Today, three threats are converging:

• a proposed regulatory rewrite of Section 106 that would silence the voices of the public and Tribal Nations and transfer all decision making to federal agencies and developers;
• a draft permitting bill that would rewrite and significantly weaken the National Historic Preservation Act;
• and executive actions that test ways to evade or narrow the law on highly visible projects.

On Friday, July 17,  2026  the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation’s Vice Chairman sent a draft revision of 36 C.F.R. Part 800 to members of the Council asking for their vote on these new Section 106 regulations through email by Friday July 24, 2026. You can read the redlined version here and the draft here. On July 24, 2026, ACHP announced they had voted to approve the revised regulations and sent the draft to OIRA for review. 

On August 27, 2026, an unprecedented coalition of more than 800 public, private, non-project organizations and Tribal Nations joined together to send a letter to Congress calling for members to reject efforts underway through regulation, legislation, and executive action to dismantle one of America’s most successful bipartisan conservation and good-government laws.

On Sept 30, 2026, The Senate released a long negotiated bipartisan bill titled the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA). The bill guts the National Historic Preservation Act and would fundamentally alter historic preservation review, consultation duties, review timelines, and access to judicial remedies.

Together, these overhauls to the statutory and regulatory framework of the NHPA will devastate our ability to protect and preserve historic places and would dramatically curtail public participation in federal decisions that affect local communities. They strip federal preservation law of the language for meaningful consultation, change the definition of consultation, eliminate the requirements for “avoidance, minimization, and mitigation,” eliminate protections for Traditional Cultural Landscapes, and imperil thousands of significant cultural and historical sites who will not meet the new definition of “historic.” They are a betrayal of Congress’s intent when it passed the NHPA sixty years ago, and a betrayal of the government-to-government relationship with Tribal Nations. 

Join the Fight to Defend the NHPA and Learn more about the Coalition at www.106strong.com