Congress is advancing a new permitting bill that pairs tougher cost protections and sharper litigation limits with a major expansion of federal transmission authority — a shift that directly answers the objections that stalled reform in 2024.

Senators Mike Lee, Shelley Moore Capito, Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse introduced the 417‑page Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 last week, setting up a debate over how far federal power should reach and how much customers should pay as transmission projects move forward.

It can be useful to compare the bill to its 2024 predecessor. Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso introduced the earlier Energy Permitting Reform Act in July 2024, but it never reached a floor vote. There were four main concerns with that legislation: how the bill would allocate the cost of new power lines, how it defined reliability, how far it would extend federal authority and how little it would do about litigation.

Comparing the two bills on those questions shows where the new proposal has improved and where concerns remain. For critics who argued that conservatives should wait for a stronger negotiating position in the next Congress, the new text offers substantial evidence that waiting was worthwhile.

Customers Gain Stronger Cost Protections

One of the more consequential changes would require a closer relationship between what customers pay for a transmission line and what they receive from it. The 2024 bill instructed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the interstate electric grid, to allocate costs “in accordance with the cost-causation principle,” meaning customers pay the costs attributable to serving them. Only customers receiving “no benefit, or benefits that are trivial in relation to the costs sought to be allocated” would have been explicitly protected from rate increases to cover those costs. A customer whose benefits exceeded that threshold could still have been charged far more than those benefits were worth to them.

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The new bill would require that costs be allocated “in accordance with the cost-causation principle and at least roughly commensurate with the benefits.” What a customer paid would therefore have to bear a reasonable relationship to what the customer received. The same cost-allocation standard would cover qualifying transmission projects whether they receive state or FERC siting approval.

The language comes from the 2009 federal appeals court decision Illinois Commerce Commission v. FERC, and FERC included it in its 2024 transmission rule, Order No. 1920. The 2024 bill invoked cost causation without expressly stating a proportionality requirement. The new bill makes that safeguard explicit.

The protection for customers receiving trivial benefits would remain, now supplemented by a proportionality requirement. The bill also specifies that nothing in it “shall prevent a transmitting utility from recovering such costs through voluntary agreement with its customers.” Such agreements could be reasonable where a utility and a large customer negotiate on equal terms.

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