Energy costs are climbing across the country — electricity bills, gas prices, home heating costs — and those costs ripple through the rest of the economy. After years of political impasse, the Senate has finally reached a bipartisan permitting reform agreement to help address it.
A deal is not a law, and Congress has a real talent for finding new ways to miss a finish line. But lawmakers must not lose sight of how badly the status quo is failing Americans while they finish the job.
Over the last year, I’ve tracked the fate of energy projects such as pipelines, solar farms, and transmission lines as they moved — or didn’t move — through the federal permitting process. Earlier this year, I published the findings in a report covering 30 projects across six states. The pattern was stark: delays measured in years, sometimes more than a decade.
Across those projects, permitting delays have cost at least 50,000 new jobs and nearly $75 billion in estimated economic benefits. And that’s just six states. The same story is playing out in every state with a stalled pipeline, transmission line, or solar farm, meaning the true national cost is almost certainly several times higher.
Take the TransWest Express Transmission project. Developers first sought federal approval in 2007. They didn’t get the final green light to begin construction until 2023, 16 years later.
The Sweden Valley Pipeline fared even worse. Federal regulators completed their environmental review but refused to issue a final decision or even set a date to do so. The company that agreed to buy the pipeline’s gas eventually walked away, and the project collapsed, not because it failed on merit, but because no one, apparently, was ever going to decide.
The pending bill’s reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act target exactly this problem, setting firm deadlines and milestones for every stage of a project’s review so there’s no more open-ended waiting for a decision that may never come. That alone could have changed the outcomes for both TransWest and Sweden Valley, because a deadline forces a decision rather than allowing one to be endlessly deferred. Deadlines are not a novel bureaucratic concept. Washington has simply taken its time arriving at one.
Consider the Thacker Pass Lithium Mine, approved in 2021 after a four-year review. A coalition of environmental groups sued, arguing the review process had been inadequate. Courts allowed the project to proceed in 2023, and the developer faced continued legal challenges for years afterward. This bill raises the bar considerably for a challenge like that one: Opponents would need to have submitted a substantive comment during the public comment period, and show they’d suffer real, direct harm if the project proceeded, not simply register general disapproval.
No developer wants to sink billions into a project that can be approved, then unwound, depending on who’s in office. The Rosebud Mine expansion in Montana was approved in 2019, and then challenged in court over claims that regulators hadn’t adequately studied its environmental impact. A federal judge ordered a more thorough review, which is reasonable on its face, but the process dragged on so long that the mine’s fate effectively became hostage to whichever administration was in office.
It finally received approval in 2025, six years after its initial approval. The project itself had not changed. The administration in office had. That’s exactly the kind of instability the bill’s permitting certainty provisions are designed to prevent: A project’s fate should turn on whether it meets the legal standard, not on which party controls the White House when the decision finally gets made.
These projects aren’t outliers. The same pattern of indefinite review, open-ended litigation, and permits that depend on who holds office repeats itself across the country, for pipelines and solar farms alike, in both red states and blue. This bill doesn’t fix TransWest or Rosebud specifically — it fixes the mechanism that got them stuck, which means it applies as much to the next stalled wind farm as the next stalled gas line. And every one of those delays also means jobs and tax revenue that never materialized.
WASHINGTON CAN’T CONTINUE TO IGNORE ‘RAMAGEDDON’
Not every obstacle in the permitting process is about process at all. Take the Gordon Butte Pumped Storage Hydro Project, also in Montana, which has waited over a decade in the permitting process. This isn’t a case of a missed deadline or a lawsuit. Federal regulators have openly admitted they lack the expertise to evaluate the technology involved. No amount of faster paperwork or narrower standing can fix a regulator that doesn’t yet know how to conduct the review. That’s a reminder that permitting reform clears the obstacles Washington created for itself — it doesn’t manufacture expertise Washington doesn’t have.
None of this guarantees every delayed project gets built. But for the first time in years, the biggest obstacles standing between Americans and more affordable energy aren’t a mystery — they’re written into this bill’s answer to them. Lawmakers on both sides helped write that answer, which is rarer than it should be. All that’s left is for Congress to do the one thing it’s historically worst at: finishing something on time.
James Morrone is an energy policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
