The country just held an election centered on the high costs of living. The electorate spoke loudly and clearly.
Americans are equally clear about their love of public lands and the freedom to enjoy them. Poll after poll shows it. The voters didn’t demand industrial oil and gas development over every acre of America’s Arctic, one of our wildest places. They didn’t ask that we give a foreign company the permanent option to build a sulfide-ore copper mine upstream from Minnesota’s pristine Boundary Waters. They didn’t clamor for unchecked data centers and oil rigs across the West.
They certainly didn’t vote to surrender their say in what happens to lands that belong to all of us.
Unfortunately, that and more would result from the permitting reform bill before Congress, euphemistically called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act.
The bill includes important provisions to improve the electrical power grid and permit renewable energy projects the president unfairly sidelined. But the cost of those reforms is far too high. The biggest threats are provisions that risk locking in development on our public lands. Once a project gets a green light, future administrations would be severely limited in the ability to alter or rescind it, even if the project is unlawful, or even if new science shows it would be destructive.
Courts couldn’t halt or invalidate permits over flawed reviews. A judge could only demand paperwork revisions while development continues.
Imagine what this administration, or any future administration, could do with this corporate get-out-of-jail-free card? Picture industrial development across what used to be Bears Ears National Monument, your favorite family campsite or smack in the middle of elk winter range. Future generations may have no way to undo the damage.
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Denali National Park in Alaska. Photo by Stephen Crane via Unsplash.com
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And that’s just one tradeoff. The bill further guts the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act — our safeguards that protect clean air and water, wildlife and community involvement.
Tribal nations and organizations have also sounded the alarm over how it usurps tribal sovereignty, undermining how and when the federal government must consult with tribes under the National Historic Preservation Act over development that might affect their treaty rights and tribal homelands.
As some have noted, the result of the bill would be a fundamental shift in how government works. Government would protect corporate interests from the public rather than protecting the public from corporate interests.
There’s also a practical problem. The bill imposes tight, new timelines and requires taxpayers to reimburse corporate permitting costs if deadlines are missed.
When I ran the Bureau of Land Management, it had close to 10,000 employees. Even then, we needed more capacity. Still, working closely with the Fish and Wildlife Service, we issued thousands of permits, including three major transmission lines and two critical mineral mines. We set records for permitting both renewable energy and oil and gas.
Today, however, the BLM has roughly half that staff — 5,500 employees — after being DOGEd and attacked by this administration. The Fish and Wildlife Service has been similarly gutted. Same with the Forest Service.
Permitting requires people to get on the ground, assess problems and solve them. It requires ensuring communities have a voice in protecting clean air, clean water and wildlife. Dismantled agencies won’t be able to meet these deadlines.
You don’t make a horse run faster by starving it half to death and hope if you whip it harder, it will magically run faster. If Congress wants to speed up permits, it should focus on hiring agency staff as a critical first step. If it wants to solve the problem of not enough power lines, it should pass that portion of the bill.
Above all, Congress must not give this administration the ability to permanently hand our shared public lands over to corporate interests. The oil and gas industry has made $130 billion in windfall profits just since the president began the Iran war. It doesn’t need more favors from Congress.
Americans went to the polls demanding that Washington address their immediate needs, not those of powerful corporations. Congress should listen. We can build a clean energy future while protecting public lands, the clean air and water they provide, and the opportunities we owe future generations. That’s the kind of permitting reform Americans deserve.
Tracy Stone-Manning is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is the president of The Wilderness Society and former director of the Bureau of Land Management.
