What Is the American Affordability and Jobs Act?
The American Affordability and Jobs Act — in full, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, bill S. 5653 — is a bipartisan Senate bill that would rewrite how fast the federal government approves energy and infrastructure projects: pipelines, power plants and, above all, the transmission lines that carry electricity across state lines. It is not law, and it has not passed anything. Four senators introduced it on September 30 — Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Mike Lee of Utah, both Republicans, with Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, both Democrats — and the Senate votes today, Monday, November 9, at about 5:30 p.m. Eastern, on whether to take it up at all.
The plain reality underneath the name is this: the act's title promises affordability and jobs, but its 417 pages are about permits. A full federal environmental impact statement takes about four and a half years on average, on the White House Council on Environmental Quality's own figures, and lawsuits can add years more after that. A major interstate power line routinely takes a decade or longer from first drawing to switch-on, while the Department of Energy's National Transmission Needs Study says the country needs roughly 54,500 GW-miles of new transmission by 2035. That gap — between how fast America needs to build and how slowly it is allowed to build — is why people are typing this bill's name into Google today.
Its sponsors say the bill closes that gap and pays for itself in lower bills. Heinrich, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy Committee, says it would "hold data centers accountable" while lowering energy costs. President Trump endorsed it on Sunday night, urging every senator to vote yes and calling it a big win for U.S. energy independence that will lower energy costs for American families — a push we reported this morning. Behind it stands a coalition that almost never agrees on anything: the American Petroleum Institute and the American Clean Power Association, the Laborers' union LIUNA, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Club for Growth and 21 governors.
"It is time to stop making permitting reform the Groundhog Day of Congress." — Brent Booker, General President of LIUNA
Stated plainly, the common-sense test of the bill is this: a deadline is not a discount. Cutting years off a review only lowers a family's electricity bill if the power that gets built at the end of it is cheaper power. Speed by itself saves nobody anything — what matters is what the speed is used to build, and who is made to pay for it.
That is where the consequences land, and where the fight is. Under the bill, anyone challenging a permit in court would have 150 days to sue instead of years. Large new data centres — 20 megawatts and up — would pay the full cost of the grid upgrades they need instead of passing those costs onto households and small businesses, the rule Heinrich and his colleagues kept at the centre of the revised text they released on Saturday. And on the other side of the ledger, tribal nations say the price of that speed is their say over sacred and historic places: on Sunday, 11 tribal organizations, including the National Congress of American Indians and the Native American Rights Fund, urged Congress to hold the bill until the next Congress can consult them properly, or to strip out Title III and its rewrite of Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act entirely. If the bill misses this Congress — which ends when the new one is sworn in on January 3 — it dies, and everyone starts again. So if it cannot find 60 senators tonight even to open the debate, what chance does it have of becoming law in the weeks this Congress has left?
The details that matter are these. On the environment laws, the bill puts firm statutory deadlines on reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act and narrows what gets reviewed, revises the Clean Water Act — including state certification under Section 401 and an extension of some discharge permits from five years to ten — touches the Endangered Species Act, and adds project-certainty rules that limit the government's power to revoke a permit once it has been issued. On transmission, it strengthens the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's backstop power to site big lines — generally 230 kilovolts and up — when a state stalls them, and orders regional and interregional grid planning; Saturday's manager's amendment makes developers give the states a year first before that federal backstop applies. The House has already passed its own narrower version, the SPEED Act, in December 2025, and the two have never been reconciled, so even a Senate win tonight starts a second negotiation. Tonight's vote itself is a procedural one: the Senate is voting on cloture on the motion to proceed to H.R. 2347, an unrelated House tax bill being used as the vehicle for the package. Sixty votes are needed and Republicans hold 53 seats until January, so the bill cannot move without Democratic votes — and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has already said he will not rubber-stamp it as written.
The last word, on the day of the vote, belongs to the opposition the sponsors spent the weekend trying to answer. National Congress of American Indians President Mark Macarro said of Saturday's revisions: "Any amendments to S. 5653 merely puts lipstick on a pig. This bill is rotten from the inside and there is no fixing the rot. Tribal sovereignty continues to be diminished in this bill."