A Predictable Permitting Process Could Restore Confidence in U.S. Construction

For Lisa Epifani, the infrastructure question behind the next industrial revolution is also a question about national capacity: can the United States still build? She linked today’s challenge to the convergence of political freedom, new ideas about prosperity and technological innovation around the country’s founding. In 1776, she noted, James Watt’s improved steam engine was just beginning to be used commercially. The technologies now taking shape are different, she argued, but prosperity still depends on the infrastructure that lets them develop.

Epifani named transmission lines, pipelines, power plants, data centers and the supply chains connecting them as foundations for the next industrial era. The question is not only whether the United States has wealth and ingenuity, she said, but whether its institutions still create the conditions for prosperity—or have become bottlenecks.

Alan Armstrong, an engineer and longtime energy-industry executive before becoming Oklahoma’s senator, said the country has grown complacent about building. He described permitting reform not as a campaign to weaken environmental standards, but as an effort to make the process clear and reliable. With a predictable process, developers could plan and build while continuing to meet environmental requirements; without one, the risk and expense of getting infrastructure built rise.

Armstrong drew a distinction between debating what should be built and changing the rules after a project has received a permit. He argued that once a permit has been issued and lawfully exercised, it should not be withdrawn. In his view, the prospect that an administration might stop a project after billions of dollars have been invested makes it difficult to build with confidence.

Alan Armstrong said earlier efforts at permitting reform had faltered in part because industries did not agree on what they wanted. He recalled disputes over previous legislation: one sector might regard a proposal as too generous to another, while a different sector saw it as inadequate. His diagnosis of what could make the current effort different was that industries across sectors had begun speaking with one voice.

That required companies to settle their differences outside their discussions with senators, he said. A reform package designed around one industry’s priorities would not establish a dependable process for the wider range of infrastructure projects. Armstrong urged the sectors to support rules that would make it possible to obtain a permit through a process and retain it afterward, rather than competing to secure advantages for themselves.

He introduced the American Energy and Mineral Infrastructure Act, he said, because lawmakers and industry participants had kept asking what permitting reform should actually include. The bill was intended to put a concrete proposal on the table after years of suggestions that a plan was nearly ready. Armstrong said its provisions drew on work already done in the House, where lawmakers had advanced individual bills. Rather than start over, his approach incorporated those proposals into a broader framework.

Lisa Epifani said her team’s crosswalk of the House bills found that about 15 were wholly or partly reflected in the final Senate version. Armstrong agreed that the House’s work was substantially represented. He said the bill produced by the Senate committees followed much the same philosophy as his proposal and included language from House bills; building on that work, he suggested, could help the Senate bill advance.

Armstrong described permitting reform as a deliberately narrow priority in a Senate crowded with problems and competing demands. He said Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, then president of the National Governors Association, had made permitting reform a priority for governors and asked him to take it on. That alignment helped prompt Armstrong to make it a central focus of his role.

He also argued that permitting problems reach beyond energy infrastructure. He connected the difficulty of building refineries to the ability to respond to fuel shortages and linked constraints on new infrastructure to rising utility costs in the Northeast. In his view, limits on construction can create scarcity, which in turn raises costs. He said these connections are often missed when people hear “permitting reform” and think only of the approval process itself.

Asked which provision would have mattered most if it had been in place earlier in his career as a developer, Alan Armstrong pointed to the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. He said people who knew him might expect him to name the Clean Water Act, but his concern was that NEPA had come to be treated as though it were a substantive environmental standard.

Armstrong described NEPA’s original function as procedural. For long infrastructure projects such as transmission lines, highways and pipelines, he said, it provided a way to weigh state and federal issues and choose a route. He contrasted that role with laws such as the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act, which he said establish substantive environmental protections. In his account, those statutes set the standards; NEPA provides a process for addressing the issues involved in a project.

He argued that NEPA’s procedural role had been turned into something people could sue over as if it were itself the substance of environmental protection. Clarifying that role in law, he said, could change how infrastructure projects are reviewed without removing the standards established by the other laws. His point was not that environmental review should disappear, but that the review process and the underlying standards should not be conflated.

A permitting bill would not, Armstrong cautioned, settle how every provision works in practice. Rules would have to follow, and legal precedent would need to be re-established around the new law. He expected those processes to take time.

He also warned that provisions beyond NEPA could become ways to block interstate infrastructure. As an example, he said the Clean Water Act was not created to give a state a veto over a federal project, but that it had come to be used that way. Armstrong likened reform to addressing the obstacles already visible while expecting others to emerge. The statutory framework could change, he suggested, but the effects would also depend on how agencies write rules and how courts interpret them.

Data centers bring local concerns about electricity prices, water use, noise and large facilities, Lisa Epifani observed. She also described them as an important part of the next industrial revolution and asked how Americans might be persuaded to support investment in them rather than see it move overseas.

Alan Armstrong argued that restricting infrastructure supply does not necessarily stop the underlying activity; it can shift it elsewhere. He made the same point about critical minerals and fossil fuels: if the United States chokes off domestic supply, production may take place in countries where, in his view, it will be less carefully governed. For data centers, he argued, stopping the infrastructure needed to serve them is a blunt way to address specific local concerns.

If the aim is to set limits on data centers, Armstrong said, policymakers should address what they allow and how they govern them directly. Preventing infrastructure from being built, he argued, affects too many other things to serve as a precise way to manage those concerns. He did not dismiss the questions about data centers; he argued that cutting off supply was the wrong instrument for answering them.

Armstrong recalled visiting a solar farm in the United Arab Emirates after attending COP 26. He said he passed three nuclear plants on the way, and that the plants had taken three and a half years to install, from the decision to build to coming online. At the solar farm, which he described as covering a hundred square miles, he asked how long permitting had taken. His guide replied, “permit?” Armstrong said he was not proposing that the United States adopt the same approach. He offered the story as an example of the speed against which American construction competes.

His argument was not that environmental protections should be weakened. Armstrong said the United States should preserve its standards, while avoiding what he described as litigation that repeatedly blocks projects and administrations withdrawing lawfully issued permits. His concern was that using infrastructure constraints to manage one issue can also limit the capacity to build for others.

Asked whether it was harder to build a pipeline or pass a bill through Congress, Alan Armstrong said he would be able to answer in about a month and a half. He had seen pipeline projects stopped, he said, and would see whether the permitting effort was stopped too.

In a brief closing exchange, Armstrong praised Oklahoma’s congressional delegation as pragmatic and called for less political grandstanding in Washington. He also said the Senate had been invigorating: unlike the more repetitive quarterly earnings, reports and board meetings of his nearly 15 years as a CEO, the work changed from day to day and required him to keep learning.