Anti-immigration activists, a Los Angeles oil and natural-gas company, historic preservationists, and bird enthusiasts make for unlikely bedfellows. But in recent years, they’ve all embraced the power of decades-old environmental laws—not to protect the environment but to defend the status quo.  

Stick with me here. Signed into law in 1970, the National Environmental Policy Act and its state and local equivalents require federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of major projects before they sign off on them. Supporters argue that NEPA “empowers local communities to protect themselves and their environment.”

But NEPA is more burdensome than it may sound. As the economist Eli Dourado has documented, environmental-impact statements were initially very short—just 10 pages, in some instances. But now they average more than 600 pages, include more than 1,000 pages of appendices, and take four and half years on average to complete.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Not everyone should have a say]

How did this happen? Lawyers—the answer is always lawyers. Over time, the courts have embraced more and more expansive definitions of what these statements should cover. And lawyers—terrified of getting their clients caught up in lengthy court proceedings where a judge tells them they should have thought through the fourth- or fifth-order impacts of an apartment building—spend eons fleshing them out. The goal is not to mitigate environmental ill effects but to get an A+ for thoroughness.

Listen, some of my best friends are lawyers. But development is supposed to flow through the democratic process, which elects mayors, city-council members, state legislators, and governors to decide what to build and where. Subordinating that to an adversarial legal process is by definition subordinating the voting public to the small group of people with the time, resources, and incentives to sue.

Putting more abstract concerns for democracy aside, in practice, NEPA and related laws have evolved not to hold governments accountable for protecting the environment but to provide organized interests with yet another tool to stymie government action. And by action, I mean anything.

Let’s return to our unlikely bedfellows.

The Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform’s innocuous name belies its anti-immigration position: Just scroll through its Twitter account for a flavor. Recently, it sued the Biden administration for failing to conduct a NEPA analysis when it expanded refugee programs, suspended construction of President Donald Trump’s border wall, and enacted various other immigration policies that it says have increased illegal immigration.

One of the plaintiffs in the coalition, who has a cattle ranch near the southern border, contends that border crossers have “set fire to land he leases and left trash, campsites, and blankets in their wake,” and that “his heightened awareness of trespassers on and around his land has impaired his enjoyment of the outdoors.” In August, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed some of the coalition’s claims but decided that the challenges to the refugee program and the border wall, among others, could proceed.

The L.A. City Council voted unanimously in December to end oil drilling, a decision hailed as a “historic move in a city that was built by a once-booming petroleum industry.” But Warren Resources, a privately held oil and natural-gas exploration and production company, sued in January, claiming that L.A. had violated the California Environmental Quality Act, the state’s version of NEPA, because its environmental-impact statement was inadequate. Reading the lawsuit is mildly disorienting—the plaintiffs argue that banning oil drilling will increase greenhouse-gas emissions, and they also assert that L.A. is “depriving the public of an opportunity to meaningfully comment on the measure and its feasibility.” Apparently, a unanimous vote by an elected body is not a meaningful comment. So much for democracy.

In 2019, Minneapolis housing advocates argued that the way the city zoned for housing perpetuated economic and racial segregation, and pushed for a plan that would legalize more affordable housing. The city responded by eliminating single-family-only zoning, allowing for duplexes and triplexes on lots throughout the city. I suppose you know where this is going. Invoking Minnesota’s state environmental law, passed concurrently with NEPA, the Audubon Chapter of Minneapolis and the Minnesota Citizens for the Protection of Migratory Birds sued to block the rezoning effort, claiming that the city hadn’t considered the environmental harms of higher-density living. Never mind the research showing that higher-density living is actually beneficial for the environment. “If this ruling establishes precedent … anti-housing groups could very well challenge any comprehensive plan they don’t like on vaguely environmental grounds, forcing cities into years of litigation and zoning chaos,” a local scholar warned.

