The House Natural Resources Committee held a hearing Sept. 10 on three pieces of permitting reform legislation that showed the political disputes that will have to be solved if any of them are going to pass.
“It’s a bipartisan issue,” Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) said in opening remarks. “It’s not just people who vote Republican that are coming in my office to tell me that. We had a hearing on this topic in July, and in that hearing, many of my friends across the aisle were calling fouls on the current administration, saying they shouldn’t be doing this. But you know what? This time a year ago on our side of the aisle, we were calling fouls on the Biden administration, saying they shouldn’t be doing this.”
Congress has an opportunity to enact permitting legislation that will improve the process regardless of who occupies the White House, he added.
The committee is not the only one working on the issue, with the House Energy and Commerce Committee planning a hearing on other permitting legislation for Sept. 16. Senate committees have been crafting bills as well. (See related story, Permitting Legislation Effort Picks Up Steam, but Passage Remains Difficult.)
Two of the bills before the committee, H.R. 573 and H.R. 4503, are focused on modernizing the permitting with new technologies and enhanced data, but Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) said Westerman’s bill — the SPEED Act (H.R. 4776) — “takes a sledgehammer” to the National Environmental Policy Act’s core provisions.
“The SPEED Act treats public input like it is an annoyance, like a hurdle, rather than a resource that can guide better decisions,” Huffman said. “It restricts what major environmental impacts can even be considered for review. It eliminates the spotlight that NEPA provides for the public to help government get it right, and by shrinking analysis and compressing timelines without investing in greater agency permitting capacity, you’re really just inviting shoddy analysis, and ultimately that’s going to lead to more litigation and uncertainty.”
The act is meant to cut red tape and relieve the “logjam” caused by onerous reviews under NEPA that have slowed down infrastructure projects, Westerman said.
“NEPA must be further reformed to put definitive guardrails around what agencies are expected to review,” he added. “Much like the review documents themselves, the NEPA litigation has gotten out of control. NEPA is the most frequently litigated environmental statute.”
The SPEED Act does have a Democrat as a co-sponsor: Rep. Jared Golden (Maine), whose district is among the most conservative in New England, with President Donald Trump winning it in the past three presidential elections. But beyond the opposition from the leading Democrat on the committee, other members of the rank and file questioned why they should work with an administration that is actively working against their states’ policies.
“I want to get to ‘yes’ on this bill,” Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.) said. “I’m not there now, but I want to get there because I understand that … we need to build out our infrastructure, repair our highways and bridges, and achieve the clean energy transition and so much more. We need to make it easier to build in this country again.”
The conversation about how to balance against the need for environmental protections and allowing impacted communities a voice in the NEPA process is something that normally Congress should be engaged in, he added.
“But we are having this normal conversation in an abnormal time, a time when the Trump administration is unilaterally and most likely illegally canceling and stopping clean energy projects, including a very important project in my district, the Revolution Wind project that was set to deliver energy to the grid at a below-market rate for consumers and meet a third of my state’s electricity demand,” Magaziner said.
The bills before the committee have their merits and deficiencies, but they also have to be considered in the context of the administration blocking clean energy, he added.
