If Congress allows permitting reform to stall again, the United States will inevitably face higher energy costs, weaker energy reliability, and reduced geopolitical influence. Washington favors strong language and superlatives about resilience, competitiveness, energy dominance, and winning the future. But for all that rhetoric, policymakers don’t seem to feel the urgency of a major weakness at home.
That weakness centers on knowingly enabling paralysis. Each time geopolitical tensions flare, Washington suddenly is reminded that energy security remains important. Lawmakers issue urgent warnings. Experts quickly explain the fragility of global supply chains, power grids, and fuel routes. Then the moment passes, and the system that makes it painfully difficult to build remains untouched. America is not building enough anymore.
This avoidable cycle is rapidly turning into a major strategic failure. Sadly, permitting reform is often seen as a procedural issue, focusing on administrative timelines and regulatory details. This perspective is entirely incorrect. In a world of rising electricity demand, artificial intelligence expansion, industrial rivalry, and grid stress, permitting reform is not procedural. It is foundational to economic stability and national security.
IF AMERICA CAN’T BUILD, IT CAN’T LEAD
Ironically, recent instability in Iran and the greater Middle East should have sharpened the urgency of this issue, not pushed it to the margins. When the world is reminding us in real time that energy infrastructure, shipping corridors, and fuel supply remain central to global power, the logical American response should be to reduce our own exposure. The U.S. should be doing everything possible to accelerate the construction of its own pipelines, transmission lines, generation capacity, export capacity, and industrial infrastructure.
Instead, for whatever strange reason, we continually treat foreign instability and domestic execution as mutually exclusive topics when, in fact, they are connected at the hip. A country that cannot build critical infrastructure cannot develop resilience. A country that cannot approve energy projects quickly enough to meet its growth goals cannot strengthen its position.
When infrastructure approvals become unpredictable, the cost of capital rises. When timelines stretch over years, transaction certainty decreases, project economics weaken, and securing financing becomes more difficult.
Delays are an entirely unnecessary tax on the economy. They increase construction costs, slow supply growth, and shift the burden downstream to households, businesses, ratepayers, and manufacturers. The most frustrating part of this situation is that the United States has the resources to achieve complete energy security; however, we are slowly losing the ability to move our resources promptly across our vast country.
The United States is entering a period of electricity demand growth unlike anything it has seen since the dawn of mankind. Data centers, AI infrastructure, manufacturing, electrification, and economic expansion are driving a sharp increase in power needs. That reality is now widely understood. The implication is simple: None of these ambitions will be met unless America can actually build the infrastructure to support them.
If we are going to win the AI race and restore American industrial strength, we have to get our permitting house in order. If demand rises faster than infrastructure can be approved and built, reliability erodes, reserve margins thin, queues lengthen, delays compound, costs rise, and strategic directives become harder to realize. The competition, namely China, soars past us. If we don’t build it, somebody else will.
America’s economic future depends on physical assets that have to move from concept to construction to commercial operation. Everything we are trying to build depends on it. Yet Washington too often debates economic growth as though it existed independently of the physical systems that enable it.
The U.S. does not lack an energy goal. Unfortunately, our problem lies in how we implement it, and this issue is worsening. The market has long signaled the need for more capacity, faster progress, and greater certainty, but our approach still involves friction, redundancy, and delays. In a slower era, that might have worked. Today, it doesn’t. When global volatility calls for better domestic execution, Washington often falls into complacency, preferring talk over action. To stay competitive, we must quickly and efficiently remove the various bottlenecks that hinder progress.
Permitting reform is not about aggressive deregulation — that is a lazy excuse. It’s about practicality, realism, and love of country. The United States should be able to conduct thorough reviews, listen to public input, and uphold valid environmental standards without turning every major infrastructure project into a lengthy, bureaucratic process. Bureaucracy impedes.
US ENERGY DOMINANCE KEEPS BEATING RUSSIA, IRAN, AND VENEZUELA. IT CAN BEAT CHINA, TOO
We need to reinstitute the entrepreneurial mindset that capitalizes on free-market principles. Clear timelines, coordinated reviews, and responsible decisions are not radical. They are the basic expectations for a country that claims it wants to build. It is unacceptable that, on average, it takes four to five years to build a gas pipeline in the United States.
The members of Congress delaying permit reform need to face reality. If it stalls again, the consequences are not theoretical. Energy costs will rise. Reliability risks will grow. U.S. energy security will decline. Growth will slow down, and the U.S. will face a more dangerous century with less strategic flexibility than it should have. We have the resources — we need to stop the talk and start taking action.
Dan Romito is Managing Director of Opportune. Tim Tarpley is President of Energy Workforce & Technology Council.