Input Stories

The NAM continues its full-court press for comprehensive, bipartisan permitting reform on Capitol Hill, urging the leaders of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works to consider manufacturers’ key priorities ahead of a hearing on environmental review and permitting processes. 

• “Manufacturers strongly support getting permitting reform done this year to provide clarity across all types of investments that will grow jobs here at home and ensure America continues to compete and lead on the world stage.” 

Building on House momentum: The NAM ramped up its decades-long effort to secure permitting reform at the end of last year and is keeping its momentum going after promising results in the House in mid-December. Now it is urging the Senate to follow suit on these key issues:   

1. Reforming the National Environmental Policy Act: The NEPA process is often used in ways not intended by Congress—leading to significant delays and uncertainty for manufacturers. The NAM supports expediting judicial review with workable statute of limitations and guardrails on judicial vacatur, expanding categorical exclusions, codifying Supreme Court precedent to ensure NEPA’s scope is focused appropriately on proximate and project-specific impacts and ensuring there are enforceable statutory deadlines for agencies.  
2. Clarifying what triggers a federal action: Federal incentives should expedite manufacturing projects, not slow them down. Manufacturers believe that the NEPA process should not be triggered automatically by the grant of federal financial support, but rather depend on an analysis of the potential impacts of a project. 
3. Modernizing the Clean Air Act: Manufacturers support a modernized National Ambient Air Quality Standards process and review cycle, allowing for expanded emissions credit trading, discounting emissions from international and exceptional event sources, like wildfires and wildfire-mitigation efforts, when setting compliance burdens and right-sizing the New Source Review program to allow projects to get shovels in the ground quicker before installing emitting equipment.  
4. Streamlining the Clean Water Act: Policymakers should clarify timelines for when agencies must act on permitting requests, establish clear, commonsense definitions regarding the scope of permitting and consultation requirements and increase the use of general permits.  
5. Providing greater certainty to lawfully permitted projects: Manufacturers should also receive statutorily equal protection for permits of all types, so they can plan and invest over the long term. Policymakers should use oversight authority to ensure federal agencies are coordinating fully during permitting and a lead agency is always designated.   
6. Accelerating energy infrastructure buildout: With demand for energy skyrocketing, U.S. infrastructure must be upgraded and expanded. The NAM supports modernizing the permitting and safety processes for pipelines and ensuring federal coordination with states and localities as they install new electric transmission and distribution lines.  
7. Unlocking access to domestic critical materials: Lawmakers should ensure that any comprehensive permitting deal will expedite the approval of critical minerals and materials projects, including aligning the Department of Energy’s Critical Materials and the Department of the Interior’s Critical Minerals Lists.   

The last word: “Manufacturers in America create family-supporting jobs in communities across the country, drive innovation, power economic growth and develop and deploy technologies to make our environment cleaner,” said NAM Vice President of Domestic Policy Chris Phalen. 

• “This Congress has made it clear that new policies are needed to ensure the United States becomes the destination of choice for new manufacturing investment so that our nation can maintain our leadership in creating new technologies and products that make lives better for people around the world.”