Bipartisan drive for permitting reform grows, but outlook is still murky

In January, a sewer line in the Washington, DC, area failed catastrophically, sending over 700 million L of raw sewage into the Potomac River. For some, the incident served as a stark reminder of a much broader concern for the chemical industry and other sectors of the economy: continued shortcomings in the federal permitting process for large infrastructure projects.

Such shortcomings were a key contributor to the spill, according to a Washington Post investigation, published in April, which found that repairs to the sewer line had been delayed for years because of environmental review requirements.

“Permitting reform” has become the go-to phrase for federal legislation that aims to ease the process of getting major infrastructure projects approved and completed. But much like repairs to the ill-fated sewer line, such reforms have spent years in high-stakes deliberations that have yielded meager results. While multiple bills to update the federal permitting process are at various stages of approval in Congress, analysts say it’s unclear that any will get to the president’s desk in the near future.

Congressional landscape ‘changes on a regular basis’

Legislation to update the federal permitting process typically targets seminal environmental laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Clean Water Act, which date back to the 1960s and ’70s. These laws were enacted to protect people and the environment from the risks that come with the development of major infrastructure projects, but critics say they too often tie projects up in unnecessary layers of red tape. That leads to delays, budget overruns, and cancellations—even for essential infrastructure.

As this year’s midterm elections approach, lawmakers continue to disagree on what permitting reforms should look like, leaving policy experts uncertain about how congressional action might unfold. That uncertainty is bolstered by the recent volatility of both domestic and foreign affairs, says Andrew Mergen, faculty director at Harvard University’s Emmett Environmental Law and Policy Clinic.

“When I talk to people on the Hill, the landscape changes on a regular basis, and it’s just hard to say,” Mergen says about the likelihood of permitting reforms being approved by Congress this year. He mentions a number of developments, some unforeseen, that have taken up lawmakers’ attention, including the Iran war.

“So, you know, how can you predict?” he says.

‘Wild card’ moves are impacting permitting discussions

Mergen also questions some of the recent moves by the Donald J. Trump administration around federal permitting and their impact on advancing legislation in Congress.

For example, a committee made up of high-ranking administration officials that can approve exemptions to the Endangered Species Act (ESA) voted in March to deregulate oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The panel, which has been dubbed the “God Squad,” cited national security reasons in its decision. The decision has been challenged in court by a coalition of environmental groups but remains in effect while the suit is ongoing. While such a move is a type of permitting change, Mergen thinks it will discourage further negotiations in Congress because of how unprecedented it is.

“If you’re a Senate Democrat, and you’re like, ‘I’m willing to deal,’ . . . how much are you willing to concede when the Republicans can’t speak for the president and the president and the administration are a wild card?” Mergen asks.

Senate Democrats have begun to say as much outright. During an April 29 hearing for Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request for the Interior Department, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-NM), told Interior secretary Doug Burgum—who also chairs the God Squad—that, given the administration’s surprising moves, the “confidence does not exist right now” for his caucus to support permitting reforms. Heinrich, ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said unprecedented actions of the Interior Department are putting a “thumb on the scale” of the permitting system.

Key senators in the permitting conversation met over dinner Monday night, Politico reports, but it is not clear if this suggests legislation may soon make formal progress through the Senate. Heinrich, who attended the dinner, did not respond in time for publication to a request for comment on whether his outlook on negotiations has changed since the meeting. In addition, Republican lawmakers had dinner with Secretary of Energy Chris Wright on Tuesday night to discuss permitting reform, Politico further reports.

In a written statement to C&EN, the Interior Department declines to comment on “the potential outcomes of [permitting] legislation.” It did not respond to a subsequent request for comment on whether moves like the God Squad’s ESA decision may be undoing permitting talks in the Senate.

In another instance, the administration recently finalized a rule to remove the long-standing ability of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to issue rules about how federal agencies should implement NEPA. This means that process is now left to individual agencies to interpret. A CEQ spokesperson tells C&EN that the council is now investing its efforts into working with interagency partners and Congress to “identify priorities to codify meaningful permitting reform.” Last month, the CEQ launched Permitting Innovators, a crowdsourcing program to generate permitting solutions from the private sector. The effort is set to culminate in an exposition in July.

Could the desire for permitting certainty eventually unite the Senate?

