The new year started in Washington much as the old year left: Democrats struggling to advance their agenda, the pandemic and inflation continuing to wreak havoc on the country, and both parties gearing up for the pivotal 2022 mid-term elections.
Democrats temporarily put aside their efforts to enact President Biden’s Build Back Better plan to take another shot at passing voting rights and election reforms. Biden and Vice President Harris travelled to Atlanta last week, where they called on Senate Democrats to waive filibuster rules to allow passage of three bills designed to counter efforts at the state and local levels to restrict voting. However, their exhortations did not do the trick; the next day, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) reiterated their opposition to changing filibuster rules.
It appears likely that Democrats will now try to turn back to the Build Back Better bill, a nearly $2 trillion social spending and climate change proposal. That bill was stymied in December when Manchin announced that he could not support the bill in its current form, citing the bill’s costs and potential impact on the federal deficit as the main roadblocks. Without Manchin’s 50th Democratic vote, the bill lacks a way forward in the Senate (it passed the House already). Biden and Senate Democrats are looking to find a middle ground between what progressive Democrats want and what Manchin and other Congressional Democratic moderates will accept, but it is not clear if there is room to find a deal.
As if the failure to pass voting rights and the continuing problems advancing Build Back Better weren’t enough, the Biden administration suffered another setback last week when the Supreme Court invalidated their employer vaccination mandate. The Court ruled 6-3 that the plan, which would require employers with 100 or more workers to ensure their employees were vaccinated against COVID, exceeded the authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to enforce it.
The challenges that the President is facing on the policy and pandemic fronts come as both parties gear up for the mid-term elections in November, when all House seats and a third of the Senate are up for grabs. With Democrats holding extremely narrow majorities in both chambers (not to mention the tendency of the party in the White House to lose Congressional seats in mid-term elections), Washington is preparing for the possibility that Republicans will assume control of one or both houses of Congress by the end of the year, making it much harder for Biden to advance his agenda. Therefore, it is expected that Democrats will redouble their efforts to get his Build Back Better plan passed this year, since that may become near-impossible in 2023.
Despite its problems with Congress, the administration continues to move ahead with initiatives that potentially impact cultural resources:
Clean Energy Project Streamlining. The administration last week outlined an array of initiatives to advance clean energy, including plans to hold the largest-ever sale of offshore wind farm rights in U.S. history and accelerate the construction of new power lines to transmit renewable electricity across the nation.
As part of the initiative, the Energy Department launched its “Building a Better Grid” plan, which is intended to “catalyze nationwide development of new and upgraded high-capacity transmission lines.”
The plan notes that, although “the time required to meet legal mandates can be reduced through effective planning processes that take advantage of existing rights-of-way,” a lack of rights-of-of way can slow the permitting process. The plan proposes to accelerate the process, “without sacrificing important analysis, protection of environmental, cultural, and other important values, or robust public engagement,” via increased coordination through the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (FPISC), public-private partnerships, and designation of route-specific transmission corridors.
The White House also announced, as part of the plan, that the “Departments of the Interior, Agriculture, Defense, Energy, and the Environmental Protection Agency are forming a new collaboration to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of reviews of clean energy projects on public lands, in order to expand solar, onshore wind, and geothermal energy.”
ACRA is studying the proposals to analyze their potential impact, if any, on CRM and Section 106.
Interior Requests Feedback on the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas. The Interior Department, working in tangent with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), USDA, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is soliciting comments to “inform how the American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas can best serve as a useful tool for the public and how it should reflect a continuum of conservation actions in the America the Beautiful initiative.” Comments are due by March 4, 2022.
The Atlas is part of the administration’s America the Beautiful initiative, a voluntary nationwide effort to conserve, connect, and restore 30 percent of America’s lands and waters by 2030. According to Interior, the Atlas “is intended to be an accessible, updated, and comprehensive tool through which to measure the progress of conservation, stewardship, and restoration efforts across the United States in a manner that reflects the goals and principles of the America the Beautiful initiative.”
Interior Announces Chaco Canyon Protection. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has formally proposed to withdraw approximately 351,000 acres of public lands surrounding New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon National Historical Park.
This action follows the White House announcement last fall of new efforts to protect the Chaco Canyon and to ensure that public land management better reflects the sacred sites, stories, and cultural resources in the region. The proposed withdrawal of federal lands within a 10-mile radius around Chaco Culture National Historical Park would bar new federal oil and gas leasing on those lands.