In a sign that both Republicans and Democrats are fed up with how hard it is to build power plants, transmission lines and other energy projects in the United States, lawmakers on Wednesday announced a bipartisan deal to vote on the largest overhaul of federal permitting rules since the 1970s.
The proposed legislation, which the Senate plans to take up after the midterm elections, aims to speed development of fossil fuel and renewable energy projects alike. The United States is struggling to build new power sources to meet surging electricity demand as A.I. data centers expand.
The 417-page bill came after months of closed-door bipartisan negotiations between a small group of senators and the White House.
Republicans pushed for language that could make it harder for environmental groups to sue to block natural gas pipelines, oil drilling, mines and other energy projects. The bill also puts new limits on landmark environmental laws like the Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act.
Democrats sought to make it easier to build large power lines, which could greatly expand the use of wind and solar energy. They also added language aimed at preventing presidents from unilaterally blocking projects, a response to President Trump’s efforts to halt offshore wind farms and throttle renewable energy.
The White House has signaled that it supports the deal, which could help the bill pass through the Republican-controlled House. Mr. Trump has sought to accelerate permitting for projects like oil wells, coal mines, gas pipelines and nuclear plants, but businesses have said those changes are unlikely to stick unless Congress acts. Rising energy costs have also become a major voter concern.
“We once built projects like the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building in years, not decades,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah and one of the four lead negotiators of the bill. “What too often stands in the way is a permitting system that takes too long and costs too much.”
The deal has attracted enthusiastic support from business groups like the Chamber of Commerce and National Mining Association. Both the oil and gas industry and renewable energy firms have called permitting reform a top priority.
But the legislation has proved more divisive among environmentalists. A similar bill in 2024 died in Congress after opposition from green groups and electric utilities alike.
Some Democrats argue that the legislation will help efforts to address global warming by accelerating construction of wind, solar and battery projects — even if it also eases barriers to new fossil-fuel ventures. Two preliminary modeling efforts estimate that the reforms would, on balance, reduce the nation’s planet-warming greenhouse gases while lowering consumer costs.
“If we can pass this bill, we will flood the grid with clean, affordable energy,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, a longtime supporter of aggressive action on climate change and another lead negotiator.
“Like all major pieces of bipartisan legislation, this bill is a compromise,” he added. “We believe it is a compromise that will result in a brighter, cleaner, more affordable future.”
Other green groups have strenuously opposed the changes to major environmental laws, saying that they could limit communities’ power to use lawsuits to fight polluting facilities.
“It is obvious that there are stark trade-offs being made,” said Manish Bapna, the president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. While Mr. Bapna praised the bill’s provisions to expand clean energy, he said his group was still reviewing whether the benefits outweighed the costs.
Energy permitting has become increasingly partisan: Democratic-led states like New York and Massachusetts have wielded environmental laws to block new natural gas pipelines, while the Biden administration tried to stifle oil drilling on public lands. The Trump administration has tried to revoke permits for offshore wind and bury new wind and solar projects in red tape.
At the same time, experts and businesses say building virtually anything has gotten much harder in the United States as federal regulations have expanded and calcified over time. One giant wind farm and power line in New Mexico took 17 years to complete after numerous lawsuits and route changes. Another 303-mile natural gas pipeline through Virginia and West Virginia took a decade to build after multiple regulatory reviews.
The bill released Wednesday would amend a wide array of laws to make it quicker to build.
For example, the landmark National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 requires many projects to go through lengthy reviews to document potential impacts on air and water. The bill would cap that process at two years and impose penalties on agencies that fail to meet permitting deadlines.
The legislation would also give private companies greater ability to sue federal agencies that held up energy projects for an “unreasonable” length of time, a change that could make it harder for, say, Republican administrations to hold up wind projects or Democratic ones to delay oil permits.
The bill would set a 150-day deadline for environmental groups and others to challenge energy projects under that law, the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act. It would also limit the courts’ ability to delay or block projects.
“It’s an attempt to strike at the heart of the excessive proceduralism in environmental law that has developed since the 1970s,” said Arnab Datta, the director of policy implementation at the Institute for Progress, a research organization.
Some environmentalists have opposed these and related provisions, including a limit on the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to veto projects under the Clean Water Act — as the Biden administration did with a gold and copper mine in Alaska in 2023 — and provisions that could make it more difficult to protect threatened species.
Defenders of Wildlife, a conservation group, said that the bill would “bulldoze” the Endangered Species Act and urged lawmakers to make changes.
Mr. Trump’s well-known hostility to wind and solar power have also loomed over the negotiations. Some Democrats and environmentalists said it was pointless to try to make it easier to build renewable energy if administration officials were just going to turn around and thwart projects. At one point, the White House reportedly offered to unfreeze a number of wind projects held up by the Pentagon to move the bill forward. (A federal judge has ordered the administration to lift the freeze.)
Other provisions would make it easier to build large new power lines and create a faster process for connecting new power plants to the grid.
One of the biggest roadblocks for more wind and solar power has been a lack of long-distance transmission lines that can connect gusty winds in the Great Plains and scorching sun in the Southwest with population centers. When lines do get proposed, states and localities in their paths often hold them up.
The bill would give federal regulators stronger authority to site and authorize transmission lines, which some experts have said could lead to a large expansion of the electric grid.
That could benefit all energy sources — including fossil fuels — but some environmental groups and Democrats believe that renewable energy could see the biggest boost.
“If you build all that transmission and level the playing field, the economics of clean energy will win out,” said Nat Keohane, the president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a group that supports the bill.
Yet some utilities have been wary of reforms that would give the federal government greater authority over power lines and override state control. New transmission could also undercut their existing power plants.
“We are reviewing the transmission provisions and how they may affect efforts to deliver reliable, affordable electricity,” said Drew Maloney, the chief executive of the Edison Electric Institute, a utility trade group. But, he said, “we are encouraged by provisions that streamline environmental permitting and create project certainty.”
The bill isn’t expected to come up for a vote until after the November elections. Members of the House have already gone back to their districts to campaign for the midterms, and senators are expected to leave Washington this week.
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