House bill eyes digitization to fix arcane federal permitting process
The notoriously slow federal permitting process would get a technological jumpstart under a bill introduced Thursday by a bipartisan pair of House lawmakers.
The ePermit Act from Reps. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., and Scott Peters, D-Calif., calls for the digitization of federal permitting, pushing the government to improve environmental reviews and authorizations through the embrace of interactive, digital and cloud-based platforms.
Aimed at reducing processing times for federally mandated National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, the ePermit Act aligns with an April executive order from President Donald Trump to modernize permitting technology and the subsequent launch of a permitting technology action plan.
“The government, industries, and citizens all agree that it takes too long to build in America,” Johnson said in a press release. “Completing the permitting process by paper is an archaic waste of time. Digitizing the system will speed up the process, save federal dollars, and cut down delays. Making this commonsense change will unleash investment in American communities and workers.”
The federal government has attempted to reform permitting practices over the past decade-plus, instituting a handful of policy actions to streamline the process and expedite approvals, according to a 2024 Brookings Institution report.
But a Financial Times analysis found that permitting delays were at least partially responsible for many unfinished manufacturing and climate projects in the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, former President Joe Biden’s signature policy achievements.
“Our permitting system is old, complicated, and slow — if we want to build the roads, bridges, broadband, and clean energy of the future, we need to modernize and streamline the permit process,” Peters said in a press release. “Our bipartisan ePermit Act builds on the efforts of the last two Administrations and brings our permitting process into the 21st century.”
The bill calls on the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to consult with the Chief Information Officers Council, the Office of Management and Budget, the Permitting Improvement Steering Council and other relevant stakeholders and agencies on new data standards to inform environmental reviews and authorizations.
That group would also be charged with settling on fresh concepts, formats and protocols to be included in those reviews, and establishing a “shared vocabulary and software systems that will support data interoperability and automatic data exchange between federal agencies,” per the bill text.
The front-end data and standardized taxonomy work would play a foundational role in the bill’s aims, providing agencies with an easier way to track projects via categories including environmental documents, public comments, geospatial information and milestones. A unified interagency data system would be created to “serve as a centralized platform for tracking and displaying real-time data on environmental reviews and authorizations,” the bill reads.
An authorization portal would be made available to the public under the bill, designed with interoperability in mind. The database would follow Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program guidelines and “stringent” Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency requirements.
Additionally, prototype tools would be built to accelerate complex reviews, enable data-sharing between agencies and facilitate automated applications, reviews and authorizations. The CIO Council would have a major role to play in that piece of the legislation, along with the head of the General Services Administration, the CEQ chair, OMB and other stakeholders.
Permitting reform was one of Trump’s day-one executive orders, earning immediate plaudits from business groups and energy companies. A 2023 report from the Council to Modernize Government noted that environmental impact statements from agencies, as required by NEPA, exceed 600 pages in length and take on average 4.5 years to produce.
