Case Study 2: Permitting Reform, 2022–2025

In American politics, almost nothing is bipartisan. The defense authorization bill, the postal-reform bill, and a small handful of others. Permitting reform is on the short list of policy questions where serious people on the left and serious people on the right have reached substantially overlapping diagnoses, even when their proposed remedies differ. The case study traces how that overlap emerged, what it has and has not produced, and what the persistent obstacles are.

How permitting reform became cross-partisan

Until roughly 2020, "permitting reform" was a term used mostly by conservatives and energy-industry lobbyists, usually as code for weakening environmental review of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Environmental groups treated permitting-reform proposals with suspicion. Progressive policy wonks were not particularly engaged with the topic.

That changed in the early 2020s for two convergent reasons.

The clean-energy buildout. As the IRA and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law made hundreds of billions of dollars available for clean-energy investment, it became clear that physical buildout was running far behind investment. New transmission lines were taking 8–10 years from proposal to completion. New solar and wind projects were facing years-long interconnection queues. New manufacturing facilities were facing extended environmental review. The transition that the legislation was designed to enable was bottlenecked by procedural barriers that the legislation did not address. Progressive analysts who supported the underlying climate policy began arguing that the procedural bottlenecks had to be cleared.

The "abundance" critique. A separate but overlapping intellectual movement began arguing that procedural barriers — NEPA, zoning, occupational licensing, environmental review at multiple levels — had collectively produced what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson called a "procedural" liberalism, characterized by accumulated review processes that allowed any stakeholder to delay any project, with the result that the U.S. could no longer build infrastructure at the speeds the country had built it in the 1950s and 1960s. The argument was made by Klein, Thompson, Jerusalem Demsas, Yoni Appelbaum, and others, mostly in left-of-center publications. It echoed long-standing conservative critiques of the regulatory state — but with a different proposed remedy. Conservatives traditionally wanted less regulation. The abundance critics wanted better-targeted regulation: keep the substantive environmental protections, streamline the procedural barriers.

By 2022, these two movements had converged enough that "permitting reform" was no longer a partisan code term. It had become a topic where progressive Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI), conservative Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), centrist Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and progressive Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) were working on parallel bills, sometimes converging into joint proposals.

Manchin's permitting demands

The catalyst for legislative movement was Senator Manchin's negotiating position during IRA negotiations. As the deciding 50th vote in the Senate, Manchin extracted from Senate leadership and the Biden administration a commitment to bring permitting-reform legislation to the floor. The specific commitments included:

• Statutory authorization for the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a roughly 300-mile natural-gas pipeline through West Virginia and Virginia that had been blocked for years by litigation over Forest Service and Army Corps of Engineers approvals.
• Time limits on NEPA reviews.
• Clarified judicial-review timelines.
• Streamlined federal-energy-siting authority for transmission.

Manchin introduced the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2022, a vehicle for these reforms. It failed to advance in late 2022, blocked by a coalition of progressive Democrats opposed to the Mountain Valley Pipeline provision and Republican senators who saw an opportunity to extract more favorable terms in the next Congress.

The 2023 NEPA amendments

Permitting reform did move, indirectly, in 2023 — through the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the debt-ceiling deal between President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy. The deal included the first significant amendments to NEPA since 1982:

• Page limits. Standard EISs are limited to 150 pages, "extraordinarily complex" projects to 300 pages.
• Time limits. EISs must be completed within two years; Environmental Assessments within one year.
• Lead agency. A single lead federal agency designation.
• Scope rules. Tighter rules on the alternatives a project must consider.
• Mountain Valley Pipeline. Statutory authorization, removing the project from further administrative or judicial review on the specific approvals at issue.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline provision was the most contested element. Progressive Democrats opposed it as a one-off carve-out for fossil-fuel infrastructure that pre-empted ongoing litigation. Conservatives generally supported it. Manchin negotiated it into the deal as the price of his support for the broader package. The pipeline went into operation in 2024.

The 2023 NEPA amendments are widely judged to have made marginal improvements without solving the underlying problems. Page and time limits matter, but they do not address the underlying complexity of multi-agency review, state-level permitting overlay, or judicial review timelines. Practitioner accounts in 2024–2025 suggest that median project timelines have not shortened substantially.

The 2024 permitting-reform effort

Manchin and Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) introduced the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024, a more comprehensive bill that sought to:

• Statutorily clarify the scope of NEPA review.
• Tighten judicial-review rules, including statutes of limitations and standing requirements.
• Reform federal transmission-siting authority, allowing FERC to overcome state-level opposition for projects of substantial interregional importance.
• Streamline mining permitting for critical minerals.
• Reform offshore oil-and-gas leasing in ways acceptable to both fossil-fuel and renewable-energy interests (offshore wind also depends on this leasing process).

