Both Parties Want Permitting Reform. They Just Can’t Agree What For.

The SPEED Act is a major test of the "Abundance" faction on both sides of the aisle.

Courtesy Benoît Deschasaux/Unsplash.

Momentum is building in Congress for “permitting reform,” a broad effort to cut the red tape and legal obstacles that delay federal approval of energy projects and infrastructure. Republicans want it. Democrats want it. Business groups, clean-energy developers, and fossil fuel producers want it. With electricity prices rising, AI-driven energy demand surging, and voters anxious about the cost of living, permitting reform has become an issue everyone can no longer ignore.

But while there’s agreement on the need to overhaul America’s broken permitting system, there is far less consensus on a crucial question: reform in service of what?

That question is coming into sharp focus as Congress advances its most serious attempt at overhauling permitting in years. The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act—or SPEED Act—passed out of committee last month and is slated for a House floor vote next week. Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Bruce Westerman and Maine Democrat Jared Golden, the bill aims to reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the 1970 law governing environmental review for major federal actions.

NEPA has grown into a sprawling, litigation-heavy process that can delay or derail nearly any major project—oil pipelines, solar farms, transmission lines, critical-minerals mines, or nuclear plants. The SPEED Act attempts to fix this by imposing clearer limits on the scope of environmental reviews, setting enforceable timelines, and tightening judicial review. (The Bipartisan Policy Center has a detailed explainer of the act’s key provisions, including a full redline of the changes the act makes to NEPA.)

The prospect of faster and more predictable permitting should thrill the energy-abundance coalition emerging in both parties. Yet even as both parties insist they want to streamline permitting, they remain divided over which energy sources should benefit. Whether the bill succeeds may hinge on lawmakers’ ability to avoid turning permitting reform into another proxy fight over America’s energy future—renewables versus fossil fuels, climate priorities versus economic ones—rather than treating bureaucratic slowdown as a structural problem that makes everything worse.

For Republicans, permitting reform has long meant reviving American energy dominance, especially in fossil fuels and nuclear power. NEPA, to them, has become a weapon that environmental litigants wield to block pipelines, liquefied-natural-gas export terminals, and critical-mineral mines. For Democrats, meanwhile, the new abundance movement has opened the door to removing supply-side constraints on energy production. But that’s only true if the benefits flow primarily to renewables.

Westerman has tried to frame the SPEED Act as a resource-neutral reform that applies equally to solar farms, gas pipelines, transmission lines, and nuclear plants. But Congress is primarily in the business of picking winners and losers, so the politics have gotten messy.

Some Republicans now worry the bill may make it too easy to build renewables. “I don’t want to fast-track any of the wind and solar,” Rep. Chip Roy recently told Politico’s E&E News. Republicans are also uneasy with provisions that would limit the Trump administration’s ability to revoke already-granted permits for renewable-energy projects—something the administration has been doing and appears eager to do more.

Meanwhile, Democrats are skeptical for the opposite reasons. Critics insist the bill must explicitly protect clean energy from the Trump administration’s ongoing freeze on renewable-energy permits. “In order for me to vote for this bill,” Rep. Seth Magaziner said during markup, “I need strong language to ensure that the Trump administration cannot continue to unfairly block clean energy projects from getting into the grid.”

To address those concerns, Westerman recently added an amendment addressing permit certainty. The provision would prohibit federal agencies from revoking, suspending, or otherwise interfering with already-approved permits. The amendment was a direct response to the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel previously permitted wind and solar projects, a campaign that has alarmed clean energy developers and their Democratic allies.

But permit certainty ought to appeal to Republicans too. Republicans have their own scars from the Obama and Biden years, when projects like the Keystone XL pipeline were approved, canceled, revived, and re-canceled again depending on who occupied the White House. A durable permitting regime that protects approved projects from the whims of future administrations should, in theory, attract bipartisan support. Yet some Republicans now worry that the provision too significantly hamstrings Trump’s ability to target disfavored renewable projects—illustrating just how difficult it is to build a coalition around neutral rules.

This is the central irony of the abundance moment. Lawmakers on both sides talk urgently about the need to build, but insist on preselecting the winners before the reforms are written. On X, Democratic senator Brian Schatz mocked clean-power companies for “cutting a deal with the American Petroleum Institute,” as though cross-aisle compromises were something sinister.

Much of the apprehension about the SPEED Act rests on a basic misunderstanding of NEPA itself. Critics warn that shorter timelines and narrower reviews will gut environmental protection. But NEPA has never been a substantive environmental law; it’s a procedural law. NEPA cannot block a project for emitting too much pollution, filling too many wetlands, or endangering a species; it merely requires the government to study and disclose the anticipated effects of its decisions. The real environmental protections live elsewhere: in the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Endangered Species Act, and a dozen other statutes that remain untouched by the bill.

A more disciplined approach to NEPA would focus on genuine environmental harms rather than procedural paperwork errors. In a post-SPEED-Act world, lawsuits would pivot from “the agency didn’t dot every ‘i’ in its environmental impact statement” to “this permit violates the substantive limits in the Clean Water Act.”

That would be healthier. Courts would rule on actual environmental outcomes rather than paperwork compliance, retaining ample power to halt genuinely harmful projects.

Moreover, these reforms would largely codify the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which held unanimously that NEPA is “a purely procedural statute” and that agencies need only evaluate environmental impacts directly caused by the project—not speculative or remote effects.

“NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.”

This debate over the SPEED Act reflects a broader tension within the “abundance” movement: a willingness to support supply-side reforms, but only for preferred outcomes. Housing advocates champion more construction—but often only urban infill, not suburban sprawl. Democrats embrace faster permitting, but primarily for wind and solar. Republicans want to cut red tape but recoil if it benefits disfavored technologies. The success of any genuine permitting reform depends on abandoning this game.

The political risk may be greatest for Democrats. As Josh Barro recently warned, “As a party, we should be nervous about the increasing salience of [energy prices], because we are worse than Republicans at delivering the cheap electricity that consumers want.” Over the coming years, Barro argued, “we will see which Democratic leaders are willing to stand up to the de-growth elements in the environmental movement and support true energy abundance—and which ones will only pay lip service to ‘affordability’ while prioritizing the interests of climate-obsessed party donors who actually want energy to be more expensive.” The SPEED Act is an early test for Democrats on whether abundance is a slogan or a meaningful governing philosophy.

Congress has an opportunity to modernize an outdated environmental law that has become an all-purpose tool for delay. The SPEED Act will require Senate negotiation before becoming law. But if lawmakers can resist the urge to turn structural reform into another front in the energy wars, they might finally give the country what it sorely needs: the ability to build again.