The permitting reform package moving through committee is described by its sponsors as a process bill: shorter environmental reviews, tighter judicial deadlines, a consolidated lead agency. Nothing in it appropriates money, which is the entire basis of its bipartisan support.
It is an infrastructure bill. The reason nobody calls it one is that calling it one means paying for it.
Consider what the bill actually requires. Shorter reviews demand more reviewers — the delay in a typical transmission review is not deliberation but queueing, and a queue clears faster only when it has more servers. Consolidated lead agency authority requires the lead agency to have staff competent in the disciplines it has just absorbed. Tighter judicial deadlines require courts that can meet them.
None of these capacities exists at current staffing. The Bureau of Land Management’s renewable energy programme has lost roughly a fifth of its permitting staff since 2021. The Council on Environmental Quality has fewer analysts than it did in 2010.
The honest version of this bill would pair every process change with the appropriation that makes it achievable. That bill would cost perhaps $2 billion a year, a trivial sum against the capital it would unlock, and it would fail, because the coalition holding the current version together is held together precisely by the absence of a number.
So the bill will pass, and the deadlines will bind agencies that cannot meet them, and in three years there will be hearings about why permitting reform did not reduce permitting time.