The Trump White House is looking to overhaul the federal permission process for new energy projects as the president continues to uphold his promise to “drill, baby, drill.”
The Washington Free Beacon obtained a new report last week from the White House revealing Donald Trump’s strategy for reforming the slow, unwieldy, and unnecessarily complicated federal system for approving infrastructure and energy development. One step is to modernize the system, moving toward digital processes instead of mountains of paperwork. Federal agencies will also be required to make public their timelines for providing permission for the energy projects, thus keeping bureaucrats more accountable and transparent.
While the climate alarmist Biden administration lavished tens of billions of our taxpayer dollars on stupid, inefficient, and actively harmful “green” energy projects, the Trump administration is trying to rebuild our grid and infrastructure while ensuring American energy dominance and independence.
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From the Free Beacon:
Thomas Shedd, a top official at the General Services Administration, predicted the reforms would accelerate permitting timelines from taking years to just weeks or months… The actions will impact everything from highways and railway projects to pipelines, green energy development, and mining projects. The Trump approach stands in contrast to the Biden administration, which sought to add more requirements for permitting such projects.
Katherine Scarlett, the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s chief of staff, also emphasized the need for faster timelines. “The Trump administration is working tirelessly to implement innovation-driven environmental review and permitting reforms to eliminate needless delays that cripple the growth of the U.S. economy, replacing outdated technology with efficient, speedier solutions,” she stated.
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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has also been vocal on this subject. “We need to drill more, map more, mine more, and build more—all while innovating faster than our global competitors,” he said.
The Free Beacon explained:
Overall, according to federal data, federal agencies take two to three years on average to complete environmental reviews. And in many cases, reviews can drag on for more than four years, sometimes even taking more than a decade to complete. Environmental reviews often involve several different federal agencies, which can cause delays and create backlogs.
One Idaho rare-earth mining project alone, a project vital for national security and helping us move away from dependence on hostile Communist China, waited 14 years for permits from five agencies. The Founding Fathers would have heart attacks if they could see our modern federal bureaucracy’s size, scope, and inefficiency.
Congress has wasted too much time on inaction because of lobbying from powerful climate groups. That’s another reason why the Trump administration’s efforts to build up our energy infrastructure and reserves are so timely and important.
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