Democrats and others also point to the White House’s repeated efforts to downsize, delay, and cancel offshore wind projects—despite existing permits—as hobbling congressional discussions on permitting reform. “The Trump administration has worsened already high energy costs by slow-walking clean energy project approvals and playing politics with our energy sector,” Heinrich tells C&EN in a written statement.

Xan Fishman, vice president of the energy program at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank that works to advance legislation supported across party lines, tells C&EN that recent revocations of offshore wind permits mirror the Joe Biden administration’s cancellation of the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline—a major issue for Republicans.

Experts, including Fishman, think the flip-flops on permit approvals and cancellations as administrations change could help Democrats and Republicans find common ground.

Fishman says a key feature of any permitting bill that is likely to succeed in Congress is provisions for project certainty during the permitting process. There’s bipartisan agreement that existing permits should not be at risk of being “clawed back by some future administration that doesn’t like a particular infrastructure type,” he says.

When asked about steps the US Environmental Protection Agency is already taking to ease the permitting process, an EPA spokesperson tells C&EN that “providing certainty to project applicants and the regulated community” is a current focus of the agency.

Fishman says that while talk of federal permitting reform has historically drawn support from industry stakeholders and congressional Republicans, clean energy projects getting bogged down in permitting issues is bringing over environmentalists and Democrats.

“There is a difference in approach, but there’s also a decent amount of overlap in approach,” Fishman says, referring to the paths Democrats and Republicans are aiming to take to fix the permitting process. He describes himself as “optimistic” that the parties will come to a compromise on permitting reform this year, despite the prospect of further unexpected complications like the Iran war. “I still think there’s a 55–60% chance that this happens.”

Changes to NEPA may come first

Significant changes to the federal permitting process under NEPA have already been made outside Congress, and experts like Fishman predict that the law will also be the main target of any permitting-reform legislation that passes in the near term.

Justin Pidot, who served as CEQ general counsel during the Biden administration, also thinks that NEPA is most likely to be where Congress concentrates its permitting legislation efforts.

“Most of the focus historically in the Senate for the last few years has been largely around NEPA itself . . . so I think they’ll start there,” Pidot says. “We’ve seen some reform to judicial review in NEPA in particular . . . shortening the statute of limitations to some extent, and the like.”

Under NEPA’s current provisions, permits can be legally challenged through the Administrative Procedure Act generally up to 6 years after approval.

Fishman also sees NEPA’s legal timeline provisions as a main focus of Congress’s discussions on permitting reform.

Such an approach is embodied in H.R. 4776, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, which passed the House in December.

The bipartisan bill, introduced by Reps. Bruce Westerman (R-AR) and Jared Golden (D-ME), would impose a 150-day deadline for challenging a NEPA permit in court, once the permit has been finalized. It would also reduce the timelines for reaching a decision once a challenge has entered the courts, and reduce the number of situations requiring NEPA review.

There is no companion bill in the Senate, where only a handful of permitting bills have been introduced and none have moved—versus at least 18 that have moved past committees in the House. Of those bills, at least 11 target specific aspects of permitting, such as geothermal exploration, natural gas pipeline authorization, and forest management. The following table provides a snapshot of the broader permitting bills in the 119th Congress.

Pidot, now a law professor at the University of Arizona, asserts that if Congress doesn’t pass permitting reforms this year, changes probably won’t be possible until at least 2028.

“We’re not going to see it next year, and there is some incentive to do it this year, because if one of the houses of Congress changes hands, it’ll take time to figure out how to move a bipartisan bill in a new political constellation,” he says.

What permitting reforms can and can’t fix

The chemical industry is generally supportive of congressional and other efforts to update the permitting process.

The SPEED Act and other “balanced reforms” would benefit the American chemical enterprise, which is “uniquely energy intensive” and thus relies on energy infrastructure projects, the American Chemistry Council (ACC) tells C&EN in a written statement. The ACC and another industry group, the Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates, say they want legislative action that improves the certainty of the permitting process while preserving environmental safeguards.

Chris Phalen, vice president of domestic policy at the National Association of Manufacturers, says federal permitting reforms are only part of the picture. In addition to shortening judicial review and providing certainty to the project approval process, he thinks “there’s certainly space” for investing in the federal workforce to help expedite environmental reviews.

Pidot thinks similarly and criticizes reductions in the federal workforce since the start of the second Trump administration, as well as funding cuts to agencies responsible for the permitting process.

“These ideas that are being thrown around all are going to amount to nothing if there aren’t people at the agencies who can actually implement them and have enough funding and time to do that,” he says.