Order of operations is what makes this draft worth reading closely. The definitional test sits ahead of every procedural step, and its two conditions are joined rather than offered as alternatives [8], so a resource fails by missing either one. That is where Watkins's list of casualties comes from: Gettysburg and the Little Bighorn, Devil's Tower and the Black Hills, the petroglyphs of Chaco Canyon [9]. The language he quotes rules out "noncompact, unimproved natural features such as mountains, valleys, bodies of water, or landscapes, including ethnographic landscapes" [10]. No amount of procedure downstream reaches a resource that has been defined out upstream.
For what stays in scope, the weight is carried by one verb. The agency official writes the report, circulates it, and must only review what comes back [7]. The obligation stops at reading. Nothing in that sequence requires the official to explain why a finding survived an objection, and Watkins reads the result as replacing a consensus-seeking process with a decision one office makes [7]. Add the discretion the draft gives agencies to judge whether public participation is useful at all [12], and something that used to be a procedural constant becomes a judgment that varies by agency.
Now the evidence. This is one person's reading, published under his byline, and he is not a disinterested observer: Joe Watkins is a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, a senior consultant in Tucson, a past president of the Society for American Archaeology's board, and the recipient of that society's 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award [11]. A career spent inside the process being rewritten makes a reading both informed and interested. The supplied commentary does not give the vote tally or the ACHP's own account of what the rule is meant to fix [15]. And a vote to advance a proposal is not a promulgated rule [1].
The 1974 framework [3] had been in force 51 years by the year of that award [14], and five decades of practice is more than text. It is agency habit, state review calendars, and an expectation that objections get answered. A rule can change the text without saying what becomes of the habit, and that gap is where schedule risk sits for anyone who plans around review windows.
So leverage moves earlier. Under a consensus model, an eligibility argument could be made at the table over months. Under a report-and-comment model it has to be in the record before the official drafts the report, because the comment that follows is only guaranteed a reading [6][7]. The same structure works in the other direction for builders, since project proponents are named among the consulting parties entitled to comment on the findings [6]. What Section 106 asks of agencies has not changed on paper, since they still must assess effects of what they license or permit and try to minimize harm [4]; what changes is who gets to say whether the assessment was any good.
My view, conditioned on the draft reading as quoted: the definitional prongs matter more than the procedural ones, because they decide what is even eligible to be argued about [8].
