In this five-part blog series, ConservAmerica fellow Alina Voss will be taking a closer look at permitting reform.
Part 1: The Permitting System Is Broken, and Conservatives Should Fix It
In 2008, a private developer proposed the TransWest Express transmission line to carry Wyoming wind power to consumers in the Desert Southwest. The federal government finished its review in 2023. Fifteen years of permitting had passed before a single shovel touched the ground. The project’s only crime was the geography it had to cross.
That outcome is not the result of strict environmentalism. It is the result of a permitting regime that treats every federal review as an open-ended invitation to litigate, relitigate, and delay. Nor does it just slow energy projects. According to the Property and Environment Research Center, it now takes the U.S. Forest Service an average of 4.7 years to begin a prescribed burn after initiating environmental review, and 7.2 years for projects that require a full environmental impact statement. When litigation joins the queue, prescribed-burn projects can stretch beyond nine years. Forests burn while reviews continue.
Conservatives have spent a decade arguing that this is a problem of cost and speed. It is, but it is also a problem of conservation. The same statutes that delay a pipeline delay a wetland restoration project. The same litigation tactics that hold up an oil terminal hold up a watershed-scale wildfire treatment. The Forest Service’s hands are tied by the same NEPA process conservation groups need it to wield faster. The result is the worst of both worlds. The country does not get the energy infrastructure modern life requires, and it does not get the proactive land management that healthy ecosystems require either.
ConservAmerica has been making this case for years. In 2022 we argued that Senator Joe Manchin’s permitting framework, including a two-year deadline on environmental reviews and reasonable limits on litigation, was a gain for industry and for conservation alike. That argument still holds. ConservAmerica has long maintained that the greatest thing we can do for the environment and the economy is to reduce the cost of energy. Reducing cost requires reducing delay. Reducing delay requires permitting reform.
This is the opening of a five-part series on what real reform should look like. We will explain how the National Environmental Policy Act, signed by President Nixon in 1970 to make agencies take a hard look before they act, was transformed by half a century of case law into a procedural veto. We will show how the same dysfunction that frustrates pipeline developers also blocks Forest Service crews, mine cleanup teams, and Land and Water Conservation Fund projects. We will summarize ConservAmerica’s January 2026 Powering America report and explain why species recovery, not litigation, is the right frame for Endangered Species Act reform. Finally, we will close with the five principles ConservAmerica believes any serious reform package must satisfy.
Conservatives did not invent NEPA, but conservatives are well positioned to fix it. The conservation tradition that runs from Theodore Roosevelt through Russell Train through today’s center-right policy community has always understood that environmental stewardship means doing things, not stopping them. A permitting regime that cannot get a prescribed burn through review in less than five years is not protecting the environment. It is failing it.
This series explains what reform should actually look like.