Ten Years of Transforming Federal Permitting for Critical Infrastructure

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How the Permitting Council has changed the game for environmental review and authorizations across the nation

By: Manisha D. Patel

To put it simply, “efficiency” is just shorthand for “the best way to get something done.”  Efficiency, or at least the pursuit of efficiency, is what led to this Nation’s prowess for building infrastructure. The assembly line, the interstate highway system, skyscrapers, rural electrification, pipelines, the telephone, and the internet spring to my mind as the most obvious examples. These reality-changing innovations came because someone was looking for the best way to get something done. However, in my line of work, you very quickly realize that “efficiency” means different things to different people at different times. Indeed, efficiency can even mean different things to the same person, depending on how one’s goals change.  

Let me give you a few quick examples. Efficiency can mean doing something faster. Certainly, fans of motorsport know that optimum efficiency means optimum speed. So, efficiency for a racing team means a singular focus: to build a car that is faster than everyone else’s. Sometimes though, efficiency can mean not wasting anything and getting the most “uses” out of a single thing -- think about how all the family farms across America operate each day.  Other times, efficiency might mean not having to do something over, or not having to do the same thing someone else already did or at cross-purposes with your own team. And, in the world of infrastructure permitting, that’s where the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council) comes in.

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This year the Permitting Council turns “10”.  I’m lucky to have been a part of its inception over a decade ago and so proud to have been involved in its evolution ever since. In December 2015, Congress created the Permitting Council under Title 41 of the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act, taking heed of the common complaints about federal permitting—that it takes too long and leads to delays that hinder job creation, slows economic growth and stifles our nation’s innovation and economic competitiveness. The purpose of the Permitting Council is to provide improvements to the federal permitting process for project sponsors that seek out and obtain FAST-41 coverage for their projects. Congress’s charge in 2015 was ambitious and seemingly elusive – to accelerate federal review for FAST-41 covered projects by making the review process more transparent, predictable, and accountable. 

Ten years later that ambitious plan is bearing fruit and the possibilities on the horizon are game changing. The key to this transformation is the transparency, predictability, and accountability at the heart of the Permitting Council’s statutory mission. From approved projects like the billion dollar Gemini Solar to multi-million dollar port expansion projects like the Port of Corpus Christi Authority Channel Deepening, the Permitting Council is racking up wins across the infrastructure landscape. And through its role as a federal center for permitting excellence, the agency is developing tools and resources that will bring the benefits of our expertise to projects across the country, even those outside of our program, as the best practices we identify and implement become standard practices. The proof is in the proverbial pudding. Looking back at historical data on NEPA timelines across government, on average, projects supported through FAST-41 achieved Record of Decision faster than those that did not leverage FAST-41 by nearly 25%. This is all the more impressive when you consider that we’ve only been a permanent agency for 3 of our 10 years, and we have a workforce of less than 30 federal employees. Now that is efficiency. 

So, how do we do it? Everyone at the Permitting Council is a dedicated professional with a deep understanding of how the federal government works. We help project sponsors, federal agencies, lawmakers, and the public weave together varying definitions and expectations of timeliness and efficiency into a transparent, predictable, and accountable process that is captured in a coordinated project plan and posted on a public website known as the Federal Permitting Dashboard.  Our hallmarks are:

• Transparency: Before FAST-41, one of the primary barriers to efficient federal permitting was that it happened in a “black box,” with very few stakeholders aware of where the project stood in the review pipeline. The Federal Permitting Dashboard changed that and is the centerpiece of FAST-41. Publicly posted permitting timetables give a real-time accounting of the progress on each required review and authorization for the project, providing transparency for all stakeholders, from project sponsors to affected community members. To put it in terms of efficiency, the Dashboard helps us manage projects so that the time and effort spent by a federal agency is visible to all. 

• Predictability: One of the biggest frustrations about the traditional federal review process is the lack of predictability—agencies finding out about changes in project design too late to incorporate them into a review or project developers finding out about agency resource challenges or rule changes too late to do anything to address them before delays become inevitable. We rewrote the book on this inefficiency by giving FAST-41 project sponsors a seat at the table and an active role in the process. Foundational tools like the project timetable and coordinated project plan bring a level of predictability to FAST-41 covered projects that enables close coordination and routine communication. This allows everyone involved to make plans and commit resources more reliably, and hence more efficiently.

• Accountability:  FAST-41 brings a level of accountability to federal permitting that is often missing from the traditional process. FAST-41 program features such as prohibitions on last minute or surprise date changes, dispute resolution procedures, and Executive Director review and approval of any significant permitting timetable modification help avoid unexpected delay, hold federal agencies accountable for schedule implementation, and facilitate deliberate and timely decision making. 

So, yes, efficiency is the focus of our every endeavor at the Permitting Council. We have the wherewithal to help project sponsors and agencies figure out just what kind of efficiency is best to meet their goals. The icing on our cake is that the pursuit of efficiency leads to innovation. As agencies improve their processes to meet the requirements of FAST-41, those lessons can be applied more broadly to deliver the infrastructure this great nation needs to sustain a thriving economy and catapult us into the future.   

The key to mastering efficiency is understanding and clearly communicating your goal and then staying true to it.  Here at the Permitting Council, our goal is to facilitate timely and efficient environmental reviews and authorizations for FAST-41 projects. This is where projects see progress and I can’t wait to see what we can build!

Learn more about the Permitting Council at permitting.gov.