With Agencies Set to Release Permitting Improvement Plans, BRT Urges Administration, Congress to Enact Reforms to Accelerate Ready-to-Build U.S. Infrastructure Projects

In a new report released today, Business Roundtable (BRT) calls on the Obama Administration and Congress to act swiftly on much-needed reforms to put Americans back to work by expediting federal permits for major infrastructure projects.

In releasing Permitting Jobs and Business Investment: Streamlining the Federal Permitting Process, Andrew Liveris, Chairman & CEO of The Dow Chemical Company, said:

• “America’s CEOs are calling for a smarter approach to issuing federal permits.”
• “Too many permits are required from too many agencies and that is costing America jobs.”
• “A smarter, more streamlined system would eliminate unnecessary and unproductive delays without compromising regulatory goals.” 

Specifically, BRT calls upon the Administration to:

• Designate a single agency to have primary permitting responsibility for each project;
• Ensure that permits are processed by multiple agencies in parallel;
• Catalog the inventory and status of pending permits by agency and program;
• Work with business to develop best practices for prompt and timely evaluations; and
• Create a public online permit-tracking dashboard that would track the dates and status of all federal permit applications across agencies.

BRT calls upon Congress to:

• Provide adequate resources for permit processing;
• Require that permits be issued in 180 days; and
• Put in place a more stringent process for judicial review of federal permits, including imposing a 180-day statute of limitations, clarifying that challengers must satisfy bond requirements, as is the case with other federal suits, and establishing that permanent injunctions are impermissible in all but the most extraordinary of circumstances.

Expedited Federal Permitting Will Help Put America Back to Work Today.

Click here to view BRT’s Permitting Jobs and Business Investment: Streamlining the Federal Permitting Process report.

Click here to view BRT’s one-page overview of Permitting Jobs and Business Investment: Streamlining the Federal Permitting Process.