The bill passed the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on a strong bipartisan vote (15-4). It did not reach the Senate floor before the 2024 election. The 2025 reintroduction in the new Congress is ongoing as of this writing.

The persistent obstacles

Why has comprehensive permitting reform been difficult to achieve, despite the cross-partisan diagnostic agreement?

Disagreement about specific design choices. Progressives want stronger requirements on environmental-justice review, on cumulative-impact analysis, on tribal consultation. Conservatives want weaker requirements on these dimensions and stronger requirements on cost-benefit analysis. The bipartisan coalition agrees on streamlining; it disagrees on what to streamline and what to keep.

Asymmetric coalition costs. A bill that streamlines permitting for both fossil-fuel pipelines and renewable-energy transmission lines requires both progressive and conservative coalition members to swallow concessions. Progressives have to accept that the bill helps fossil-fuel projects they oppose. Conservatives have to accept that the bill helps renewable-energy projects they may not actively support. The political incentives push toward keeping issues separate, where each side can win on its own preferred projects, rather than packaging them together.

Litigation as veto power. The current system gives substantial leverage to any party that can credibly threaten litigation. NEPA challenges, ESA challenges, Clean Water Act challenges, and state-law challenges can each delay a project independently. Permitting reform requires reducing that leverage — which means reducing the procedural rights of parties who currently use those rights to block projects. Some of those parties are environmental groups; some are local communities; some are fossil-fuel interests blocking renewable-energy projects. Each set of stakeholders is reluctant to give up procedural leverage.

Federalism complexity. Substantial permitting authority sits at the state level — utility commissions, state environmental agencies, state lands departments. Federal permitting reform does not directly affect state-level processes. Comprehensive reform requires either federal preemption of state authority (politically difficult, especially under the Trump administration's general support for state authority) or parallel state-level reform (which depends on each state's politics).

The judicial-review question. A substantial fraction of permitting delay comes not from agency review but from judicial review after agency review concludes. Statutes of limitations, standing rules, and remand procedures shape the litigation timeline. Reforming judicial review — which the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso bill attempts — is constitutionally and politically delicate.

What happens next

As of 2025, permitting reform remains a live issue, with bipartisan momentum but no comprehensive resolution. Several specific dynamics will shape what happens:

• The clean-energy backlog. Hundreds of GW of solar, wind, and battery projects are stuck in interconnection queues. The economic pressure to clear those queues is substantial and growing.
• Data-center demand. Hyperscale data centers (driven by AI) are creating unprecedented demand for firm zero-carbon electricity, which is intensifying pressure for both nuclear permitting reform and transmission buildout.
• Critical-mineral imperatives. Strategic concerns about Chinese supply-chain dominance are pushing both administrations toward permitting reform for domestic mining and processing.
• The Trump-2 deregulatory push. The administration is pursuing administrative permitting changes under existing statutory authority, in some cases bypassing the legislative process where possible.
• State-level reform. Some states (Colorado, Washington, Massachusetts) are pursuing state-level permitting streamlining; others are not.

The case study's lesson is that permitting reform is a domain where the diagnostic consensus is unusual but the prescriptive disagreement remains substantial. The cross-partisan acknowledgment that procedural barriers block important projects is real. The specific design questions — what to streamline, what to keep, who bears the cost of reduced procedural leverage — are contested, and the contestation cuts across rather than within parties.

That is a difficult political position. It produces movement when specific catalysts (like Manchin's 2022 leverage) align. It does not produce continuous legislative progress in the way that more conventionally partisan issues do, because each side's constituencies have to be brought along simultaneously, which is rarer and harder than mobilizing only one side.

What permitting reform is and is not

A final note on framing. Permitting reform is not the same as deregulation. It does not propose to weaken the underlying substantive standards — air-quality limits, water-quality limits, endangered-species protections, tribal-consultation requirements. It proposes to streamline the procedural overlay through which those standards are applied to specific projects. Defenders of robust environmental review fairly observe that, in practice, procedural review has been the channel through which substantive concerns get raised, so weakening procedure can effectively weaken substance. Streamlining advocates fairly observe that, in practice, procedural review has accumulated to a point where it blocks projects that the substantive standards would allow. Both observations contain truth. The design challenge is to streamline the procedure without abandoning the substance — which is harder to do well than either side's rhetoric usually acknowledges.

The chapter's broader theme applies. American institutions were designed for disagreement; they handle disagreement by negotiation among veto players. When the veto players agree on the diagnosis but disagree on the prescription, the system can move — but only with the right alignment of leverage and timing. Permitting reform, in 2025, is waiting for that alignment.