Scalise, Westerman: The SPEED Act: Helping America Build Again

Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman published an op-ed in the Washington Times highlighting the importance of the SPEED Act, legislation that will simplify and streamline America’s overly burdensome permitting process. The legislation will allow America to start building again, which will create new jobs, reduce costs, and unleash American energy. Read the full op-ed below or here. 

The SPEED Act: Helping America build again

The economy today faces a large but, thankfully, simple problem. Our demand for energy is rising faster than our ability to generate it. The solution is also simple: build more infrastructure — more power plants, more roads, and pipelines — so we can produce more energy.

President Donald Trump’s administration has made it clear that energy dominance is a priority. The private sector is ready to invest billions in energy abundance, and workers are ready to break ground on next-generation infrastructure. Unfortunately, for decades now, shovel-ready projects across the country have been routinely stalled and even strangled by our antiquated federal permitting system.

As AI data centers and reshored manufacturing drive demand higher, Congress has to decide whether the next decade brings the United States an energy crisis or global energy dominance. Permitting reform — specifically the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act — is a generational opportunity to deliver higher wages and real affordability for working families.

At the heart of permitting dysfunction today is the National Environmental Policy Act. Passed in 1969, NEPA used to require federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of any new government construction project. But five decades of bureaucratic mission creep and agenda-driven lawsuits have twisted the original, sensible law into a black hole of costly red tape.

For construction workers to law professors to small business owners, the very word “NEPA” is today more synonymous with waste and abuse than environmental protection. Consider that the average NEPA Environmental Impact Statement from 2013 to 2018 totaled 575 pages and took nearly five years to complete. A quarter of them took six years or more. These delays cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

And even when reviews do get completed, approved projects face a gauntlet of expensive, time-consuming lawsuits. NEPA is the nation’s most litigated and frivolously litigated environmental statute. According to research by the Breakthrough Institute, it takes an average of more than four years to resolve legal challenges after publication of NEPA environmental review documents. And where do these lawsuits come from? Ten extremist environmentalist groups are responsible for 35% of all NEPA lawsuits.

The scrapped Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a textbook case. It was a 600-mile, $8 billion project, initially approved in 2015 to deliver affordable natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. By the time the project was abandoned in 2020, NEPA had delayed it 894 days, and litigation another 570 days. Billions of dollars’ worth of affordable and reliable energy for one of the fastest-growing regions of the country was lost. And all the jobs, economic development, and tax revenue that went with it disappeared in a tsunami of legal fees and broken promises.

These aren’t failures of planning or engineering. They are failures of policy. And in 2025, the federal government’s tolerance for NEPA’s red tape is becoming existential. If the U.S. cannot build energy and mineral infrastructure, China will surpass us in AI technology — for both civilian and military applications. That would have disastrous economic and strategic consequences for America and our allies. If, due to our policy failures, we cede global leadership to China, America would become a less safe, less affordable, and less free country.

A generation from now, we cannot tell our children that a heavily abused permitting process contributed to losing the AI arms race. If Congress passes the SPEED Act, we won’t have to.

The bill, scheduled for a vote in the House of Representatives this week, fixes several of NEPA’s systemic problems by restoring the law to its original purpose: a procedural review for proposed projects.

The SPEED Act would restrict NEPA lawsuits to parties actually affected by a project and establish reasonable filing deadlines.

It would codify key elements of the Supreme Court’s Seven County decision, clarifying judicial review in NEPA cases. It would align judicial remedies with the fact that NEPA is, after all, a procedural statute, not a progress impediment.

Finally, the SPEED Act would reaffirm the scope of NEPA reviews as they were initially intended.

The SPEED Act would establish clear rules and a level playing field for federal projects across all agencies and industries. It enjoys bipartisan sponsorship in the House and support from over 300 NEPA-adjacent industries and organizations.

NEPA was originally written to facilitate thoughtful growth, not reckless obstruction. The SPEED Act restores its proper function and will finally empower the people to build. The challenges we face demand that we act. It’s time to pass the SPEED Act and protect America’s future.

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