This piece was initially published in The National Interest.

Rising electricity prices are a top concern for American families, and with demand set to surge, we desperately need more supply. Yet bureaucratic inertia in America’s permitting process has deterred investment and slowed the development of all forms of energy. House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR) is working to fix that. 

Rep. Westerman and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) recently introduced legislation that would vastly improve permitting at the federal level. By narrowing the scope of environmental reviews and reining in the delays imposed by frivolous litigation, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act would help deliver more affordable, dependable power, without compromising on environmental protection. This bill would be a win for the economy and the environment.

NEPA’s Expansion Has Slowed Progress

The crux of the problem is the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Environmental stewardship is critical, but NEPA has morphed into a bureaucratic mess that serves as a tool to delay and obstruct projects unpopular with judicially active special interest groups or biased politicians who ignore scientific and technical logic. As the SPEED Act emphasizes, NEPA is a procedural law that does “not mandate particular results, and only prescribes a process.” That process, on average, takes 4.2 years, spans thousands of pages, costs millions, and invites seemingly endless litigation. 

The SPEED Act would address the major reasons NEPA reviews have grown in time and cost, namely that agencies must consider speculative and cumulative impacts, and that the law can be duplicative to other statutes. Lawsuits delay projects and create uncertainty for developers. 

A Streamlined Review and Clearer Scope

Specifically, the bill would establish the functional equivalence of a NEPA analysis through federal (Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, etc.) and state statutes that already require an environmental impact analysis (a position we advocated eight years ago). Furthermore, the Act restricts environmental assessment to the project itself rather than speculative, downstream, and indirect effects. 

Consequently, agencies would not have to consider how a new highway would increase the number of cars on the road or how mechanical thinning in a federal forest would affect emissions from sawmill factories. 

The bill clarifies and narrows agency considerations to reasonably foreseeable environmental impacts or those with a close causal relationship. Effectively, the legislation would codify the recent Supreme Court decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, that clarified and narrowed the scope of NEPA reviews.  

Limiting NEPA Triggers and Judicial Overreach 

Critically, the SPEED Act also stipulates that federal funding alone is not enough to trigger NEPA. In many instances, administrations could bypass such a triggering through categorical exclusions. For example, when the Obama administration passed its stimulus bill, agencies granted more than 179,000 categorical exclusions, demonstrating just how unnecessary the NEPA process is. The same logic applies to other publicly funded energy and infrastructure projects and privately financed projects that trigger NEPA, too.

The legislation would also make necessary fixes to the judicial review process. When it comes to legal standing, the SPEED Act would require those to have been meaningfully involved in the NEPA process—through public comments—before filing suit, and to show direct harm, as described in the public comments. Further, the bill shields categorical exclusions from lawsuits.

In several other nods to the Supreme Court decision, the SPEED Act would limit the Court’s ability to invalidate an agency action only if the agency abused its “substantial discretion,” and the “agency would have reached a different result on said action without the abuse.” Like the Supreme Court decision, the bill states that any inadequate NEPA analysis (such as a deficiency or error in an environmental impact statement) does not mean a court must vacate the agency approval of a project. Instead, the agency’s action will remain in place, and the project can move forward as the agency corrects any errors or deficiencies. 

A Short Law with a Big Impact 

The original NEPA statute is only 3,200 words. Still, over time, the law has transformed into a regulatory gauntlet for project developers that want to build roads, transmission lines, solar arrays, and open critical mineral mines to power the US economy. Far from being an effective environmental law, activists have weaponized NEPA to obstruct, delay, and cancel essential infrastructure, energy, and forest management projects. 

While only 15 pages long and with a similar word count, the SPEED Act would go a long way to fix America’s much-maligned permitting process at the federal level. Narrowing the scope of NEPA would reduce analysis paralysis and require agencies to conduct various hypotheticals. Reining in judicial review will keep projects moving forward while helping to restrict lawsuits to truly legitimate challenges. 

Permitting reform must remain a priority if the United States wants to maintain its economic competitiveness, energy dominance, and environmental advantage. The SPEED Act will help us achieve those ambitions faster. 

The views and opinions expressed are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of C3.