Trump Is the Biggest Wild Card in Permitting Reform

A big bipartisan permitting reform deal may be in the offing in Washington. But getting it done will require taking away one of Donald Trump’s favorite toys: The power to mess with solar and wind permits.

Last week the House Natural Resources Committee advanced the SPEED Act, a bill introduced by Republican committee chair Bruce Westerman, that would put the full weight of Congress behind the federal permitting process. There’s a lot in this bill for energy developers of all stripes to like — and a lot for environmental activists to loathe, including a 150-day statute of limitations on litigation, language enforcing shorter deadlines for reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (also known as NEPA), and a requirement that final approvals be released within 30 days of said review’s completion.

But this bill will mean nothing for the renewables industry if the Trump administration continues to dawdle on the kinds of routine governmental actions necessary to move any infrastructure project forward.

Since the start of Trump’s latest turn in office, officials have woven a paralytic web of bureaucratic hold-ups that make it next to impossible for a solar or wind energy project to get federal permits for construction activities. Meanwhile the SPEED Act, like NEPA, is essentially a process statute at this point — it deals with the boundaries within which environmental reviews are conducted. Without requiring the government to process any project regardless of whether it’s a renewable energy project or a new coal plant, Trump officials could easily produce endless delays and remain inside the letter of the law.

This is why Representative Jared Golden, a retiring moderate Democrat from Maine, pushed to add language to the SPEED Act that blocks any president from rescinding a permit after its approval. In theory, this would insulate offshore wind projects from losing even more permits (see: SouthCoast Wind, Atlantic Shores).

The bill — including the restriction on executive power — passed the House Natural Resources Committee on a bipartisan 25 to 18 vote, though only two Democrats voted in favor.

For lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, energy bill inflation and data center drama have created serious momentum for getting bipartisan permitting legislation done ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. The SPEED Act would more easily serve that need with stronger language addressing executive permitting powers, according to numerous interviews with Democratic lawmakers, D.C. policy wonks, and energy lobbyists.

“Any deal hinges on the Trump administration providing assurances they’re not going to kill every single clean energy project in existence,” Representative Mike Levin told me on Tuesday.

Levin, a California Democrat who is involved in permitting talks, said that an ideal fix for Democrats would be a proposal he co-authored with Democratic Representative Sean Casten that would require “parity” in the permitting process between fossil and non-fossil projects of all kinds. This language would explicitly require the Interior Secretary to ensure that project applications, authorizations, and approvals needed for wind, solar, battery storage, and transmission projects are “not subject to more restrictive or burdensome procedural requirements than those applied to oil, gas or coal projects.” It would also mandate that the department rescind any existing policies that violate this “parity” requirement.

“We’re going to need language in any bill that would provide certainty that all these projects permitted would be allowed to proceed, that permits will be honored, that in the future more permits will be granted. And I do not trust this administration to honor that without concrete language in the bill,” Levin told me.

Levin’s colleagues in the House echoed those sentiments. House Natural Resources Committee ranking member Jared Huffman told me that he’s hearing from representatives of the clean power sector who are “actually aligned” with environmentalists that “all of this is completely academic if you don’t release the hostage.” Representative Paul Tonko, ranking member on the House Energy and Commerce environment subcommittee, told me in a statement that “for any permitting reform negotiations to move forward, the least we need are guarantees that whatever comes of an agreement will have the force of law and will be followed by this Administration.”

Public reactions to the SPEED Act from the renewable industry have ranged from warily cheerful to notably silent, in a way that has discernible political undertones. American Clean Power, a major energy sector trade association, and the American Council on Renewable Energy, otherwise known as ACORE, have carefully applauded the bill’s advancement while also emphasizing the need for bipartisan compromise. The Solar Energy Industries Association has yet to endorse the bill, and Rachel Skaar, a spokesperson for the group, told me it is “currently reviewing the language that passed out of committee.”

These complaints won’t mean much in the full House — Republicans can pass this bill without any votes from the opposing party. But this degree of party-wide consternation almost always translates to a filibuster in the Senate. It’s hard to imagine Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, the top Democrats on the two main Senate committees overseeing permits, trying to roll this solid bloc of colleagues. And while enough Senate Democrats broke with the party leadership to break the filibuster and reopen the government earlier this month, two of those were Senators Catherine Cortez-Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, where Big Solar wields a lot of sway.

“Its going to be a big factor in these talks,” said a senior Democratic congressional aide familiar with the bill, referring to the bureaucratic holdups facing renewables permits. The aide, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations, said that lawmakers are racking their brains to find the “perfect language” to keep Trump in check. “Everything now has to be explicitly and clearly defined by Congress because there’s a track record of the federal government using any daylight where they can navigate the system to their advantage,” the aide told me.

Based on all my conversations, the House will likely vote to pass the SPEED Act, along with probably a slate of other permitting bills, maybe as soon as December. This will probably kickstart momentum in the Senate to produce something more bipartisan, which would in turn produce more pressure to address Trump’s permitting freeze head on.

There will be challenges with crafting language that makes all sides happy without creating unforeseen policy issues around executive powers in the future. “This issue of project certainty, as this subset of permitting talks has been called, is really tricky,” said Xan Fishman of the Bipartisan Policy Center. “How you actualize that into law is tough.” But if the Schoolhouse Rock of it all can be overcome, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune would be able to present a ready-made deal to the president.

Whether Trump would actually sign such a deal, however, is another ball of wax.

“The $64,000 question is, as this becomes even more real, will the White House start to intervene?” asked Josh Freed, senior vice president at Third Way’s climate and energy program.

There’s definitely outside momentum toward dealing with Trump’s permitting freeze under the valence of tech neutrality — whatever is good for the renewables goose would be good for the energy sector gander, so to speak. Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said in a recent interview with Politico that addressing this freeze would help stop a future Democratic president from using the same trick on pipelines and drill sites. And Congressional Republicans appear to be negotiating in good faith with Democrats on the SPEED Act.

One D.C. energy lobbyist involved in the talks, however, confessed to me that the appearance of movement is “a lot of kabuki” unless Congress addresses the underlying issues around renewables permitting.

“It’s going to have to have teeth,” said the lobbyist, who requested anonymity because they did not have clearance to speak publicly. “The administration’s going to do whatever it wants.” And even with the language on executive power, the bill can only protect processes that fall under the federal government’s purview — that is, it won’t do anything with the litany of municipal and county restrictions that more frequently undermine renewable energy development.

When asked whether the White House was providing input on the SPEED Act, a spokesperson for Natural Resources Republicans told me that staff had “received technical assistance” from “relevant agencies.” The White House did not respond to requests for comment.