Westerman’s bipartisan NEPA permitting overhaul advances to House floor

Proponents say the SPEED Act is an important first step in reaching a long-sought bipartisan comprehensive permitting reform deal this Congress.

November 20, 2025

The House Natural Resources Committee approved bipartisan legislation Thursday aimed at overhauling permitting reviews to enable faster buildout of new energy and infrastructure projects at a moment of unprecedented power demand growth and rising electricity prices.

Chair Bruce Westerman’s SPEED Act would limit the scope of permitting reviews and restrain legal challenges for projects under the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental protection law Republicans and some Democrats believe is mired in too much red tape.

Westerman portrayed the successful markup — which comes ahead of a floor vote he is targeting for this year — an important first step in reaching a long-sought bipartisan comprehensive permitting reform deal this Congress. The committee approved the bill 25-18, with the support of all the panel's Republicans as well as Democratic Reps. Jared Golden of Maine and Adam Gray of California.

Some Democrats continued to criticize it as not going far enough to meet their goal of preventing the Trump administration from killing renewable energy projects, including those that had already received federal permits.

“With its bipartisan support and project-neutral approach, the Speed Act will create the stability and clarity needed to spur investments across the country,” Westerman said during the hearing. “The NEPA process, while born of good intentions, has grown into a convoluted mess.”

Along with NEPA changes, a broader deal between the Senate and House would also likely include changes to the Clean Water Act to smooth pipeline project approvals and ease the siting of transmission lines to connect clean power to the grid.

Context: To make the SPEED Act more palatable to Democrats, Westerman brokered a bipartisan amendment with lead co-sponsor Golden approved as part of the bill that would make it harder for the executive branch to cancel permits for energy projects. Westerman negotiated the measure with Democrats over several weeks to attract more bipartisan support and address their concerns about the Trump administration's attacks on solar and wind projects.

Westerman’s push comes as key Senate negotiators Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), ranking members of the Energy and Environment and Public Works Committees, have also told POLITICO they are exploring potential legislative remedies to address the Trump administration’s attacks on solar and wind projects, which they view as a must-have in any broader deal.

Several Natural Resources Committee Democrats said they backed the amendment but are pushing for stronger language to prevent administrations from interfering in the permitting process before a project is approved.

“It's good that at least prospectively, the Trump administration, after passage of this bill, will not be allowed to engage in these dirty tricks to block projects that have already gone through the approval process,” said Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-R.I.), who supported the amendment but voted against the overall bill. “But we ought to agree that it is also good to have in the present. Unleashing American energy means unleashing all of it, including affordable clean energy. We don’t just want a technology-neutral bill, we want a technology-neutral outcome.”

Republicans blocked several Democratic amendments seeking to undo Trump administration policies, including the Interior Department's memo requiring all wind and solar energy projects on federal lands secure personal approval from Secretary Doug Burgum, including for routine actions.

Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), the committee’s ranking member who opposed the bill, argued the Westerman-brokered amendment was insufficient for not addressing the Interior memo, which he called “a cartoonishly extreme policy to kill off clean energy” that would raise utility costs by cutting off access to the cheapest, fastest-to-deploy energy sources.

Democrats also unsuccessfully sought to undo the Trump administration’s attacks on particular projects, including several offshore wind projects such as Revolution Wind off the New England coast.

Westerman argued targeting Trump policies and actions would be unfeasible and outside the scope of the bill.

He was hopeful the amendment is “going to provide certainty that can get many more people on board to support" the SPEED Act and broader permitting reform.

Details: Westerman’s NEPA bill — backed by several clean energy, oil and gas, business, and technology groups — would codify parts of a May Supreme Court ruling that limited the scope of environmental reviews, saying the law requires agencies to consider only the direct impacts of a project rather than its broader effects.

The bill would also build on NEPA reforms included as part of the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act that established a two-year time limit on conducting Environmental Impact Statements, and a one-year limit for environmental assessments.

It would preclude agencies from evaluating impacts outside the immediate causal result of the proposed action, in an attempt to eliminate any consideration of upstream or downstream consequences of a project.

And it would narrow the definition of “major federal action,” which is the condition for triggering the NEPA process, by specifying that the allocation of federal funds, loans or loan guarantees are not sufficient actions on their own to trigger NEPA.

It would also impose limitations on judicial challenges against projects, requiring litigants to sue within 150 days, in a bid to make it more difficult for environmentalists to sue to stop them, and establish a 180-day deadline for courts to issue judgment on suits. The current statute of limitations is six years.

It would only allow parties that provided substantive comments during the public review period the opportunity to issue a legal challenge. And it would limit a court’s ability to remand an agency decision, specifying that the agency decision will hold while it corrects errors or deficiencies.

Democrats argued the provisions to rein in legal challenges are too extreme and would limit the ability of the public to engage on projects built near them.


By:  Josh Siegel
Source: Politico Pro