Permitting reform in budget reconciliation

Heatmap has a story today about the House Natural Resources Committee trying to incorporate some permitting reform into their piece of budget reconciliation.

What would this proposal do, specifically?

The bill would allow companies to pay a fee to access a faster, more streamlined NEPA process that would not be reviewable by the courts, according to the bill. That means environmental groups would likely have a harder time suing the government for failing to account for various environmental maladies in their study.

Under the draft legislation, companies would pay 125% of the cost of preparing the report to get an expedited review. But avoiding a lengthy court fight is so valuable that many companies would likely take advantage of this new process, Bagley told us.

“You can read it as effectively creating a price for a litigation shield — the federal government is allowing developers to buy themselves out of litigation risk with a flat fee,” he said.

Our position is that this isn't the right way to do permitting reform. There are a lot of bottlenecks in the permitting process that need to be tackled in a comprehensive bipartisan permitting reform package like last year's Energy Permitting Reform Act. That's the right place to tackle litigation reform, and specifically, letting project developers pay to shield themselves against lawsuits is not a good approach.

This proposal still has a long way to go. So far the legislation is only in draft form, and even if it's included in the Natural Resources Committee's budget reconciliation proposal, it would still ultimately need the support of nearly all House and Senate Republicans. And it's not clear that the Senate Parliamentarian would determine that this proposal is sufficiently ‘budgetary in nature’ to be eligible for the budget reconciliation process.

So, CCL will keep an eye on it, and we'll also continue to encourage our Democratic MOCs to engage in comprehensive bipartisan permitting reform negotiations.

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