Alongside your irregularly-scheduled Green Tape programming, we will also be posting Right of Way episodes and transcripts here.
In this episode, we discuss:
Why this round of permitting feels different
What the Senate package borrows from House legislation
How the House is engaging with the Senate in advance of a vote
Thomas: Welcome back to Right of Way, a podcast about energy policy, energy politics, and above all the current permitting reform negotiations. I’m Thomas Hochman, consultant and non-resident senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, and I’m joined by Pavan Venkatakrishnan, consultant and fellow at the Searchlight Institute.
It feels like we’ve been in and out of permitting negotiations for the better part of four years. In 2022, we had Senator Manchin’s permitting side deal with Majority Leader Schumer. In 2023, the debt ceiling deal delivered the first real changes to NEPA in decades. And in 2024, the Manchin-Barrasso Energy Permitting Reform Act sailed through committee, then died in the lame duck.
But with each new Congress, the players and conditions have changed, and so has the nature and scope of the permitting reform conversation.
This Congress, negotiations really kicked off in July of last year, with the introduction of the SPEED Act, House Natural Resources Chairman Westerman and Democratic Congressman Jared Golden’s sweeping NEPA reform bill. The SPEED Act passed the House in December, and a number of its ideas – the 150-day statute of limitations, the codification of key pieces of the Supreme Court’s Seven County decision, and so on – are visible in the Senate permitting bill.
If the Senate is successful in passing the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, House Natural Resources will again be critical in getting a final bill across the finish line.
Our guest today is House Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman. Chairman Westerman has represented Arkansas’s Fourth District since 2015 and has led the Natural Resources Committee since 2023. He has long been one of Congress’s leading champions of permitting reform, so we’re thrilled he’s joining us.
Chairman Westerman, welcome to Right of Way.
Chairman Westerman: Great to be with you. Look forward to talking about some permitting reforms.
Pavan: So, Mr. Chairman, you have been involved in nearly every major permitting reform negotiation over the past couple of years. Does this one feel different? And if so, what do you think has changed?
Chairman Westerman: Well, it feels different because it feels like we’re getting close to the goal line.
We had some very good discussions two years ago, but it just wasn’t ready for a final deal. But a lot of effort’s been put into permitting reform, a lot of bipartisan effort, and it’s going to take, obviously, a bipartisan bill to get the votes that it needs in the Senate. We passed a bipartisan bill out of the House, obviously, which I think gave a big momentum boost.
But also, when we were doing that bill, the SPEED Act, we got a coalition of over 400 different groups from all 50 states. That coalition has grown. There’s been a lot of people traveling to DC, visiting with their House members and their Senate members. And there’s really been kind of a groundswell of support for permitting reform. I was very pleased to see the Senate say it’s gonna be the first thing they vote on when they get back after the election. So yeah, I can see the goal line from here, and we’re just gonna keep plowing forward.
Thomas: So you’ve given us a good segue here. In December, the House passed your NEPA reform bill, the SPEED Act. Now the Senate has produced on their side this 400-plus-page package that includes significant NEPA reforms. What’s your read on those provisions? Where do they borrow and build on SPEED? And do they go anywhere that the SPEED Act didn’t?
Chairman Westerman: Yeah, well, they took a lot of language from the SPEED Act. Obviously, they were working in a bipartisan effort and also working with the administration in the Senate, and trying to improve and refine what we had in the House. And there’s some areas where I wish they had left it like it was. There’s some things we’re still negotiating with them on. The Senate has released language, but they’ve not voted on anything yet.
Hopefully they’ll do a manager’s amendment, and it’ll be something that they can get House buy-in on before they do the amendment, and we can put a bill together that can come back to the House and pass, hopefully pretty easily, if we’ll do the work here on the front end and get the policy to the best place possible.
But all of that said, my staff worked very closely with Senator Capito’s staff and Senator Lee’s staff all through the development of the Senate language, and I’ve stayed in contact with Senator Capito and Senator Lee. I’ve also visited with Senators Whitehouse and Heinrich as well. So there’s been a lot of effort put into getting us to the point where we are now. I think there will continue to be efforts and discussions, and hopefully we’re gonna see this thing move across the finish line.
Pavan: Chairman, you’re also a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, where you helped pass Clean Water Act reform legislation out of the House. I know Clean Water Act reform has long been a goal for permitting reform advocates, so can you speak to the issues as you read them on the Clean Water Act, and maybe give us your take on BAAJA’s reforms?
Chairman Westerman: What they’ve got in BAAJA is basically what we called the PERMIT Act in the House, which deals with the Clean Water Act. This is the language that’s been weaponized and used to stop pipelines. If a pipeline’s crossing a stream, well, then this is the point where there can be lawsuits resulting in injunctions. And you see this with nearly every major pipeline project.
