SPEED Act Marked Up and Moving through the House

Lawmakers’ renewed focus on affordability is slowly coming into focus. It’s no secret that everything is more expensive, and energy is no exception. This month’s elections underscored the importance, and need, to reign in rising costs. When it comes to energy, a great way to create new jobs, make energy cheaper to produce and distribute, as well as unleash economic growth, is to reform and streamline the federal permitting process so that energy projects, ranging from power plants to transmission lines, come online and meet demand. Fortunately, the SPEED Act is progressing through the House of Representatives.

The SPEED Act primarily reforms the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review process, a key procedural hurdle that often results in elongated delays for vital energy projects. This bill ensures NEPA reviews have consistent and predictable timelines, clarifies what is deemed a major Federal action to trigger a NEPA review, places reasonable judicial limitations on reviews, and simplifies the entire bureaucratic process.

The House Committee on Natural Resources passed the SPEED Act yesterday, a promising sign for the bill’s future. Several lawmakers highlighted the need to reform the permitting process and pass the SPEED Act during the committee markup:

Rep. Bruce Westerman (Arkansas): “The United States is unnervingly reliant on China for minerals critical to both high-tech military equipment and everyday civilian goods. Yet today, thanks in part to NEPA, it takes 29 years to get an American mine up and running. As committee members know, we have viable, domestic deposits of the critical minerals that we need. Permitting delays cannot be the reason why we fall behind our chief global rivals.”

Rep. Jeff Hurd (Colorado): “The federal NEPA environmental review process was never intended to be a climate policy, it was never intended to be a litigation strategy for stopping reasonable projects that promote economic growth. It was meant to ensure agencies look before they act, instead it has become a system that stalls projects and gives an advantage to foreign competitors, especially China. The SPEED Act restores common sense. It focuses reviews on real impacts, not speculative ones…. This is not about weakening environmental protections, it’s about ending unreasonable delays so that states can actually build what they need.”

Rep. Harriet Hageman: (Wyoming): “The SPEED Act is designed to ensure that we can build the infrastructure and develop the energy we need to power this country. It is project agnostic and one of the rare examples where Washington, D.C. is not selecting winners and losers, but rather making structural updates that bring benefits across every important sector that Americans rely on.

Americans for Prosperity is a strong supporter of this legislation and thanks the lawmakers driving this bill forward.

James Morrone Jr. is an energy policy analyst at Americans for Prosperity