After the failure of the Manchin-Barrasso Energy Permitting Reform Act in the last Congress and with the zone flooded by executive action, legislative approaches to permitting reform in a new Congress are also kicking into gear. There has been a groundswell of support for reforms of the National Environmental Policy Act since the Bush administration. While the Trump administration has taken decisive action to push permitting reform onto the agencies, legislative action remains vital to an energy abundance agenda. One critical step forward would be Reps. Rudy Yakym (R-IN) and Jimmy Panetta’s (D-CA) newly reintroduced bill, Studying NEPA’s Impact on Projects Act.

The act requires the Council on Environmental Quality to prepare an annual report, starting in July, that revives and consolidates three reports the CEQ has previously prepared. The first is an annual NEPA litigation survey that was published from 2001 to 2013 and reports on NEPA litigation data. The second is a report on the length, number of drafts, costs, and five-year trends of these data for environmental assessments and environmental impact statements; this report was previously prepared in 2019 and 2020. The bill’s third provision requires reporting on the duration of a project’s NEPA review and a description of 10-year trends; this was previously reported in 2018 and 2020. 

The data covered by these provisions — NEPA’s litigation, paperwork, and temporal burdens — will provide actionable information to further justify bipartisan action by Congress to end the massive obstacle NEPA presents to building new energy projects and every other government objective. Permitting reform is low-hanging fruit for increasing state capacity and cutting ineffective red tape, with NEPA being the largest target. But many other permitting burdens must be addressed, such as those under the Clean Air or Clean Water Acts or the Endangered Species Act. (The latter two of these were addressed by President Donald Trump’s day one National Energy Emergency executive order.)