4 Pillars for Permitting Innovation

Some thoughts on why (and how) the environmental movement can support permitting reform

Hello! 👋

My name is Brent, and I’m EPIC’s new Senior Manager for Permitting Innovation! In this new role, I’ll be helping EPIC establish its Permitting Innovation Hub. The Hub (website coming soon!) will bring EPIC’s diversity of permitting resources under one roof–technology, ecological restoration, and infrastructure (where I’ll be focused). Once the hub goes live, I encourage you to check it out if, like me, you are also seeking to make sense of the broad array of permitting reforms being undertaken and proposed across the country. 

With an eye for improving both our built and natural environment, our goal with the Hub is to utilize technology and policy to get permitting processes to move faster and more efficiently to a final decision, whether yes or no, while ensuring local communities are engaged and consulted, and protection for the natural environment and human health is achieved. 

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Now, about these four pillars for permitting innovation…

The permitting reform space is growing fast, and there are clearly different philosophies for why this work is important, what values should guide us in identifying solutions, whether reform is even needed, and how we build a large enough coalition to make meaningful changes at all levels of government. So, for my first blog with EPIC, I want to put out some initial ideas that will guide my approach to permitting innovation. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll focus on how these pillars will inform my approach to infrastructure permitting, but I think these can easily be applied more broadly.

• Permitting processes are too slow, and it is imperative for the future of our democracy, and our planet, that all levels of the American government make it easier and faster to get to a permitting decision (whether yes or no).

  Permitting innovation isn’t just about tinkering around the edges of bureaucracy; it’s about proving to the American people that our government can act: lowering costs, tackling the climate and biodiversity crises, and delivering infrastructure that creates jobs and transforms American lives for the better.

  Our inability to build quickly and efficiently is eating away at American’s confidence in our form of government.  It's not hard to see why: 

  • Despite frequently being less complex, US rail projects take longer and cost about 50% more than those in Europe and Canada. 

  • Amidst exploding electricity demand and increasing electricity prices, transmission lines can take over a decade of planning before construction even starts.

  • With home affordability challenging for many Americans, US housing unit authorization is at a 5-year low, and expected to drop more.

  America needs to learn to build again, and to do that, our government must make decisions faster and more efficiently. That means those of us that work on environmental policy will need to figure out new ways to balance protecting the environment and communities with the need for reforms that make it easier and faster to build critical infrastructure like housing, public transit, and clean energy.

  Let me give an example of the type of reform I’d support under this pillar: we should exempt federal grants from automatic NEPA coverage. If a project is receiving money from the federal government, the origin of the funding should not be considered a major federal action and automatically trigger NEPA. Plenty of federally funded projects would still trigger NEPA where the project has a legitimate federal environmental nexus including if the project requires a federal permit or license (ie a CAA permit or ESA consultation). However, with this change in place, over the next decade, literally tens of thousands of federally funded infrastructure and ecological restoration projects would be spared unnecessary regulatory burden. Although, even with this reform in place, these projects would still have to navigate other federal, state, and local permitting processes that also need to be reformed!

• Faster permitting will undoubtedly have tradeoffs, but it remains fundamental that our government continue to listen to the needs of, and protect, the environment, human health, and local communities.

  At its best, I want permitting to rein in our worst impulses—putting guardrails on greed, short-term thinking, and overall bad decision-making. The architects of America’s permitting system intended it to be a force for balance: enabling progress and economic growth,  protecting the natural environment, safeguarding future generations, and fostering genuine community input. Yet, there are far too many cases where I’d argue it’s failed to achieve even one of these objectives. When it comes to protecting and restoring the natural environment, EPIC’s Executive Director Tim Male, and my colleagues Danielle Bissett, Jessie Mahr, and Becca Madsen have written extensively on a multitude of ways permitting can make it harder (or easier) to do just that.

  Permitting reform must make government decision making  faster and easier, while finding new, more efficient ways to incorporate the input of communities and protect the environment and human health. 

  In many cases, speed does not have to mean fewer environmental protections or less community engagement. There are proven policy solutions that maintain these priorities while speeding up the permitting process. Take, for example, the Department of Energy’s Coordinated Interagency Transmission Authorization and Permits (CITAP) Program.  This new program, established through federal rulemaking in 2024, makes a number of exciting changes to how transmission lines receive federal permits. These changes include requiring that permitting decisions be issued within two years of applications being filed. This “shot clock” for decisions provides more certainty to developers on when they will receive a decision from the feds, and will help to jump start development of transmission infrastructure that will be desperately needed in the coming years to address energy demand.

