Agency Action & Permitting
Agency Action & Permitting Publications
Dispelling the Myths of Permitting Reform and Identifying Effective Pathways Forward (2025)
Permitting efficiency is often characterized as incompatible with strong environmental standards, rigorous analysis, transparency, or public engagement, but available evidence suggests otherwise. An empirically grounded approach to permitting reform would address the true causes of delay and reject the prevailing zero-sum perspective that assumes deregulation is the only option. Increasing agency capacity through adequate funding, staffing, and training improves the permitting process for everyone. Similarly, interagency coordination reduces delays caused by inconsistent or redundant standards across agencies. Finally, early and meaningful public engagement avoids delays by proactively addressing community concerns and mitigating harms. Agencies have already adopted these types of programs, significantly improving efficiency without compromising regulatory standards. Promising examples include the FAST-41 program, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Integrated Licensing Process, and the Fish and Wildlife Service's IPaC system. We conclude by proposing several principles that should guide permitting reform, describing established programs that should serve as models for reform, and identifying future work that would promote an informed and constructive national debate.
Permitting for the Energy Transition (2025)
Across the world, jurisdictions are navigating the challenges of governance amidst a major transition in energy infrastructure. Building a new system of energy infrastructure involves the construction of critical mineral mines, transmission lines, and utility scale renewable energy projects. Perceived inefficiencies and tales of slow decisionmaking often fuel calls for deregulation, but this approach is short-sighted. Characterizing the problem as “permitting” oversimplifies the situation by suggesting a monolithic process that can be tweaked with a couple adjustments. In democratic societies, with multiple levels of government, there are often a wide variety of laws and regulations, enforced by different authorities, seeking to protect or achieve social goals, like managing pollution, ensuring workforce safety, and coordinating infrastructure. This article explores the feasibility of using detailed data to understand the functionality of specific permitting practices and identify root causes of delay that arise during the process, using hardrock mine permitting as a case study.
This Permit Reform Already Works. Why Aren’t More Mining Projects Using It? (2023)
This article describes permit reform measures implemented through the FAST-41 program, a pilot project designed to expedite federal permitting for complex infrastructure projects without compromising environmental standards or restricting public participation. The article explores the common causes of delay in the permitting process, with a focus on agency capacity problems at the Bureau of Land Management. It then analyzes the effectiveness of the FAST-41 program, concluding that there is qualitative and quantitative evidence that the interagency coordination provisions, shared data protocols, and strategic permitting practices facilitated by the law improve the transparency, predictability, and timeliness of the permitting process.
Written Testimony for House Committee on Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Hearing on May 11, 2023 Regarding Permit Reform and NEPA Implementation.
Identifying productive areas of reform that would improve permitting predictability, transparency, and timeliness. Identifying problems facing renewable energy projects that are unrelated to environmental permitting, but cause delay in project implementation.
Choosing Between Environmental Standards and a Rapid Transition to Renewable Energy Is a False Dilemma, Issue Brief published by the Roosevelt Institute (2023)
Debunking the claim that there must be a choice between progressive climate policy reform and environmental protections. Progressive climate policy reforms can be enacted without compromising environmental protections or communities’ right to engage with infrastructure projects that impact their physical and economic well-being.
Playing the Long Game: Expediting Permitting Without Compromising Protections (2022)
This article responds to the argument that environmental standards must be loosened in order to facilitate mineral production sufficient to fuel the transition to a green economy, arguing that the premise poses a false dilemma by failing to distinguish between productive and unproductive causes of delay in the permitting process. The permit process creates opportunities to eliminate, reduce, or mitigate risks. These opportunities may cause short-term delays in exchange for the long-term benefit of designing a better project or avoiding environmental catastrophes. On the other hand, there are ways to improve permitting efficiency by identifying unproductive causes of delay.
Evidence-Based Recommendations for National Environmental Policy Act Implementation, (2021)
This article reviews approximately 40,000 environmental analyses completed by the U.S. Forest Service to identify factors associated with permitting delays. We found that most environmental reviews are completed in a predictable way and that delays are most often attributable to non-regulatory factors.
This article reviews over 600 critical habitat designations made pursuant to the Endangered Species Act and found that designations that were subject to National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review were completed faster than decisions exempted from NEPA review.
Measuring the NEPA Litigation Burden: A Review of 1,499 Federal Court Cases (2020)
This article reviews thirteen years of federal court litigation data to quantify the number of cases filed, estimate the percentage of NEPA decisions challenged in federal court, and compare the outcome of those cases to other environmental cases in which the federal government is a defendant. NEPA litigation represents just 0.043 percent of all civil suits filed against the federal government and just 0.5 percent of all NEPA decisions result in litigation. Environmental organizations win at higher rates than other plaintiffs. Together, these results indicate that environmental organizations are not filing frivolous NEPA claims to delay development.
NEPA at 50—An Analysis of the Data in the Courts (2020)
This article summarizes the Stegner Center’s body of work on NEPA practice and litigation comments critiquing changes to NEPA regulations on behalf of 95 law professor
NEPA and the Energy Policy Act of 2005 Statutory Categorical Exclusions: What are the Environmental Costs of Expedited Oil and Gas Development? (2017)
This article compares impact reductions under three levels of NEPA review, concluding that EISs are more effective at minimizing impacts than less rigorous environmental assessments or categorical exclusions.
This article reviews Environmental Impact Statements completed in conjunction with Resource Management Plan Revisions conducted by the BLM between 2004 and 2014, and finding that RMP revisions increased application of more protective use stipulations by statistically significant amounts without causing a statistically significant change in either the number of jobs created or the pace of oil and gas development.
This article evaluates Environmental Impact Statements for oil and natural gas field development, finding that EISs result in statistically significant reduction in environmental impacts without harming economic development.