Jul 2, 2025
The America the Beautiful for All Coalition has been closely tracking the budget reconciliation process to understand how it will impact our priorities to save nature, uphold public health, and support justice for communities.
This week, the Senate voted to approve it's version of a massive budget reconciliation bill In President Trump refers to as the “Big, Beautiful Bill.” The House-passed version includes several awful provisions impacting nature and communities. Numerous attempts were made to include a public lands liquidation provision, but our collective organizing work resulted in enough pressure to remove them from both House and Senate version.
Here’s the top 4 ways the bill language could sellout nature and the environment in their budget bill:
Requires the government to open our coasts and oceans to drillers to help raise money to pay for billionaire tax cuts,
Repealing clean energy and community investments from the Inflation Reduction Act that are helping communities adapt to climate change, lowering energy costs, and creating sustainable jobs,
Opens the Arctic and public lands to drilling, logging and mining,
Suspends the methane pollution fee that polluters pay, endangering the health of frontline communities by increasing their exposure to harmful air.
Coalition leaders are speaking out and fighting back. Already, we defeated numerous proposals to liquidate public lands, and won a reprieve for the Boundary Waters which an initial version of the bill would have opened to dangerous mining.
Reactions from Coalition leaders are below:
Photo: Courtesy of Mason Cummings, The Wilderness Society
Shantha Ready Alonso, Executive Director, America the Beautiful for All Coalition: "The Trump Administration and Republican Congress’ budget bill deprives, destroys, divides and kills. We who cherish nature, community, health, and justice will continue to unite to support dignified life on Earth for all. We call forth a different way forward that supports thriving among our oceans, lands, wildlife and water."
Mark Magaña, Founding President and CEO of GreenLatinos, and America The Beautiful For All Coalition Co-Chair: "This proposal sacrifices the health, safety, and stability of working-class families to solely benefit polluters and the ultra-wealthy at a time when the United States is grappling with rising inflation, ecosystem degradation, unprecedented climate disasters, and persistent gaps in healthcare access. It abandons our clean energy future, undermines public health protections, and exacerbates the inequities that the working-class communities struggle to overcome every day."
Earthjustice Action, Vice President of Policy and Legislation Raúl García: "The Republican reconciliation bill plunders wildly popular programs that reduce pollution, lower energy costs, and improve health outcomes. While billionaires and polluting industries CEOs reap the benefits, everyday people are left with crumbs. Not content with robbing the public of a cleaner future, they are also trying to shield polluting industries from scrutiny and accountability, attempting to eviscerate the rule of law, and giving the Trump administration the ability to approve any project it wants without any check or oversight."
Jewel Tomasula, National Policy Director, Endangered Species Coalition: "The politicians who passed this budget bill are selling out our public lands and oceans by promoting more drilling and mining—with less oversight. While adding $18 billion in tax breaks for the oil and gas industry, these politicians eliminated millions of dollars in funding to recover endangered species including freshwater mussels, butterflies, desert fish, and native Hawaiian and Pacific Island plants. These are some of the most vulnerable species in need of recovery work. They’re also deeply connected to clean water and food security for people."
Usman Mahmood, Policy Analyst, Bayou City Waterkeeper: "This reconciliation bill sacrifices our waters and environmental protections to fund tax cuts for billionaires. It would force drilling in the Arctic, eliminate clean energy investments, weaken environmental review processes, and prioritize polluter profits over public health - all at a time when our communities most need federal investments in protecting clean water and healthy environments."
Jacob Malcom, Executive Director, Next Interior: "The reconciliation bill will make it impossible for the Department of the Interior to fully serve the American people. Taking funding from the National Park Service will not help people enjoy our national treasures during family vacations. The wild plants and animals on which rural Alaskans depend to feed their families will be harmed--people will go hungry. Cutting investments in clean power development will not help the Bureau of Land Management contribute to the Nation's energy transition, but it will make energy costs higher and threaten our public lands and waters. And letting polluters continue to release methane into our neighborhoods and the planet's atmosphere for free will only make people sicker and the Earth hotter. This is all deeply unpopular."
Avery Davis Lamb, Executive Director, Creation Justice Ministries: "This bill is a betrayal of our sacred responsibility to care for God's creation and to protect the most vulnerable among us. It trades clean air, water, and a livable climate for short-term profits and political gain. Communities of faith across the country are working to build a more just and sustainable future, and this reconciliation bill does the opposite: it props up polluters, endangers frontline communities, and accelerates the destruction of our common home. We must reject this assault on creation and demand a moral economy that puts people and planet first."
Chase Huntley, Vice President of Federal Policy at The Wilderness Society: “The Senate just passed a bill that reeks of fossil fuel influence and is wildly out of touch. While the majority in the Senate might be chalking up the bill as a success, they seem to be forgetting about the tens of millions of people who enjoy the same lands they’ve put on the table for energy development up for auction. We fought to ensure this bill did not sell off public lands, and we’ll keep fighting to guarantee our public lands are not overrun by leasing and development. The House must stand up and reject this bill.”
Cassandra Carmichael, Executive Director, National Religious Partnership for the Environment: "We are deeply disheartened by the Senate’s passing of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” which reverses critical environmental provisions. This legislation not only fails to honor the dignity of human life and the sanctity of God’s Creation, it denies communities the ability to flourish. By forcing massive lease oil and gas sales on precious lands like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, cutting funding for critical clean energy projects, and eliminating programs that help protect our most vulnerable communities from pollution, H.R.1 disregards Biblical mandates to love our neighbor and to honor, tend, and care for an Earth that belongs to God."
Zach Plopper, Senior Environmental Director, Surfrider Foundations: "For our coasts and oceans, the Big Beautiful Bill is anything but beautiful. Instead of protecting Americans, it further exposes us to the harms of offshore oil drilling, extreme weather, and climate change. The oil lease sale provisions for the Gulf are ludicrous; offering more acres of ocean for exploitation than that actually exist. It undermines bipartisan support for a clean energy economy, strips away environmental safeguards in place to protect us and our communities, and reduces our ability to plan for and respond to hurricanes and other extreme weather events. Nonetheless, Surfrider and our network of more than 200 chapters and student clubs around the country remain steadfast in our commitment to protect our coasts and ocean."
Kevin Chang, Executive Director, Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo: “One would think from the prior rhetoric and promises of the current administration that greater local voice and governance was a strong theme of the day. Instead, this Big un-Believable Boondoggle of a bill shifts more wealth to the ultra-wealthy, weakens community environmental resilience efforts and protections, helps open up the veins of states, territories and communities and their precious environments to outside exploitation, further undermines a growing civic trust in government, cuts important social benefits and services for our precious communities and kicks the ladder on common people who tirelessly work to build on an American Dream.”