I think what people realized is that this section of the Clean Water Act can be used not only to stop pipelines, but also transmission lines. Pipelines going under a stream, transmission lines going over one: if somebody wants to stop either of those projects under the current law, they can do that. So I was very glad to see the Clean Water Act revisions put in the bill, along with all the work they’re doing on transmission and things that are more in the Senate ENR jurisdiction that are outside of NEPA.
Thomas: Yeah. We were just talking to Senator Armstrong earlier, and he was making the same point about Section 401 of the Clean Water Act. It’s a problem, and it will continue to be an even bigger problem if unreformed, for all sorts of linear infrastructure, not just pipelines. So your point is well taken.
Chairman Westerman: Yeah, we talk about energy a lot, but public infrastructure, all of that gets in the same domain there. If you’re building an interstate highway and you need to cross a stream, well, there’s Section 401. So we can make everything more streamlined and still meet the environmental protection requirements, but give some certainty and the ability to build more quickly and at lower cost.
Thomas: So you’re an engineer and a forester by trade, which makes you pretty unusual in Congress. When you explain to people why permitting reform matters, is there a project in Arkansas, or anywhere else for that matter, that best captures the problem this bill is trying to solve?
Chairman Westerman: There’s projects all over, and we could go through a lot of different projects. But when we talk about this, the one that really pops in my mind – it’s not in Arkansas – was the last runway at the Atlanta airport. It took 11 years to build it. It actually only took 18 months to build it, but it took nine and a half years to get the permit.
Then you look more broadly, and you see how dependent we are on mining. And where we’re at right now: in 1995, we produced three times more copper than China, and today they produce 11 times more than we do. They have 60 copper smelters, and we have two. It’s not because we don’t have copper deposits in the US. It’s because we’ve exported all of that mining and refining capability.
And there’s a copper mine out in Arizona that got their record of decision, and they spent $2 billion developing this mine. And in 2018, under – I think it was under the National Historic Preservation Act and the NEPA process – there was a lawsuit that stopped that project till 2026. So you’ve got $2 billion of capital that has a delayed income stream. Stuff like that greatly disincentivizes development. It squishes innovation. We’ve always been a country that innovates and tries to do things smarter and do things faster, and the current permitting environment just throws a wet blanket on all of that.
Pavan: You bring up mining, so that’s a good transition. Obviously, we discussed the NEPA reforms, NHPA reforms, ESA reforms. There’s a lot of that in this bill. But there’s also a lot of stuff that is related to mining, to geothermal, to public lands. In fact, last year the House passed the Mining Regulatory Clarity Act, which you have been a huge champion of. It would resolve issues left by the Rosemont decision. Of course, now, as I said, it’s within BAAJA, and BAAJA addresses geothermal issues, hydropower, other lands issues as well. Are there any of those that you’re particularly excited about?
Chairman Westerman: Yeah, I get excited about all of those things, because when we create a system that works, we will actually promote a healthier, safer environment, and we’ll see the economy grow. And we’ve got to take these tools away that have been misused just to stop stuff. Our society’s going from NIMBY – not in my backyard – to BANANA: build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything. That’s the direction we seem to be going. And when we do that, we’re importing goods and we’re exporting wealth.
Our wealth comes from the land. And if we can’t extract things from the land, if we can’t transport it from one place to the other, if we can’t, as I say, mine it, refine it, and manufacture from it, then we’re yielding what wealth we could be gaining, and we’re actually shipping the wealth that this country’s built up over the ages to some other country. So from an economic perspective, from a national security perspective, there’s a lot of reasons to get excited when we start talking about making these environmental laws actually work to protect the environment, versus being weaponized to stop development.
Pavan: So there’s been a great deal of debate in the Democratic Party – and you may have heard it from many of your colleagues on the Democratic side of the aisle – about whether they need to vote for a permitting reform deal this Congress, or whether next Congress would be a better opportunity for a deal. But variations of this debate have really happened in both parties over the years. So what’s your take? Why should we pass this now?
Chairman Westerman: Well, we should pass permitting reform sooner than later. And I think the timing is right. I think there’s a lot of excitement about it. There’s been a tremendous amount of work put into creating good policy, and it would really be a shame to pass up this opportunity, because we never know when an opportunity’s going to come around again. And I have Democrats tell me the same thing. Even with them thinking they’re gonna win the House or the Senate or both, they say we have to do permitting reform.
Thomas: Yeah. So walk us through the mechanics from here. Senator Capito wants this to be the Senate’s first vote after the election, as you said earlier. If it passes out of the Senate, what do you expect the process to look like in the House? And how are you planning on collaborating with leadership and members of E&C and T&I, etc.?
