impacted communities use to hold industry accountable. The trade-offs are too steep a price.
The American people have seen too many rollbacks of environmental policy, science, and programs to now surrender our right to the democratic process as a safeguard for our communities. Further hobbling the Clean Water Act (CWA), the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) should make this deal null and void. It limits environmental reviews and community and Tribal input. It lets data center developers avoid federal permitting and undermine accountability by targeting expansion within U.S. gas basins; it may trigger Section 404 CWA liabilities, which also apply when a data center is built on private lands (which most are). It imposes unrealistic and unreasonable timelines for input and judicial review. It disallows the introduction of new data, research, or insight. Our evidence-based understandings from developing the endangerment finding and cataloging disproportionate impacts should preclude this course of action. The ways this bill erodes democracy alone should render this dead on arrival. The project certainty feature makes it very difficult for future administrations to revisit permitting decisions based on new policies, health or environmental impact data, economic projections, or for any other legitimate policy reasons. This blocks us from acting in accordance with our conscience and responsibility to rectify harm, which undermines the sacred relational foundations of Unitarian Universalism.
This deregulatory push shows how structural racism manifests as federal policy violence; this is clear if we remember that we, as Unitarian Universalists, stated in 1970: “The thrust of continental policy is now, as it has been historically, the steady expropriation of Indian land and water resources for the benefit of whites in the United States.” In 2021, we reasserted that “Systemic white supremacy is a direct affront to every one of our principles.”
We also know that environmental racism violates the Civil Rights Act. A justice analysis that has been affirmed in foundational documents such as The 17 Principles of Environmental Justice (1991) and The Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing (1996). Our faithful friends in the United Church of Christ said it directly in their 1987 landmark report, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites, when they agreed with the National Council of Churches: “Racism is more than just a personal attitude; it is the institutionalized form of that attitude.”
BAAJA perpetuates sacrifice zones and sacrifice constituencies, discarding the inherent worth and dignity of the very communities whom legislators continue to abandon. Poor Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) and white folks in urban and rural communities will bear the disproportionate impacts of “progress” for the sake of net gains in emission reductions.
We love our neighbors too much to accept that abundance is dictated through racist and classist policy. Structural and environmental racism is fundamentally unholy, and an affront to our sacred and radically inclusive Love. We refute the notion that people near point-source pollution, or who will see their cherished lands strip-mined and despoiled, must bear the multigenerational costs while the fossil fuels industry is maintained through corporate welfare.
Since 1967, Unitarian Universalists have aligned with Tribal nations against continued encroachment on their lands for resources, including renewable energy. Our opposition to BAAJA, on Indigenous Sovereignty grounds, is aligned with at least 59 years of UU precedent. BAAJA threatens Tribal sovereignty by undermining Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), a critical tool that ensures that Tribes can weigh in on federal decisions that would affect sacred sites and historic properties. Section 106 requires consultation with Tribes/Nation before the start of any project that could potentially impact protected sites. BAAJA states agencies “may” consult with Tribes/Nations after the review is complete and any report is issued, meaning that Tribes/Nations will have less input on decisions impacting their sacred sites. The challenge to the Section 106 process, and thus our obligations to Tribal Nations, should make this a non-starter. As Unitarian Universalists, we must not sacrifice Tribal communities in our country’s pursuit of energy infrastructure. The need to take action in the promotion of all rights of Indigenous peoples is imperative to the future of humankind.
Our faith calls us into a deeper LOVE in our free search for responsible truth that embraces a generous and transformative pluralism. This deeper love fundamentally demands interdependence, equity, and justice. We would much rather see Congress start with proposals such as the Environmental Justice for All Act, using that as a baseline for addressing climate change, the climate crisis, and environmental harms. From that posture, Congress can then address rising energy costs, the need to expand cleaner energy, and the public sector’s capacity deficit in managing permits. Perhaps reconsider and improve measures such as the Clean Electricity and Transmission Acceleration Act, the Cheap Energy Act, and the Energy Bills Relief Act.
We want Congress to move our economy and society toward a thriving future in strategic and practical ways that improve technology and our built environment while preserving our public lands and community agency or sovereignty. We seek a wholeness with justice. Let all people of faith and conscience reject complicity with domination and instead live into the courageous call to love every neighbor. No community, species, or ecosystem should be sacrificed for net emissions reductions. Accepting BAAJA would make us complicit in harm to the very lives we hold sacred.
If BAAJA proponents were serious about the permitting process without sacrificing communities, their proposal would invest in agency staff and capacity while also incentivizing industry to bring forward permit-ready, shovel-ready plans: project concepts that have undergone meaningful community consultation and undertakings that have won authentic consent to proceed. Instead, BAAJA pursues speed and backlog clearance via strict procedural timelines, legal overhauls, and structural limitations on environmental reviews.
Unfortunately, BAAJA does not move in a productive direction; instead, it further jeopardizes bedrock environmental laws; surrenders meaningful environmental review; imperils Tribal sovereignty and heritage rights; expedites and entrenches the fossil fuel industry; grants foreign mining conglomerates access to public lands; muddles clean water and ocean protections; gives developers and polluters privileged access to courts; imposes strict statutes of limitations; and weakens protections for endangered species. Overall, it shows we have not learned from nearly 100 years of privileging the fossil fuels industry and corporate actors over people and our communities. Across the board, it shows once again that Congress is all too willing to ignore nearly certain harm to communities for the prospect of profits and net gains.
As a faith tradition, we, Unitarian Universalists, call Congress back into fellowship, caring for our communities, and covenant with our interdependent web of life. We ask Congress to set this permitting reform – deregulation push – proposal aside and work toward measures that ensure environmental justice, honor Tribal consultation obligations and rights, preserve creation, and then structure human activity and procedures toward sustainability. We counsel Congressional policy staff to start with frameworks such as the Environmental Justice for All Act, and we commit to help them pass it. We conclude that the altars of progress, affordability, and profit should not require sacrifice of community input, accountability, or fact-based science.
Unitarian Universalists have long understood ourselves as bearers of love and justice in the world, those who show up for peace and freedom, who side with love in the face of all that would otherwise diminish our humanity. Love only exists in relationship to the beloved. Love does not happen all alone. Love, fundamentally, calls us into accountable relations with all our human and beyond-human beloveds.
Therefore, we call on our Unitarian Universalist community to actively oppose the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026. Join with others, both interfaith and secular allies, in that work. Trust that Congress can do better when it follows robust community consultation and crafts legislation in a transparent process. Believe that we can succeed in demanding better of our national legislators.
We cry together, in one unified voice, “May it be so.”
List of joiners:
- JUUstice Washington
- MUUSJA – Minnesota Unitarian Universalist Social Justice Alliance
- Oregon UU Voices for Justice
- Texas Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry
- Unitarian Universalist Advocacy Network of Illinois
- Unitarian Universalist Association
- Unitarian Universalist FaithAction NJ
- Unitarian Universalist Justice Ministry of North Carolina
- Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of Maryland
- Unitarian Universalist Ministry for Earth
- Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
- Unitarian Universalists for Just Economic Community
- Unitarian Universalists for Social Justice
- UU Justice Ministry of CA
- UU Women’s Federation
- Wisconsin UU State Action Network