The University of California system has repeatedly weathered criticism for admitting students without providing sufficient housing options. As the Los Angeles Times reported, 9,400 students “were denied university housing [in 2022] because of shortages,” which pushed some into homelessness. UC Berkeley sought to address this crisis by building housing for 1,100 students. But local homeowners and historic preservationists sued to block the development, citing, among other concerns, the potential environmental impact of “loud student parties.” A judge recently ruled in the homeowners’ favor, acknowledging the legitimacy of this concern. Is this what environmental protection means now? Shielding the ears of wealthy California homeowners who knowingly moved next to one of our nation’s preeminent universities?

The concept of pollution has apparently stretched to include not just toxic waste and carbon-dioxide emissions but also any potential change to quality of life—an insidious shift that groups students into the same category as oil and natural gas. When asked where the students should go, a local leader suggested a satellite campus miles away from Berkeley, which, the San Francisco Chronicle points out, would “create even more extreme environmental impacts in a neighboring community—one that lacks the public transit and other sustainable infrastructure that Berkeley does.”

Seemingly in an attempt to avoid censure, the court’s opinion begins by almost pleading with the reader to recognize that “we do not take sides on policy issues. Our task is limited. We must apply the laws that the Legislature has written to the facts in the record.” The judges add that the defendants don’t have to abandon their plan to build student and low-income housing; they only need to go back and fix their proposal: “Ultimately, CEQA allows an agency to approve a project, even if the project will cause significant environmental harm, if the agency discloses the harm and makes required findings.”

This is all a game. And the winner isn’t the public or the environment. It’s the status quo.

The status quo can be preferable to a proposed alternative. I readily admit that these environmental laws stop environmentally damaging projects. But I’m skeptical that the broad hammer of status-quo protection actually prevents more damage than it causes.

See, for example, the federal government’s permitting dashboard. It shows many more planned or in-progress renewable-energy and electricity-transmission projects than fossil-fuel projects. This shouldn’t be all that surprising, given the decades of political activism highlighting the harms of carbon emissions, the surge of investments in clean technology, and the grim reality that we’ve already built a lot of fossil-fuel infrastructure. But the larger point is that we have many more clean-energy projects than dirty-energy projects that could be slowed or derailed by NEPA.

[Conor Friedersdorf: The environmental laws hindering clean energy]

We now know that unless we build quickly and cheaply, we are slated to lose out on much of the climate benefits that clean technology offers us. Advances in solar and wind power are meaningless if we don’t have the political capacity to build the infrastructure that gets that energy to our homes and offices.

But even if I’m wrong about the balance of harm, what’s clear is that the answer to the question “What’s best for the environment?” is not necessarily guiding the answer to the question “What should we build?”

The egregious cases above illustrate how these laws can be weaponized for ugly ends by unsympathetic actors. Yet, after sitting through countless community meetings and reading thousands of public comments, I’ve noticed that opposition to local projects doesn’t always come from an easily caricatured millionaire homeowner; typically, it’s from people of all sorts who are afraid of change. These status-quo defenders are often asking for the impossible: for someone to tell them exactly how their lives will look in the future. How will this affect my commute? What kinds of neighbors will live near me? And in their fear, they ask for caution, for further study, for more deliberation. They ask for time.

Caution and deliberation are good in moderation, but waiting cannot relieve this uncertainty; it merely changes its form. Doing can cause harm, but not doing won’t preserve the world in amber. Neighborhoods in desirable communities that don’t build more housing see skyrocketing prices and demographic shifts toward high-income, white, and older residents. And nations that don’t build the necessary renewable-energy infrastructure will be subject to the very environmental degradation that 20th-century activists tried so hard to prevent.

The unforeseen consequences of blocking change should weigh as heavily as the ones that come from allowing it. Those lost students, missing refugees, absent neighbors, and failed government projects may never intrude on our sight line or cause us frustration during our commutes, but they cost us all the same.

Instead of curbing poverty, as its mission outlines, the bank entrenches inequality. Its US-led governance is to blame.

