The House Just Passed a Bill To Curb Environmental Lawsuits and Speed Up Construction Projects
The SPEED Act is unlikely to pass the Senate, but hopefully it will initiate sorely needed bipartisan reforms.
Real estate developers, energy companies, and federal agencies could soon see project construction times shrink, thanks to a bill that was just passed by the House of Representatives.
On Thursday, the House advanced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act. This bill aims to modernize the federal permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires government agencies to conduct an environmental review of proposed projects before they can be built.
For years, NEPA has added complex and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy to projects, pushing back completion times and increasing costs for developers. Federal legislators have repeatedly tried to overhaul the law, but to no avail. The most meaningful reform to it happened in 2021, when Congress set page and time limits for NEPA reviews. Since these changes were enacted, the NEPA process has been reduced slightly, but it still takes an average of 2.4 years to complete an environmental impact statement—the law's most comprehensive level of review—according to the Council on Environmental Quality.
The SPEED Act makes several updates to NEPA, including codifying changes outlined by the Supreme Court earlier this year and expanding the list of projects that don't require a review.
Perhaps the most meaningful provision of the bill is the changes it would make to NEPA litigation, which has become a significant hindrance for getting things built. Today, an aggrieved party can file a NEPA-related complaint up to six years after a project has gotten the green light from federal regulators. From 2013 to 2022, these lawsuits set projects back by an average of 4.2 years, according to the Breakthrough Institute. The SPEED Act would fix this problem by reducing the statute of limitations to 150 days and giving courts strict deadlines to decide these cases.
This proposal to limit the statute of limitations caused considerable consternation from some Democrats during the bill's markup on Monday. Many were concerned that this change would keep communities from being able to challenge local projects. But even with shorter statutes of limitations, communities would still be involved, since NEPA requires agencies to hold multiple hearings and an open comment period before finalizing an environmental review. And in most cases, it's not locals that object to projects—it's well-funded NGOs. As the Breakthrough Institute has documented, 72 percent of NEPA challenges from 2013 through 2022 were brought by national nonprofits (with 10 groups bringing forward more than a third of the claims). Only 16 percent were filed by local communities.
Some Democratic opponents raised concerns that reducing the statute of limitations would amount to a handout for fossil fuel companies. This too ignores the realities of the law. Energy development is heavily contested under NEPA, but the regulatory process does not discriminate and the law has been used to slow down clean energy development almost as much as it's been used to curtail fossil fuel projects (and sometimes even more so). Recognizing this, a broad coalition of renewable energy and oil and gas industry groups endorsed the original text of the SPEED Act.
Those Democrats' fear that the bill would be used to greenlight fossil fuels was matched by certain right-wing Republicans' anxiety that it would make it too easy to build renewable energy projects. The bill included a provision that would prohibit presidents from rescinding permits for approved energy projects, unless a court deemed it appropriate. President Donald Trump has used this tactic to hamper several offshore wind projects since returning to office.
The bill's co-sponsor, Rep. Bruce Westerman (R–Ark.), reached a deal with this coalition of Republicans: In exchange for allowing the bill to reach the floor, he modified its language to give the president more discretion to scrap projects whose permits were approved between January 20 and the bill's enactment date. The American Clean Power Association pulled its support for the bill after these changes were announced.
The bill passed with bipartisan support, in a 221–196 vote. It now moves to the Senate, where it faces an uphill battle in its current form. Earlier this month, the chamber's top Democratic climate hawks told Heatmap News that they would support a permitting bill "only if it ensures we can build out transmission and cheap, clean energy." The senators said that the SPEED Act "does not meet that standard" but signaled that they'd be willing to negotiate with Republicans on broader reforms.
For years, Congress has promised to deliver comprehensive permitting reform; for years, it has failed to do so. Now more lawmakers are recognizing that the regulatory labyrinth is making it harder to build things in the United States, and that this sets back both economic and environmental progress. It's unclear whether the SPEED Act will be the bill that finally crosses the finish line. Hopefully it will at least initiate the discussions that will ultimately deliver sorely needed reforms.
