It looks unlikely that the United States will see comprehensive permitting reform anytime soon.
A group of lawmakers including the retiring chair of the Senate energy committee Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.) and Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), who chairs the House Natural Resources committee, has made a hard push to get permitting reform into the year-end spending deal. But yesterday, those involved in that bipartisan effort said it had failed.
It’s a major setback for the effort to streamline the U.S. permitting process, which impacts transmission, major renewables projects, mining, and fossil fuels. The bipartisan bill at the center of discussions was introduced in July by Manchin and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), after nearly two years of negotiations.
Katherine Hamilton, chair of 38 North Solutions, said this latest effort was unique in that the bill had pieces “that would help so many different constituencies,” including geothermal, transmission, grid-enhancing technologies, and the oil and gas sector. And there was “so much work in the background” to get the bill passed, she added: countless calls and conversations coming from both sides of the aisle.
Both parties tend to agree that the current permitting process, which regularly takes years, is a problem. But reform efforts have been mired in lack of bipartisan consensus; for this reason, the Manchin-Barrasso bill was considered the country’s best recent chance.
“I don’t see something like that being replicated in that same form moving forward,” Hamilton said. “It was the one shot to get something that everybody could mostly agree on. It was not perfect… [but] while it had oil and gas provisions, it also had significant environmental benefits.”
Manchin has described permitting reform as his committee’s top priority in 2024. And in the wake of the news that Congressional leadership had taken the issue off the table, he responded with dismay.
“It’s a shame that our country is losing this monumental opportunity to advance the commonsense, bipartisan permitting reform bill that has strong support in the United States Senate,” he said in a statement, adding that the Republican leadership “have done a disservice to the incoming Trump administration, which has been focused on strengthening our energy security and will now be forced to operate with their hands tied behind their backs.”
Division within both parties
The dynamics that killed the bill were complicated, but largely came down to faultlines within each party. On the left, there are those who view permitting reform to be one of the most important things Congress can do to facilitate the energy transition; the Energy Department’s Undersecretary for Infrastructure David Crane, for instance, called it the “missing link” earlier this year. But there are others, especially progressives and green groups like the League of Conservation Voters, that are anxious about the boost that the bill would have given fossil fuel projects.
On the right, meanwhile, there is a division between the House and Senate. House Republicans, for instance, wanted to include changes to the National Environmental Policy Act in permitting legislation, which outraged Democrats; Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), who chairs the public works committee, reportedly left one of the frantic final hour meetings in anger over those discussions.
While some Republicans have considered a version of permitting reform via reconciliation — and therefore skipping the need for buy-in from the Democrats — Hamilton says that’s impossible because it’s not a budget issue. So the task for the next Congress, therefore, will be to find another way, or perhaps multiple ways, to achieve the same goals.
Now, Hamilton expects that the next Congress will instead act “in a much more piecemeal way” to enact progress for technologies with bipartisan support. For instance, she said she can imagine a geothermal-focused bill or a transmission package, but “having it all put together is so much trickier.”
Executive options
Just days before news of the bill’s likely demise, Donald Trump posted about permitting on his proprietary social media platform Truth Social, saying that anyone who makes a $1 billion investment in the U.S. “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
But, as the Biden administration found, there is a limit to what the executive branch can do to speed permitting. Last April, they passed two final rules aimed at reforming the federal permitting process, and especially at improving the transmission backlog. The changes included a two-year deadline for federal permitting, as well as streamlining environmental reviews for projects that use existing transmission rights of way.
Hamilton said there is more that the Trump administration could do, though. While he can’t skip over legally mandated environmental review processes without legal repercussions, there are certain efficiencies that could be made, especially within the Bureau of Land Management. For instance, the office has yet to finalize its categorical exclusions for permitting or geothermal.
“It’s really about just the regulatory regime, and I think you could make that more efficient,” Hamilton said. “And by efficient, I don’t mean reducing resources. I mean, you actually need to increase people power and staffing at BLM to really give that agency the capacity to process permits.”
The status quo, she added, is that people are sitting in remote locations processing a stack of permit applications that include snowmobiles and fishing licenses alongside a geothermal power plant. Changes that would expedite that process, however, for now remain theoretical.
In the meantime, Hamilton said, we can expect the Sisyphean task of permitting reform to start up again once the next Congress is back to work. The mood on the Hill is resolute, she added: “these problems aren’t going to go away.”
“I think the general view is, ‘Alright, we’re going to just start fresh in the 119th [Congress], and let’s do it again,’” she said.