Robert Garcia, a 45-year-old former Long Beach, California, mayor and newly elected Democratic U.S. representative, is hardly the first openly gay member of Congress, but there’s something unique and irreverent in how he has approached his first few months on the job. He’s publicly celebrated drag culture, casually criticized Republican colleagues on Twitter, and paid tribute to Beyoncé on the House floor. Although some of his commentary is cringe—after a recent jobs report, he tweeted that “President Biden’s economy is SLAYING”—Garcia embodies something new and welcome in American federal politics: an eagerness to embrace the pop culture and institutions made by and for gay people.

On a Friday night in mid-February, I met Garcia and three of his friends at Hamburger Mary’s, a drag bar and restaurant in downtown Long Beach. “We have a celebrity in the house, y’all,” the hosting queen hooted. The lights fell on Garcia. “You giving all those crazy bitches hell for us, Congressman?” she asked, sidling up to him. Garcia laughed and handed the queen—stage name Mia Farrow—a wad of dollar bills, which she slipped between a black-velvet dress and a pair of shiny silicone breasts.

The location was Garcia’s idea. His hair combed to a Clark Kent sheen, Garcia greeted the Hamburger Mary’s staff with kisses on the cheek. As he and his friends chatted about an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race the bar had shown on TV, they arranged three neat piles of cash to give to the queens strutting by. “I’ve been to every gay bar in Long Beach tons of times,” Garcia told me over a double Tito’s soda.

There are more openly gay, lesbian, and bisexual politicians in Congress than ever, but Garcia stands out among his political contemporaries, many of whom have public images that seem to resist gay stereotypes. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ran for president as a married veteran. Colorado Governor Jared Polis was once described in The New York Times as a “who-cares gay” with a schlubby tech-nerd vibe. Former Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, who emerged from the macho politics of New York State, was known for his combative style.

All these men march in pride parades and speak freely about their sexuality, but being gay for Garcia entails more conspicuous enthusiasm for queer people who aren’t his husband. In Long Beach, he hosts fundraisers at gay bars and has attended drag shows for years. Jewels, a local drag queen whom Garcia honored with a key to the city in 2019, told me it’s been “mind-boggling” to see her friend of two decades and a champion of drag performers make it to Congress, especially at a time when Republican-led state legislatures are trying to restrict drag shows. (Tennessee just passed a law banning “adult cabaret” performances in public.) Garcia, Jewels said, is willing to stand up for people who want “the freedom to do more than conform.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: Drag shows are free speech]

That change is overdue. In 1986, Barney Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily come out as gay, and for many years he was one of just a handful. “It was really only in the ’90s that gay issues hit the national political stage with Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act,” the historian George Chauncey told me. The gay-rights movement’s emphasis on two pillars of hetero respectability—the military and marriage—elevated politicians who fit a similar mold. “There was no meeting where everyone agreed to be a little less subversive in exchange for political access and power,” the cultural critic Dan Savage told me in an email. But as more aspects of gay culture entered the mainstream—including drag and frank discussion of sex—more forms of gay respectability emerged too. “Once we had space to be ourselves—to be a Cabinet member or International Mr. Leather—we … kept being ourselves,” Savage said.

Garcia considers himself “pretty vanilla,” but vanilla in Long Beach is different from vanilla in Washington. Most politicians talk about drag queens and other gender-nonconforming people with contempt, or like a caring but slightly clueless parent. When Garcia does, it’s from a place of familiarity—even reverence. He called drag “an important art form” in our conversation, and vocally defends the raunch and camp that bring millions of people joy and meaning, even as some Republicans try to legislate it out of existence. “I’m not going to, like, dial back things that make me who I am,” Garcia told me.

Garcia, the first gay immigrant elected to Congress, was 5 years old when he and his mother left Peru for the United States, settling in Southern California. “My mom’s first couple jobs were cleaning houses and working for shops,” he told me. “We always just worked to make it.” He learned English by reading comics, and realized in middle school that, like the superheroes he read about, he had an identity he wanted to keep secret. (A comic-book nerd to this day, Garcia was sworn into Congress with the Constitution and an original first-issue Superman.)

