Your Congress in Action: September 8, 2025

As Congress returns to Washington from its August recess, most of its attention will be turned to avoiding a government shutdown (see the previous Your Congress in Action). But at least some lawmakers are hoping that permitting reform makes it back onto the agenda as well.

The last time Congress addressed permitting was in 2023, when as part of legislation to raise the debt ceiling it amended the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), including instituting time and page limits on environmental assessments (EAs) and environmental impact statements (EISs). Since then, Congress has tried and failed to enact broader permitting changes.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not let congressional inaction deter it, issuing several executive orders and other agency policy changes designed to speed up the process and/or exempt projects from environmental reviews (see here, here, here, here, here, and here.) The courts have weighed in as well, with a Supreme Court ruling in May that narrows the scope of NEPA reviews to just the environmental effects of specific projects, and not to broader up- and downstream effects.

Perhaps feeling left out of the fun, the legislative branch is now trying to get into the act.

In late July, House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman (R-AK) and Rep. Jared Golden (D-ME) introduced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (or SPEED) Act. The bill would amend NEPA by, among other things:

• Clarifying that it is a “purely procedural statute intended to ensure Federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their actions during the decisionmaking process” and does not “mandate particular results”
• Relieving agencies from preparing environmental documents under NEPA if the proposed action is subject to another federal, state or Tribal statute
• Limiting agencies to considering only effects that “share a reasonably close causal relationship to, and are proximately caused by, the immediate project or action under consideration”
• Giving project applicants more power over whether agencies can extend the deadline for making a determination
• Exempting projects from review if the federal government does not have complete control and responsibility over the action (as opposed to current language whose threshold is “sufficient” control)
• Limiting judicial review of agency determinations

Although the bill’s prospects in the Republican-controlled House are fairly good, the Senate is another matter. There, supporters of permitting reform would need to get at least seven Democrats to agree to move forward on legislation. And while Democrats have in recent years warmed to the idea of permitting reform to speed up clean energy projects, the Trump administration’s aggressive unwinding of renewable energy programs is making Democrats less enthusiastic about reforming permitting laws at all.

Things can change rapidly in Congress. But at this point, permitting reform appears to face the same difficult odds it always seems to face. Nonetheless, the issue is not going away anytime soon.

BLM Announces New Categorical Exclusions Under NEPA

Speaking of permitting reform at the agencies, the Bureau of Land Management has announced the adoption of 65 of categorical exclusions (CXs) issued by other agencies.

Under NEPA agencies can “adopt” another agency’s CX for a category of proposed agency actions.

A table showing the CXs that BLM is adopting is below.