By Alex Trembath, Marc Levitt, and Elizabeth McCarthy
It’s a testament to the urgency of the nation’s infrastructure crisis that federal permitting reform is still even considered a possibility under this Congress.
On the one hand, momentum for meaningful permitting reform has been building for the last few years, at least since former Senator Joe Manchin insisted on a permitting deal in a handshake agreement with then-Majority Leader Chuck Schumer during the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. The Biden presidency ended with a nail-biting but ultimately disappointing Lame Duck debate over the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024. And despite the new Republican trifecta in 2025, many energy and permitting advocates across the political spectrum started the year feeling hopeful. Republicans, after all, have long been the party of deregulation, and these days many Democrats even agree that an abundant clean energy future requires meaningful permitting reform.
On the other hand, DOGE. And Liberation Day. And the One Big Beautiful Bill. And a slew of rescissions of federal energy grants and programs passed during the Biden Administration. And now the government shutdown. The gamut of Republican legislative and extra-legislative activities in 2025 have not exactly bolstered the necessarily bipartisan politics required for major federal permitting reform. Democrats may be in no mood to cooperate with their opponents across the aisle on major legislation.
But with energy costs rising across the country, the public pressure to address America’s infrastructure sclerosis may overcome even these political headwinds. As a number of advocates have urged, there is a “window of opportunity” to reform federal permitting procedures in the coming months.
We would amend this slightly. While the opportunity to capitalize on the current moment is real, the goal should be to keep the window open, not just to pass something before it closes.
Make no mistake: the politics of permitting reform remain daunting. The opposition is powerful—particularly the environmentalist wing of the Democratic caucus, but also utilities skeptical of major transmission reforms and Republicans who have become skeptical of policies that benefit wind, solar, batteries. And neither Democrats nor Republicans need to pass major legislation in order to satisfy their voters in the coming midterm elections. Indeed, operatives on both sides are opportunistically blaming their opponents for rising energy prices. Reform advocates are right to identify the tenuousness of the political opportunity in front of us.
And all of those advocates would agree that even the most sweeping feasible legislative deal passed during this term will not solve America’s permitting problems. It’s likely that such a deal would touch judicial review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and federal transmission policy, and perhaps sections of the Clean Water Act (CWA). But even this real progress would leave several federal statutes and regulatory frameworks unaltered. That’s to say nothing of necessary reforms at the state level, nor the generational culture shift needed at federal agencies, Departments of Environmental Quality, and Public Utility Commissions across the country. And if the disappointing reforms passed under the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 taught us anything, it’s that even well-crafted statutory changes may find themselves in need of further amendment in the future.
So as legislative and civil society reform advocates look beyond the government shutdown, we should do so in service of building a self-sustaining permitting politics. Environmental regulatory reform should be understood as a perennial and constant imperative for legislators.
In that spirit, this morning Breakthrough published our comprehensive NEPA reform proposal, entitled “Reboot NEPA.” Our proposal recognizes that robust government oversight and public comment—the core commitments of the original law—can exist without the regulatory uncertainty, cynical lawfare, and administrative waste that have come to define the statute. Our proposal would improve public comment and streamline judicial procedure under NEPA, while equipping agencies with modern artificial intelligence tools and capabilities for smarter, faster, more efficient administration of the law.
We offer this framework in the hopes that it will further expand, not satisfy, demands for permitting reform. Fortunately, there are many appealing permitting proposals introduced in Congress right now, some of which might very well pass under a deal in the coming months, hopefully building momentum to tackle others in subsequent negotiations. NEPA has become the locus of reform efforts over the last several years, and understandably so. But there are further analytical and legislative problems stemming from many other statutes. The work ahead, if not entirely clear, is cut out for us.
We believe an important step in that work is to reboot NEPA. The regulation has mutated far beyond what its drafters intended, becoming a vehicle for costly and overwhelmingly ineffective litigation. Comprehensive reform would place clearer bounds on the original function of NEPA—informed planning and public engagement—preventing the administrative bloat that has characterized the law since its passage. Rebooting NEPA would prevent the administrative ping-ponging that has become standard over the last two decades, as Democrats and Republican administrations each weaponize the statute for their own aims. And it will avoid the unintended consequences of some well-meaning proposals, such as environmental review page limits that merely shuffle content to report appendices, or the neutering of a regulation under a Republican president that could be easily revived on Day One of a Democratic successor.
With energy politics increasingly polarized, and as the shutdown continues, the cynics are right to doubt the prospects for permitting reform during this Congress. But our peers in the permitting advocacy community are also right to identify the window of opportunity in front of us. Permitting advocates’ legislative strategy should be to pass something through that window in the short term, holding it open for further opportunities in the long term.