Energy & Environment

Jeff Luse | 12.18.2025 4:01 PM

Real estate developers, energy companies, and federal agencies could soon see project construction times shrink, thanks to a bill that was just passed by the House of Representatives. 

On Thursday, the House advanced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act. This bill aims to modernize the federal permitting process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which requires government agencies to conduct an environmental review of proposed projects before they can be built. 

For years, NEPA has added complex and unnecessary layers of bureaucracy to projects, pushing back completion times and increasing costs for developers. Federal legislators have repeatedly tried to overhaul the law, but to no avail. The most meaningful reform to it happened in 2021, when Congress set page and time limits for NEPA reviews. Since these changes were enacted, the NEPA process has been reduced slightly, but it still takes an average of 2.4 years to complete an environmental impact statement—the law's most comprehensive level of review—according to the Council on Environmental........

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