Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined the call for Congress to pass meaningful reforms to the federal environmental approval process required to build energy and infrastructure projects, specifically encouraging reforms to the National Environmental Policy Act.
Better known as NEPA, the 55-year-old law requires all federal agencies to consider and review the environmental effects of proposed projects requiring federal permits, including pipelines, highways, transmission lines, and much more.
Critics of the law have long insisted that NEPA does more harm than good by acting as red tape, opening the door for extensive legal challenges and slowing domestic infrastructure development.
Wright echoed this concern on Monday at the American Leadership in Energy Innovation Summit, calling NEPA a “massive problem.”
He said when NEPA was passed in 1970, its primary purpose was to serve as a “check,” requiring projects touching federal lands or federal funds to review what the effect on the environment could be. However, he said the law is no longer used in this way.
“It got turned into something completely different,” he said. “This is a weaponization, a 10-year legal stop on anyone from building anything by suing them on NEPA. That’s not what NEPA was about to begin with.”
In recent weeks, the Trump administration has broadly endorsed efforts in Congress to pass bipartisan permitting reform without specifically backing specific bills.
Last week, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin said Congress should consider any bill that results in a permit taking less time, costing less money, and providing more certainty.
Wright made similar comments on Monday, saying, “I hope we can get a bipartisan permitting reform bill done that’s broad-based, just quicker to get permits or stable to get permits easy, just lower risk to start planning to build things again.”
The House is poised to vote on a permitting reform bill specifically targeting the bedrock environmental law.
This week, the House is also expected to vote on the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act, better known as the SPEED Act.
Introduced by House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AR), the SPEED Act would broadly overhaul and simplify NEPA and the scope of review required for environmental analyses by removing requirements to consider or conduct new scientific or technical research.
The bill would also mandate that federal agencies are not permitted to delay the issuance of an environmental review document or decision on the basis of waiting for new scientific research to be released.
Additionally, the SPEED Act would limit agencies’ ability to include downstream environmental effects associated with projects in a review and shorten the statute of limitations for legal challenges against projects subject to environmental reviews.
The bill has support among oil and gas industry executives, manufacturing trade groups, and several House Democrats.
However, a handful of House conservatives have threatened to tank the bill, saying offshore wind could benefit from the reforms, which would thwart the administration’s crackdown on renewables.
HOUSE GOP ADVANCES BILLS TO ACCELERATE APPROVALS FOR ENERGY AND INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS
Some members of the House Freedom Caucus have targeted an amendment included late last month that would limit the president’s ability to revoke permits for certain projects.
Westerman has vowed to keep the language in the bill, telling Politico earlier this month, “If we start picking winners and losers, I don’t think we’re gonna get permitting reform done.”
