Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering a bill called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. That isn’t a very descriptive name, but the author of a fine Substack called Energy Talking Points has a better one — he calls it “Freedom-to-Build legislation,” and says that it’s the biggest attempt at permitting reform that the United States has made in 46 years.
One weird thing about this law is that it’s supported by pro-business and libertarian think tanks, like the Cato Institute, and also by a lot of left-wing NGOs like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. How could such an odd alliance come together? Well, the short answer is that it involved some hardball politicking by an administration that takes its job a lot more seriously than any previous Republican administration of my lifetime.
But first, an explanation is in order of why permitting reform is so necessary, and why overhauling the system could reduce the cost of living and create hundreds of thousands of new American jobs.
At present, if you want to build a large infrastructure project in the U.S., such as a railway, power line, pipeline, wind farm, road, mine, or refinery, then you have to get a lot of permits, from federal agencies like the EPA, as well as from the state and the city that you’re in. But that on its own isn’t newsworthy — every country has building codes, pollution limits, and some form of environmental protection law.
But America is different from countries like Japan, Canada, and Australia (which have been outcompeting us in physical industry for a long time) because, in the United States (due to laws like NEPA that were signed by the traitorous Nixon Administration in the 1970s):
The environmental laws are vague. If you’re a builder, you must produce “environmental impact statements” (EISs) that spend hundreds or thousands of pages listing ways that your project might affect the environment, without any clear guidance on what impacts are and aren’t acceptable.
Building permits are easy to revoke if there’s a change in the administration. And it’s hard to persuade people to spend money on things like the Keystone XL Pipeline if you might have to stop work the moment that a different party is in the White House.
Some of these laws are enforced by private activists, not the government. Once you file your EIS, anyone can sue you on the grounds that it isn’t thorough enough… and the window to file a lawsuit stays open for six years.
There is no presumption of innocence. If the court sides with the activists, then you have to stop work on the project until you can write a newer, longer EIS, which (due to the vagueness of the laws, and the burden of proof being on the accused) usually takes years and years of litigation before it’s finished.
For an example of how long these EISs can be, just consider that, back in 2008, San Francisco spent two-and-a-half years writing a 1,353 page report to try to convince a judge to let it add new bike lanes to the city streets. Bike lanes! A project that liberals, in theory, are supposed to like! (Now imagine how much worse the problem is if you’re trying to build an oil pipeline or a uranium mine.)
These are the problems that the BAAJA is trying to mitigate. If passed, it would shorten the lawsuit window from six years to 150 days, restore the presumption of innocence so that work can continue while the suit is being decided, and allow developers to sue government agencies for damages when they revoke existing permits without an urgent reason. There are a lot of other details, too — I can’t summarize everything in the 417-page bill, but suffice it to say that it does a lot of things that are necessary and long overdue.
But with the permitting process that we have right now, it’s no wonder that American industry is a risky, low-yield investment. And it’s no wonder that more and more of our energy and tangible goods have to be imported from abroad each year. As a reminder of how bad things are, just look at this S&P500 survey of development time on mines in different countries. The United States came in second-to-last, ahead of only Zambia.
One major takeaway from the permitting situation is that most leftists love big government way more than they love the environment. Just think about how California approved its high-speed rail system in a 2008 ballot measure, has spent about $14 billion on it over the next 18 years, and still has no operational track. This is because California state permitting laws are even worse than federal laws. (It’s worth remembering that, back in the 1930s, before any of these laws were enacted, Americans were able to build the Empire State Building in barely a year, with much more primitive technology.)
So how did Donald Trump’s Republicans manage to get a bunch of green energy activists to see the light and support permitting reform? It was simple, really — the GOP just had to apply the law impartially.
When Donald Trump returned to office in 2025, he froze development on a lot of wind and solar farms.
There wasn’t any good free-market reason for him to do that. These projects were not boondoggles like Solyndra, the solar firm that the Obama Administration scandalously subsidized back in 2009. It turns out that, over the last decade or so, a lot of gradual technological improvements have made wind and solar the cheapest way to generate power on windy and/or sunny days, especially in places like Texas, which is now producing more solar energy than California.
Yes, you read that right. The moment that technological progress made solar panels profitable, the pro-business state that doesn’t care about climate change started installing way more of them than the state that yelps loudly about the environment… but that really just loves big government for its own sake.
What was the effect of Donald Trump’s decision to pull all of these wind and solar permits? It forced the Democrats to the negotiating table. Suddenly, a lot of left-wing engineers realized that the only way they would actually be able to install more green energy is if they lobbied for a permitting reform bill that would make all construction easier.
To be fair, there were a minority of Democrats who were agitating for permitting reform during the Biden years. These were people like Noah Smith, the centrist economics blogger who spends half his time accusing Donald Trump and his allies of being corrupt and bigoted, and the other half trying (and usually failing) to get his fellow Democrats to admit to obvious but inconvenient truths: like that being soft on crime mainly harms poor people, or that refusing to teach algebra in public schools doesn’t fight racism.
As long as Joe Biden was in the White House, the Noah Smith wing of the party could be ignored by the other Democrats, who were usually content to spend lots and lots of money on infrastructure subsidies, and not pay much attention to whether any infrastructure was actually built with that money. (Remember that whether or not anything gets built, a lot of money still moves into the pockets of activists and consulting firms, which is kind of the point).
But once the Republicans were in the driver’s seat, they could put hard pressure on the Democrats, by holding solar and wind projects to the same standards as any other infrastructure. That made it possible to hammer out a deal with just enough support from green energy activists that it might get passed. And if the Cato Institute and Vox both agree that the new legislation will bring down Americans’ electricity prices… well, they’re probably right.
And if this bill makes it all the way through Congress and to the president’s desk, then there’s a good chance that it will be remembered as the greatest accomplishment of Donald Trump’s second term.
After all, without reforms like this one, trying to bring back American jobs via tariffs and tougher immigration laws is a sorry half-measure. (It doesn’t really matter if you exclude foreign competition when Americans themselves have little or no economic freedom.) But if the new bill gets signed into law, then it will remain in place, and keep making American industry more competitive, even if most of Trump’s other policies are reversed by future executive orders.
That is why I’m calling my senators and representative and telling them that I support the BAAJA. And that’s why you should, too. After all, Donald Trump ran on a promise to end job-killing regulation, and now is the moment when we’re within sight of the fulfilment of that promise.
Twilight Patriot is the pen name of a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working on a graduate degree. You can read more of his writings at his substack.
American Thinker
