Key Republican casts doubt on bipartisan permitting deal over dispute with White House

A dispute between Republicans and the White House over environmental policy could throw a wrench into ongoing talks about how to reform the nation’s infrastructure. 

A key House Republican has indicated he may be willing to walk away from the permitting reform talks amid a disagreement over a rule that, in part, implements previous changes related to the issue that were passed under a deal to lift the debt limit. 

“There is no way Congress will give this Administration new laws to invent imaginary authorities if they continue to operate in bad faith in the implementation of the Fiscal Responsibility Act’s [National Environmental Policy Act] reforms,” said Rep. Garret Graves (R-La.), who has been a key negotiator for House Republicans on the issue, in a written statement to The Hill. 

A spokesperson for Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) expressed a similar sentiment.

“Any steps the Biden White House takes to undermine the commonsense permitting reforms achieved in the FRA will undermine our ability to work in good faith on this issue moving forward,” the spokesperson said via email. 

The spokesperson added that the new rules add “more burdensome requirements” to the permitting process that will “make it harder to meet the statutory deadlines set in the FRA and clearly goes against bipartisan congressional intent on streamlining the permitting process.” 

Republicans and many Democrats alike have lamented the time it takes to get new infrastructure and energy projects up and running. The GOP in particular has identified lengthy environmental impact studies and court challenges as among the reasons that projects take so long to be built. They have been in talks with Democrats for months on the issue, with Democrats seeking to speed up renewable energy projects.

Republicans won some of the reforms they had been pushing for in a deal signed in June to raise the debt limit: Namely, they got the shorter environmental review timelines, as well as page limits and provisions that make it easier for certain categories of projects to evade environmental studies altogether. 

Late last week, the White House proposed a rule that in part sought to implement the changes that were written into the law — including the timelines and page limits — and set up a process for broadening exclusions from environmental impact studies. 

The rule also contained additional provisions, including those that would get rid of Trump-era constraints on court challenges to energy and infrastructure projects and direct government agencies to consider climate change and pollution burdens on communities in their actions.

Critics of the Biden rule say provisions such as these, as well as additional requirements for exempting projects from environmental reviews, may detract from the goal of speeding up project approval.

“It’s just adding more stuff — one more requirement here, do one more look there, go a little bit further here — until cumulatively, I would say the things that were included from the Fiscal Responsibility Act are being offset by more subjective requirements that are going to delay projects,” said Chad Whiteman, vice president for environment and regulatory affairs at the Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. 

In the same statement in which he said Congress won’t give Biden new laws he can use in bad faith, Graves, a key Republican negotiator, said the previous changes were implemented “to focus the scope of environmental reviews.”

“Anything outside that interpretation is just illegal,” he added. 

A spokesperson for the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which proposed the rule, defended it — saying it implemented the changes that were agreed upon, but did not incorporate additional “radical” GOP proposals. 

“The Bipartisan Permitting Reform Implementation Rule fully and faithfully implements new permitting efficiencies directed by Congress through the Fiscal Responsibility Act,” the spokesperson said in an email to The Hill. 

“What it does not do is adopt radical provisions of the House Republicans’ Builder Act — provisions that were not part of the bipartisan deal — such as changes that would limit environmental reviews to ignore a project’s effects on climate change or ignore the cumulative effects of adding more and more pollution to already overburdened communities,” the spokesperson added. 

A Senate Democratic aide also defended the Biden administration and criticized Graves’s suggestion that Congress may not move ahead with an additional permitting reform deal. 

“If House Republicans use this rule as an excuse to not come to the table on permitting, they should not accuse the Biden administration of acting in bad faith,” the aide told The Hill in an email, noting that the rule implements the changes Republicans pushed for. 

The aide also said that even without Republicans, the Biden administration still has other tools at its disposal to bolster clean energy deployment.

Meanwhile, some proponents of a deal are still saying they will work towards one. 

A spokesperson for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said that his Energy and Natural Resources Committee recently held a productive hearing on permitting and added, “We remain committed to working in a bipartisan, bicameral way to pass comprehensive permitting reform.”

A Senate GOP aide told The Hill they don’t believe the dispute changes the calculus on the issue, because people recognize how important the reform is.

— Updated at 10:05 a.m.