Dive Brief:
- President-elect Donald Trump said he will expedite federal permits and environmental reviews for construction projects worth more than $1 billion. Many infrastructure megaprojects — in particular energy projects — fall in that price range.
- In a Dec. 10 post on his Truth Social site, Trump said anyone making a $1 billion investment in the U.S. “will receive fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!”
- Trump’s plan applies to both domestic and foreign investment, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, told AP News. “If you want to bring in money, he’s going to move heaven and earth to get that money in the door and get it invested in the United States,” Miller said.
Dive Insight:
In his first term, Trump took a slew of actions to speed the permitting process for construction projects. In 2020, his administration cut the number of projects requiring federal review under the National Environmental Policy Act and narrowed the scope of effects considered under those reviews. NEPA is a bedrock environmental protection law, and many permit requirements stem from it.
President Joe Biden rolled back those changes when he took office and focused on categorical exclusions and agency capacity-building to speed up projects.
There is some bipartisan appetite to overhaul construction permitting. Democrats are eager to speed up environmental and clean energy projects, some of which have been funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act but have yet to break ground due to the NEPA process, Alex Etchen, Associated General Contractors of America’s vice president of government relations, told Construction Dive.
“Democrats have become more interested in this because they want some of these renewable energy projects to break ground. They need permits for these transmission lines, and if they want to meet some of their carbon reduction goals, they have to be able to build some of these projects,” Etchen said. “So I think that’s why there’s been this move of some on the Democratic side wanting to negotiate a compromise on some of these things.”
That said, Republicans will likely wait to push for permit changes until next year, when they will control both chambers of Congress and the White House, experts told AP News.
In addition, a case percolating in the Supreme Court — Seven County Infrastructure Coalition vs. Eagle County — has the potential to drastically weaken NEPA. That ruling could further enable Trump’s goal of opening up public lands and waters for oil and gas drilling, a focus during his most recent election campaign.
