What’s Really Wrong With the Permitting Pipes

This week’s Q&A is with Peter Bonner, senior fellow for the Federation of American Scientists. I reached out to Peter because this week, as I was breaking stories about chaos in renewables permitting, his organization released a report he helped author that details how technology and hiring challenges are real bottlenecks in the federal environmental review process. We talked about this report, which was the culmination of 18 months of research and involved detailed interviews with federal permitting staff.

The following interview was lightly edited for clarity.

Okay so walk me through why you did this report.

The reason for doing the report was to look at, why is permitting a bottleneck? What are some things that can improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of permitting to get permits done better and faster?

Depending on the type of permitting project and where the infrastructure is getting built, permitting could be very, very difficult, or it could go more easily. It depends on the number of stakeholders involved. It depends on the type of permitting project it is. But it also depends on each agency doing permitting somewhat differently, and leaning on different types of technology to enable them to do permitting better.

One agency may have one configuration of a permitting team and in another agency, that configuration of a permitting team may be quite different, sometimes independent of the type of permitting project they’re talking about. So there’s a need for greater consistency in how those teams are built, and also the skill and talent that goes into those teams and how they work with contractors to get the permits done.

In addition, each agency is leaning on their own types of technologies on case management and how to run the permitting project instead of there being consistency around the technologies they use as well.

What went into this report?

There were a couple pieces to it. One is a set of pretty extensive interviews with permitting program managers, hiring managers, and HR specialists who were bringing people into agencies to help with permitting functions and programs. We also did significant extensive research into the permitting process and what technologies permitting teams were using to document and guide their work in adherence to regulations. So a lot of it was primary research working directly with the agencies and the people who were on the ground doing the permitting.

How much of the backlog in permitting is Congress? Or is it just the executive branch?

Clarity in the laws and regulations that guide permitting – there’s still work there to be done. But our focus was less on laws and regulations and more around, how are permitting teams actually getting the work done? What talent do they need on those teams? What technologies can they use to support their work?

So you’re telling me a big issue might really be the government’s load bearing infrastructure, so to speak. Is it really just the back-end? The pipes?

A decent amount of it is the pipes and getting the right people in place.

The permitting workforce has been wanting for people and skillsets even before the increase in infrastructure spending over the past few years. You’re looking at a workforce that did not have enough people to do the job before this influx of projects came in.

It therefore depended on bringing in people and contracting people to do that work as well. And in the hiring process, we found significant delays in recruiting for permitting talent..

What we found was a lot of delays due to the bureaucracy around hiring that I think is well-documented in other places [in government]. Doing more, clear skills-based assessments up-front when you’re evaluating people for jobs so that highly qualified people then make it to the list that you can hire from. Making sure people get through the background check process properly. There’s lots of things that delay getting people on board faster and also reaching out and recruiting the right sorts of folks.

To what extent do you think your recommendations here on the pipes, so to speak, will have an audience with this administration? I’m particularly curious given all the headlines we’re seeing about staff reductions in the federal government.

It’s hard to project that and there’s a lot of clarity that needs still to come in terms of how this administration is viewing supporting permitting teams and the agencies to make sure that they can do their jobs better. The real answers to that are still to come.

I think there’s a lot of change going on in the permitting regulatory environment, the regulations. There’s also executive orders, legal decisions that have come down lately. We’re in a dynamic, changing situation.

My hope is that the administration would recognize that, take a look at the report we have and take a look at investing in the right people and the right technologies.