The lame-duck passage of the industrial-expediting bill BAAJA (S. 5653) will permit Trump to demolish almost anything he wishes in our nation’s capital, experts and advocates fighting his fascistic vanity projects warn.

The Trump regime has besieged the city of Washington, District of Columbia, with thousands of armed troops occupying the streets, a citywide surveillance network, and cage fights on the White House lawn.

Trump is also madly focused on remaking the district in his image, with notorious projects including—but not limited to—the ongoing White House East Ballroom boondoggle, the buffoonish painting of the granite Eisenhower Building, the renaming and threatened demolition of the Kennedy Center, the proposed remaking of Hains Point and the East Potomac Park, his grandiose Garden of Heroes, and the Trump Arch between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial. As Christiann MacAuley explains, none of DC’s waterfront property is safe from Trump.

Trump’s felonious follies are being slowed in the courts, thanks to the fierce use of laws that protect the public from our environment and our national heritage being destroyed arbitrarily. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (S. 5653), on which the Senate plans to cast the key vote on November 9th,¹ would eviscerate those protections.

BAAJA—which cripples the National Environmental Policy Act, National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act—is backed by the American Petroleum Institute, the White House National Energy Dominance Council, Williams CEO-turned-senator Alan Armstrong (R-Okla.), and co-sponsors Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

As a federal district with vast swaths under the direct control of federal agencies (particularly the National Parks Service) and an understandable concentration of historic sites, Washington, D.C. is uniquely threatened by BAAJA’s demolition of environmental and historic preservation rules.

Greg Werkheiser, a partner at the historic-preservation law firm Cultural Heritage Partners, told Hill Heat in a telephone interview that the passage of BAAJA would lead to “the next death mask of America.”

During the Depression, the National Parks Service hired Americans to create an inventory of historic places, eventually building a list of 12,000 sites. In 1966, more than half of them were gone, from entire historic Black neighborhoods across the nation to the majestic Penn Station in New York City. The photographic collection was dubbed by historian Helen Duprey Bullock “the death mask of ‘This Was America’.” Congress passed the National Historic Preservation Act without objection.

Section 106 of the NHPA allows public and tribal nations and communities a basic process through which they can be informed when a federal undertaking might reasonably harm a historic site. Interested parties are invited to comment and the federal agency conducting oversight has to take them into account. There are 120,000 reviews every year throughout the country, and 90 percent conclude there is no harm. The average assessment time is 16 days. In the vast majority of cases where deeper analysis is needed, a workaround is found.

In the absence of other protections, this has largely has been the regulatory framework that preserve the America of Tribes and Black and brown people.

With BAAJA, Section 106 is effectively eliminated.

“The bill would dramatically narrow the historic and cultural properties and projects that are subject to review, fundamentally alter consultation with Tribal Nations and other stakeholders, expand unilateral federal agency authority, and significantly constrain judicial review,” Shaw Sprague, Vice President of Government Relations at the National Trust, has warned.

Trump has systematically replaced the key agencies and institutions that protect our nation’s capital. Trump purged the Kennedy Center board in February 2025 and named himself chair. Trump fired members of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) in February 2025, installed Travis Voyles as acting chair, and stacked the council with his lickspittles a year later. In October 2025, he fired all the members of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts (CFA) in October 2025 and replaced them with his toadies in January of this year. Trump stacked the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) with toadies last Wednesday. And there is worse to come, as Trump has been more slowly squeezing the Smithsonian; Secretary Lonnie Bunch recently resigned and there are now six vacancies on the board.

Congress and the Supreme Court have abetted Trump’s takeover of the agencies that protect our national heritage and a free, democratic capital city, mostly by failing to act, but also with key moments of support. For example, in January 2025, the Senate overwhelmingly confirmed Doug Burgum as Secretary of the Interior, putting him in charge of NPS; Heinrich and Whitehouse were among Burgum’s supporters. The Republican majority—which is likely to expire on January 3—has blocked oversight and accountability efforts from Democrats. In June 2026, the Roberts Supreme Court asserted Trump had the power to reshape every once-independent agency as he saw fit.

The Trump administration and Supreme Court have repeatedly reinterpreted permitting laws to their advantage, through executive orders, regulatory rewrites, and tortured rulings.

Now, the lame-duck Congress is prepared—in bipartisan fashion—to codify these savage rollbacks of public limits on Trump’s bulldozer of destruction and domination.

In our next newsletter, the U.S. Climate Politics Almanac takes a detailed look at several of the major fights, and the specific ways that BAAJA will speed Trump’s takeover of the nation’s capital.

Thanks for subscribing and spreading the word. Connect with me—@climatebrad.hillheat.com on BlueSky and @[email protected].