  In other cases, it is appropriate to place certain projects on an expedited track to approval with less stringent environmental protections and community engagement. For example, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge reconstruction project received a Categorical Exclusion (CatEx) under NEPA—fast-tracking federal environmental approval and allowing the project to bypass a full-scale Environmental Impact Statement. Expediency was critical  in this case to address the urgent transportation and community needs created when the bridge collapsed in March 2024. This type of exclusion isn’t new or rare, in 2020, the White House Council on Environmental Quality estimated there are more than 100,000 CatEx’s issued annually by the federal government. I think we should be expanding the use of CEs where projects are broadly viewed as urgently needed or are widely accepted to have positive outcomes, economic, environmental or otherwise. 

  Let me also note that some in the permitting reform debate have expressed much more extreme views. This includes calling for the repeal of core tenets of environmental laws like the Clean Water Act or the Clean Air Act. For these folks, they tend to cite China, which has historically had no such protections, as the gold standard for a society that can build things quickly. But, these folks either have missed or neglected to mention that China’s government is now trying to fix many of the environmental, social, and health effects it created by moving too fast: entire communities displaced, devastated forests, and heavily polluted air and water.

• We need permitting processes that Americans can trust will consider projects fairly and transparently.

  I joined EPIC because EPIC has always fought against arbitrary and subjective systems, and for clear and consistent government decision-making. When government processes are predictable, it makes it easier (and more appealing) for everyone to participate.  Those tenets are central to business operations, environmental protection, economic growth, and a healthy democracy, and have been core to EPIC’s work for many years.  If Congress is going to change the rules, I believe we all want to make sure the new rules will be applied as intended.

  To that point, I’m concerned by what we’ve seen over the past nine months at the federal level: an administration that has hand-picked winners and losers. For example, why should we trust the Trump administration to fairly implement new permitting laws for all energy projects after how his administration has treated clean energy projects over the last year? 

  I don’t expect (or want to see) reforms that guarantee projects I or anyone else might like are automatically approved. What I do want to see are reforms that all sides can trust will be applied fairly across the board, no matter who the president is.

• Technology is key to achieving better and faster decision-making at all levels of government.

  EPIC has an incredible track record of advancing technology strategies and solutions that improve the government's ability to make environmental progress. This allows us to provide unique value in the permitting debate, as it's clear that technology will be key to better and faster permitting.

  A particularly exciting example of technology in permitting is Virginia’s Permitting Transparency (VPT) initiative. VPT is a centralized online platform that allows users to track real-time status and timelines for permit applications across multiple Virginia state agencies, greatly enhancing efficiency and transparency (for applicants, the public, and other parts of government) in the state’s permitting process.  Virginia has reported massive benefits from implementing VPT, including dramatic reductions in average permit processing times—up to 65–75% for some agencies—and greater transparency that allows the public and businesses to see real-time status and timelines for applications across state agencies. 

  If you are interested in learning more about the value and insights that EPIC’s technology is bringing to the permitting space, I encourage you to check out these recent blog posts from my colleagues Boon Sheridan and JR Washebek.

So where do we go from here?

There is so much work to do. For the first time in decades, Democrats and Republicans are beginning to align on the outline of comprehensive permitting reform. An issue that once seemed mired by partisanship may be on the brink of bipartisan progress. EPIC’s team of permitting experts have lots of ideas for how environmental permitting laws can be better, and we’re excited to engage the Hill on these in the months to come.

We’re also excited by the innovations we’re seeing across the country, being advanced in state capitals by Republicans and Democrats alike, from Virginia to Utah to Pennsylvania to California, and in the coming weeks and months I look forward to lifting up some of the most interesting permitting innovations I am fired up about, and looking behind the curtain to understand how these came to be. My goal is to elevate the best ideas so that others, both in the states and in DC, can get ideas for reforms of their own, so they’re building on lessons learned and not reinventing the wheel.

Finally, I’ll add that if you consider yourself part of the fast-growing permitting reform space, whether here in DC or somewhere else in the country, I'd love to connect. I can be reached at Brent@PolicyInnovation.org. And keep an eye out for the new Permitting Innovation Hub website - launching soon!