CCL worked hard to pass permitting reform, despite its imperfections. It failed in Congress at the last minute.
Republicans Will Regret Killing Permitting Reform
Robinson Meyer, December 19, 2024
They might not be worried now, but Democrats made the same mistake earlier this year.
Permitting reform is dead in the 118th Congress. It died, although you could be forgiven for missing it, on December 17, when bipartisan talks among lawmakers fell apart over a bid to rewrite parts of the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes would have made it harder for outside groups to sue to block energy projects under NEPA, a 1970 law that governs the country’s process for environmental decision making.
When those talks died, they also killed a separate deal over permitting struck earlier this year between Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Barrasso of Wyoming. That deal would have loosened some federal rules around oil and gas drilling in exchange for a new scheme to build huge amounts of long-distance transmission.
Even if lawmakers could not agree on NEPA changes, Republicans made a mistake by not moving forward with the Manchin-Barrasso deal. We will not see another shot at bipartisan permitting reform until at least late 2026, when the federal highway law will need fresh funding.
The facile reading of this situation is that Republicans now hold the advantage. The Trump administration will soon be able to implement some of the fossil fuel provisions in the Manchin-Barrasso deal through the administrative state. Trump will likely expand onshore and offshore drilling, lease the government’s best acreage to oil and gas companies, and approve as many liquified natural gas export terminals as possible. His administration will do so, however, without the enhanced legal protection that the deal would have provided — their absence will still allow environmental groups to try to run down the clock on some of Trump’s more ambitious initiatives.
Republicans believe that they will be able to get parts of permitting reform done in a partisan reconciliation bill next year. These efforts seem likely to run aground, as long as the current rules governing reconciliation bills hold. Manchin and the Democrats already tried to reform the permitting system via a partisan reconciliation bill and found it essentially impossible.
Twelve or 24 months from now, demands on the country’s electricity grid are likely to be higher than they are today, and the risk of blackouts will be higher than before. The lack of a robust transmission network will hinder the ability to build a massive new AI infrastructure, as some of Trump’s tech industry backers hope. But 12 or 24 months from now, too, Democrats — furious at Trump — are not going to be in a dealmaking mood, and Republicans have relatively few ways to bring them to the table.
When Manchin and Barrasso unveiled their compromise earlier this year, Democrats didn’t act quickly on it. They felt confident that the window for a deal wouldn’t close — and they looked forward to a potential trifecta, when they would be able to get even more done (and reject some of Manchin’s fossil fuel-friendly compromises).
Democrats wound up regretting the cavalier attitude that they brought to permitting reform before Trump’s win. But now the GOP is acting the same way: It is rejecting compromises, believing that it will be able to strike a better deal on permitting issues during its forthcoming trifecta. That was a mistake when Democrats did it. It will be a mistake for Republicans, too.
Meanwhile, a long queue of renewable energy projects linger, awaiting transmission capacity to where it's needed.
| 