Chairman Westerman: Yeah. Well, there’s a lot of work going on right now, a lot of it at the staff level, but I’m staying very tuned in with my staff on the discussions and the debates. And again, I think the best path forward is to work out the details and get the bill in the Senate in the form where it can pass the House. If they can’t do that and they pass something, then maybe we change it and send it back to the Senate. But it would go much more smoothly if we can work out whatever issues there are before the Senate passes something, and get the bill in the position so it could come back to the House and maybe even pass under suspension, ‘cause I think there’s that much desire to pass a good permitting reform.
Thomas: Yeah, makes sense. So obviously, permitting reform is the news of the day right now. But outside of permitting reform, what are some other energy priorities of yours that we should be tracking and paying attention to?
Chairman Westerman: Well, we’ve sent a lot of bills to the Senate. We’ve got a lot of bills passed. I was just going over this with my staff a couple of days ago, and there’s still a couple of bills that are at the White House that the President hasn’t signed yet. But when all’s said and done, we will have passed 45 of the 132 bills signed by the President out of the Natural Resources Committee. So that’s a pretty good ratio.
The other side to that is we’ve still got well over 100 bills that we’ve passed out of the House from the Natural Resources Committee that are over in the Senate. And so there’s gonna be a ton of work to do after the election.
Some other priorities: obviously, permitting reform’s way up there on the list, but I’ve also got the Fix Our Forests Act, which should have already passed. That was the first big bill we passed off the floor of the House in this Congress. In January of 2025, we passed the Fix Our Forests Act. That’s when Los Angeles was on fire. A lot of the policies in the Fix Our Forests Act are permitting reform, because we can’t manage our forests anymore. When I say we can make a healthier, safer environment by doing permitting reform, part of that is being able to manage our forests and keep from having these catastrophic wildfires. So I’m going to be really focused on that.
We’ve got the Great American Outdoors Act that has well over 235 co-sponsors in the House and, I believe, 70 co-sponsors in the Senate. So the votes are obviously there to pass the bill. We just have to get that done.
And then again, we’ve got a tremendous amount of legislation that we’ve already passed. The last week we were in DC, we were supposed to have been there for three weeks before the October break, and when it was announced we were only going to be there one week, I told my staff we’re going to do three weeks of work in one. So that one week, we passed 21 bills off of the House floor, passed 17 bills out of committee, and had hearings on many other bills. So we’ve got a queue of bills that we still want to mark up and pass out of the committee and get on the House floor as well. So there’ll be no end of work after the election, regardless of the outcome of the election.
Thomas: You mentioned the Fix Our Forests Act, and I was asking earlier about examples of situations where permitting reform would be extremely helpful. When I think about one of the classic NEPA nightmares, it’s all the forest projects where they recognize that there’s an area of forest at risk of wildfires, but then to do that wildfire protection plan, they have to do a NEPA review before they can actually move forward with a restoration project or a thinning project or whatever it is. And then in that time, there’s a number of stories of the area of forest in question burning down as they wait for the NEPA review to conclude.
Chairman Westerman: The absolute number one best thing we can do for the environment is have healthy forests, and our environmental laws are preventing us from having healthy forests because of the laws being weaponized, and activist groups going out and suing because they can sue, and creating clickbait and raising money online. So that Fix Our Forests Act passed with pretty much a suspension-level vote in the House. I think there were four Democrats that were co-sponsors of the bill that were back in California and didn’t get a chance to vote on it. But we’ve got that much agreement on fixing these environmental rules so we can manage forests.
I’m an engineer and a forester, so I really get excited about these things. But the ability to have healthy forests can do more for air quality than all the other environmental laws really combined. We’re talking about PM2.5, which is currently at 12 micrograms per cubic meter, and EPA wants to move it down to 9. Well, when you have a big forest fire, PM2.5 goes up to like 250 micrograms per cubic meter. So you wipe out all the benefits you get from having clean industry when you let your forests go up in flames.
Thomas: Makes sense. So, Chairman, we like to end each of our episodes by asking our guests for an energy policy hot take. So what’s your hot take?
Chairman Westerman: I guess my hot take would be that we’re gonna get permitting reform by the end of the year.
Thomas: I hope that’s not too hot of a take, because we certainly share it with you.
Chairman Westerman: Yeah. And I probably shouldn’t be as bullish on it, but I really am pleased with the progress that’s been made, and I know there’s gonna be a tremendous amount of work and focus on getting what I call the perfect permitting reform bill. And that’s the one that gets to President Trump’s desk and he signs. It’s not the one I would write in a vacuum. It’s not the one somebody else would write in a vacuum. But it’ll be the perfect one if we can get a signature.
Thomas: I think that’s the perfect place to end it. Chairman Westerman, thanks so much for joining Right of Way.
Chairman Westerman: Thank you. Great to be with you.