Garcia came out in college, and in our conversation he was remarkably candid about his first experiences as a gay man—from going to his first gay bar as a closeted fraternity pledge, to his first gay sexual experience with a fraternity brother, to his first drag show at a bar in Long Beach called Sweetwater, featuring a local performer named Dolly Levi. (Long Beach has a storied “gayborhood” that is both racially and economically diverse. “For most of us poor queers of color, Long Beach was the shit,” Melissa Hidalgo, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at California State University at Long Beach, told me.) By the time Garcia graduated, he had a crew of gay friends. One Fourth of July, they went to Factory, a West Hollywood spot that closed in 2018, and Garcia danced all night with the guy who, in 2018, became his husband, Matthew Mendez, now a political-science professor at CSULB. “I was so sprung,” Garcia said.

The precarity Garcia felt as both a gay man and an immigrant (he became a U.S. citizen in college) drove him to enter public service and help people who didn’t have the opportunities he did. In 2009, at age 32, he won his first race, for a seat on the Long Beach City Council. In 2014, he was elected the city’s youngest, first Latino, and first gay mayor. During his eight years in the job, he built up the city’s downtown; opened the Long Beach convention center to immigrant children who arrived at the border unaccompanied; and worked with the city’s gay-bar owners to safely revive nightlife during the coronavirus pandemic and to vaccinate bartenders, drag queens, and go-go boys against monkeypox.

In Congress, Garcia has begun to use his new platform to position himself as a foil to Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and George Santos. Garcia—who earned praise as mayor for his handling of COVID, which killed his mother and stepfather in 2020—sits on the COVID-19 oversight subcommittee with Greene, who has spread misinformation about COVID vaccines. At one committee meeting last month, she asked the head of the Government Accountability Office how much federal COVID funding had gone toward drag-queen story hours, which Greene had previously described as “an attack on our children.” (The GAO head said he did not know.) “She sits, like, right across from me. It’s hard to listen to, but you just             show up prepared,” Garcia told me. “I think most people would tell you that they’d rather leave their kid with a drag queen than with fucking Marjorie Taylor Greene.” (When I emailed Greene’s spokesperson with a request for comment, he wrote back: “I’m not responding to someone with ‘pronouns’ in their signature.”)

[Read: Why is Marjorie Taylor Greene like this?]

Garcia also has made a target of Santos, recently introducing a resolution, largely symbolic in the GOP-controlled House, to expel the New York freshman from Congress, after revelations that he had fabricated much of his résumé. Garcia reserves particular ire for Santos’s apparent lie that some of his former co-workers died in the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, in which 49 people, most of them gay Latino men, were killed. Yet Garcia also expressed pained empathy for Santos; both are gay men from South American immigrant families. “Have you seen the videos of him as Kitara?” Garcia asked me, referring to a stage name Santos reportedly used in a drag performance in Brazil. “He looks so happy. My heart breaks a little.” (Santos denies having been a drag queen. “I was young, and I had fun at a festival,” he told reporters. His office did not return a request for comment for this article.)

Garcia, of course, is just getting started in his new job, and to stay in office, he’ll have to deliver for his constituents. That his arrival in Washington still seems remarkable is a reminder of many Americans’ narrow expectations for queer people in public life. But Garcia seems intent on showing how a serious public servant can celebrate queer culture at its most playful, and expand what it looks like to be gay and represent America.

As we were leaving Hamburger Mary’s, he looked back at the stage. “Oh my God,” he said, grabbing a handful of dollar bills before running back to where we had been sitting. Dolly Levi, the first queen Garcia saw perform, as a college kid, had taken the stage and was lip-synching to an up-tempo track from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. As Levi spun around, the beat dropped and the black shroud she was wearing fell away to reveal a flowing pink-and-lavender dress. Garcia seemed transfixed. The smoke billowed and the lights flashed, and I thought of RuPaul’s line that drag “doesn’t hide you. It reveals who you are.

TikTok said the Biden administration was threatening to ban the app unless it sheds its Chinese ownership.

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The Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok from the United States unless the app's Chinese owners agree to spin off their share of the social media platform, TikTok acknowledged Wednesday evening.