Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee want to pass energy infrastructure permitting legislation, but a Jan. 28 hearing on the subject showed how that might not happen during this Congress.
Senators, including EPW Ranking Member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and leaders from the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, have been working on potential legislation for the past year, but are trailing House colleagues who passed a bill late in 2025 that would alter the National Environmental Policy Act to speed up permitting. (See House Passes SPEED Act to Quicken Infrastructure Permitting.)
“I’d like to begin by thanking my colleagues who are here with me, and in particular, Ranking Member Whitehouse, for their drive to elevate problems in our current permitting regime and to work constructively together,” EPW Chair Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said at the start of the hearing. “That’s what we need to do.”
“It’s the never-ending story on permitting, but we’re going to get into that story — I hope,” Moore Capito said.
Any bill needs to be bipartisan to be durable, she said before Whitehouse made his opening remarks, saying he shared that goal but thinks there is a “trust problem” with the Trump administration. He cited the president’s executive orders that temporarily stopped the Empire offshore wind project.
“This all stank, but I remained willing to work on a permitting bill,” Whitehouse said. “In August, stop-work Trump struck again against Revolution Wind off Rhode Island, a project over 80% complete with $4 billion invested, based on supposed national security concerns. That order was instantly thrown out in court as arbitrary and capricious, in part because the Trump administration had been making the opposite arguments about that same project in the same courthouse just weeks earlier.”
Other actions against clean energy continued through 2025.
“So, Sen. Heinrich [D-N.M.] and I have paused permitting reform negotiations,” Whitehouse said. “Let me be clear: We find no fault with Senate Republicans.”
The conflict is entirely between the legislative and executive branches of the government, according to Whitehouse, who said the Trump administration’s “lawless” attacks on clean energy loom over every other industry. The executive can resuscitate the bill’s prospects if it shows it will stop putting up roadblocks to clean energy, Whitehouse said.
‘Essential’
The Solar Energy Industries Association is not focused on reforming NEPA, which the SPEED Act and any Senate proposal from EPW would do, because the law is rarely used in litigation against solar projects, said SEIA CEO Abigail Ross Hopper, who said “permitting is essential.”
“SEIA strongly supports these bipartisan efforts to improve the process for energy and transmission projects,” she said. “Permitting reform must begin with this basic principle: Projects that enter the federal permitting process must be allowed to move through that process in good faith and without unfair treatment based on energy source. And once a project receives a permit, that permit should be honored.”
The solar and battery developers that SEIA represents have run into issues with the Trump administration since a July 2025 Department of the Interior memo created “68 new layers of red tape” for their projects, she added. By requiring secretarial approvals on many easy decisions, it effectively amounts to a moratorium on solar.
The bureaucratic roadblocks are endangering 70 GW of solar and 42 GW of battery storage on both federal and private land,” Ross Hopper said. Together they represent 43% of all planned new capacity in the U.S.
“We all know electricity demand is rising rapidly, and without this power and the grid infrastructure to deliver it, electricity prices will continue to rise,” she said.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) noted that the tactics being used against solar now could be wielded against the oil and gas industry in the future by a Democratic president. He entered a memo into the record from Evergreen Action laying out how to get that done.
“This administration must be forced to end its punitive treatment through clear legislative text and vocal Republican opposition to any efforts to violate the law,” Markey said.
After Markey’s turn on the mic, Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) responded that previous administrations from his party had done the same kind of thing against infrastructure they disliked.
“Mr. Markey, we feel your pain. We could take your statement and where you said left — we could put right,” Lummis said. “Where you said right, we could put left. Where you said Trump, we could put Biden.”
One of the first things former President Joe Biden did when taking office in 2021 was to stop construction on the Keystone XL pipeline, she added. Markey countered that Trump has taken more such actions before Chair Moore Capito reminded him it was Lummis’ time to speak.
