A Different Approach to Permitting Reform
Permitting reform must continue to be a priority. The latest proposal was a modest but important step. If enacted, it would have accelerated leasing of federal lands for every form of energy production, made it easier to build electricity transmission lines, and expedited the judicial review of all those actions.
But it would still have been harder and more expensive to build infrastructure in the United States than it is across most of the world. Increasingly, we will be saddled with old things while the rest of the world builds new things, including power plants, transmission lines, highways, air traffic control systems, railways, and factories.
And since other countries will be building new things faster than the United States, supply chains will shift to support those markets. The Chinese and Europeans will design high-speed trains and nuclear power plants because they are the customers. Meanwhile, ships needed to install offshore wind will be based in European ports, not diverted to U.S. waters to install a few turbines because that work could be halted by regulatory challenges.
We will fall behind quickly.
Senators Manchin and Barrasso should be commended for their efforts, especially their bipartisanship, which is scarce in Washington these days. But those efforts need to be massively expanded.
As Jerusalem Demsas explained in 2021, “the complexity of the problem lends itself to complex solutions,” and those solutions are hard to identify and even harder to legislate.
During the new administration, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy may contribute to solving the first part of the challenge through the Department of Government Efficiency, which will be teeming with ideas for reform, including permitting. A process to review those ideas and implement a subset of them will be necessary, and changes to permitting requirements will require changes to regulations and statutes.
This will usher in the opportunity for new approaches.
One approach is inspired by the process the United States used to close unneeded military bases at the end of the Cold War. After recognizing the need to close bases, each of which had the support of congressional delegations that precluded a consensus on which bases to close, Congress passed the Defense Base Realignment and Closure Act of 1990, or BRAC. The act created a commission that developed a list of bases to be closed, which was reviewed by the president and then submitted to Congress for up-or-down votes on the entire package. This process occurred five times. And each time, Congress approved the list. The process not only worked, but it was efficient.
Congress could create a commission to propose changes to permitting requirements and statutes from which those permits are derived for up or down votes in Congress. Like the BRAC process, the commission would hear from experts and make a series of proposals every few years. Over the span of those years, it could address everything from permitting for electricity transmission lines and geothermal development to nuclear licensing and offshore wind, oil, and gas development to hydropower licensing and fusion deployment. This process would be more manageable as well as responsive to changes in technology and markets that are inevitable in coming years.
More importantly, a new permitting process will enable us to overcome years of creeping regulatory excess and delay. But the majority of Americans want new things and want government and private funds spent efficiently on infrastructure, so a new approach would offer hope and freedom from increasingly restrictive permitting requirements derived from laws passed 50 years ago.
Alex Flint is the executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions and former staff director of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
