Senate Advances Bill That Museum Groups Want Defeated

The U.S. Senate has advanced a bill that would narrow the rules for checking how federal projects affect historic and sacred places. The vote was 73-25, according to ArtNews, and museum groups are now pressing Congress to stop it.

The measure is Senate bill S.5653, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026. Senator Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican from West Virginia, introduced it. Senators Mike Lee, Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich are cosponsors.

The bill targets Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act. That is the part of the federal law that requires government agencies to weigh how their decisions, such as building a road or approving a pipeline, could harm older sites before they go ahead. S.5653 would limit which types of projects trigger that review.

Opponents have been organising since early November. On November 6, the 106 Strong Coalition, a group of more than 1,200 organizations, tribal nations and advocates, sent a letter to Congress calling for the bill to be defeated. Signers include the American Alliance of Museums, numerous state museum associations and many individual museums.

The museum letter describes the bill as "a sweeping assault on the protections Congress enacted sixty years ago to ensure that federal agencies consider the consequences of their decisions for America's historic and sacred places."

The disagreement reached the streets as well. About 800 protesters gathered on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol in Washington to speak against the bill.

For museums, the review process matters because it is one of the ways a federal project can be stopped, changed or delayed to protect a site. Anyone who works on a historic building, an archive or a collection that sits near a federal project has a stake in how that process is written. The bill now moves forward in the Senate, and the coalition's letter makes clear that its opponents want it stopped before it becomes law.