Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2026

What is this bill?

• HR 4553, sponsored by Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN-3)

This is a 74-page bill that allocates money for energy and water related projects across various departments. It’s incredibly dull…and then it gets bad.

What makes this bill fascist?

On page 68, we get Title V: General Provisions. In other spending bills, this section tends to be rules that say you can’t transfer the money to other departments or spend it outside of what’s already defined in the bill. The GOP and the Trump administration appears to be taking these rules and contorting them in order the tack on all the fascism they can.

In the final three and a half pages, this spending bill:

• Sec 505: Blocks funds from being used for DEI, Critical Race Theory, or “…any concept associated with Critical Race Theory.”

• Sec 506: Blocks funds from being used to punish a person for speaking about or acting on the belief that marriage is only between “one man and one woman.”

• Sec 507: Blocks funds from being used to enforce masking or requiring covid vaccinations

• Sec 508: Blocks funds from being used to fly or display a flag other than the American flag, a flag with an official US government seal or insignia, or a POW/MIA flag. This kind of rule is entirely used to prohibit the flying of any pride or LGBTQIA+ flags in government department buildings.

• Sec 510: Blocks funds for any person, organization, or social media company that accuses the government of misinformation and/or censors “protected speech.”

So, you know, just a mix of racism, anti-LGBTQIA+ ideology, eugenics, threats to punish people for being truthful, and a promise to protect the people who support the administration’s version of the truth.

It is also good to keep in mind that these set of rules are only set out for the people who give out and receive the funding in this bill, so it isn’t a wide reaching dictum for everyone. But it is a way to slowly chip away so that these sort of rules become normalized across all departments and agencies.

Which Dems voted for it?

This bill will probably come up for a vote on Thursday or Friday. Prior to the Senate cloture vote on S 2296, I would have been wary to wager how many Democratic members of Congress would vote for this. But after 34 Democratic Senators voted for cloture for a racist and anti-trans spending bill, I’m more than worried that a majority Democrats in the House will use the excuse of this being a spending bill to let the worst parts of this legislation slide.