Golden’s permitting reform bill gets first hearing before House Natural Resources Committee

WASHINGTON — The House Natural Resources Committee (HNRC) today held an initial hearing on the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, bipartisan legislation spearheaded by Congressman Jared Golden (ME-02) and HNRC Chairman Bruce Westerman (AR-04) that would reduce red tape and put the United States back in the business of building. 

The SPEED Act would modernize the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to streamline the permitting process and return the law to its intended purpose as a procedural statute for assessing the environmental impact of federal actions.

“Our country needs modern infrastructure to keep our people and our economy moving. We need robust power production and transmission to achieve energy dominance and lower costs. We need housing for families. But NEPA has been warped over time to become a law that allows endless lawsuits and bureaucracy that make it harder to build the things we need at the pace we need them,” Golden said. “By reforming NEPA while standing firm in our commitments through the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, we can be good stewards of our environment while ending a permitting status quo that is onerous, overly complex and ripe for litigation abuse.”

During the hearing, Golden spoke about the ways the bill would retain the ability of any interested party to weigh in on proposed projects, and about the delays NEPA has allowed for the development of all types of energy production — including clean energy. 

“The problems with the NEPA process are energy-neutral,” Golden said. “They can be detrimental to both fossil fuel and renewable energy projects. … These problems with NEPA can cut both ways and so too should the solutions. This is a pro-energy bill that takes an all-of-the-above, technology-neutral approach.” 

In response to questions from Golden, Jeremy Harrell, CEO of ClearPath — a nonprofit working to reduce global energy emissions — said America’s broken permitting system is “the single largest barrier to deploying new clean energy in this country.” Harrell pointed to the fact that solar energy projects face the highest rate of NEPA litigation of any energy source in the country.

WHAT’S IN THE BILL:

The SPEED Act will modernize NEPA to help streamline the permitting process and return the law to its intended purpose. It will: 

• ensure environmental reviews focus on direct, significant impacts rather than hypothetical or tenuously connected effects;
• create reasonable timelines for agency decisionmaking while protecting public comment and thorough environmental review;
• streamline judicial review to create more certainty for those working to build and to reduce opportunities for frivolous litigation; and
• improve efficiency and ease burden on agencies, including by clarifying when NEPA is triggered by refining the definition of “Major Federal Action” — a category that has grown so broad that nearly any federal action or funding can trigger a lengthy, complex review.

An independent review of the legislation from the Bipartisan Policy Center can be found here. 

BACKGROUND:

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is a procedural statute that established parameters for assessing the environmental impacts of all major federal actions and created the Council on Environmental Quality. The procedural requirements in NEPA apply to all major federal actions, including but not limited to the construction and maintenance of roads, bridges, highways, ports, irrigation systems, forest management, transmission lines, energy projects, broadband and water infrastructure.

While well-intentioned, NEPA has evolved into a cumbersome and lengthy process that has increased costs and permitting timelines. Additionally, NEPA has become a tool used by special interest groups to block critical infrastructure across the country, as it is currently the most litigated environmental statute.

This litigation is most often initiated not by communities or individuals, but by national NGOs. According to the Breakthrough Institute, NGOs filed more than 70 percent of all lawsuits filed under NEPA in recent years. According to the report, litigants lose their challenges 80 percent of the time. But what they lost in court, they made up for in delays; Litigation under NEPA added an average of four years to a project’s timeline. These kinds of delays can kill a project even when the litigation against it fails.

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