US should default to 'yes' on projects – federal permitting council lead

➤ The default position of US government agencies should be to approve permits.

➤ Improved analytics and technology could speed up permitting for a wide array of projects.

➤ Broader improvements to the nation's permitting processes will require the cooperation of Congress.

President Donald Trump appointed Emily Domenech as executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council on May 28.

Domenech previously worked at Boundary Stone Partners, a government consultancy firm. Prior to that role, she was the senior policy adviser to Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and Speaker Mike Johnson.

Domenech will oversee a portfolio of nearly $75 billion in large-scale projects spanning 19 sectors including mining, energy and transportation. Established in 2015 under the Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act (FAST-41), the permitting council aims to improve the transparency and predictability of federal environmental reviews and authorizations for critical infrastructure. Multiple waves of mining projects were recently added to the council's dashboard, which only listed one mining project before 2025.

Domenech hopes to speed up the permitting process to address a long-held complaint of the mining and energy companies looking to build infrastructure, Domenech said in an interview with Platts, part of S&P Global Commodity Insights. The following conversation has been edited for clarity and space.

Platts: As the new leader of the permitting council, what do you think was done well and what would you like to do differently?

Emily Domenech: The permitting council is a small but powerful agency. A lot of its success comes down to the goals of the executive branch.

In the first Trump administration, when they were really standing up this program, my predecessor did a fantastic job of really building a team [and] figuring out what the goals of the permitting council should be and frankly, doing the kind of work that we, as [former] Hill staffers, do all the time, which is running around calling people to fix problems.

That is a really, really important role, but it's not as sustainable as we can be looking ahead in the role of the permitting council.

The beauty of this administration is that President Trump and the team in the White House, they want to get things built quickly. That's their number one priority. And it is really across all of the 19 sectors that are available to the permitting council.

We have plenty of really great staff who were here during the Biden administration, who did great work to sort of move the ball forward. But it's really hard to get projects built when the White House is consistently issuing regulations that add more layers of review to that permitting process.

I really think it's less about changing the way the permitting council operates and more about responding to an executive that actually wants to get things built.

The council responds to the priorities of the White House, and we've already seen a lot more mining projects coming forward. How might the priorities of the permitting council be changing in the next four years?

It's no secret that the Biden administration really only focused on putting one type of project on the dashboard. The projects that were holdovers from the first Trump administration, they frankly neglected them and let them fall off the dashboard.

We have 19 sectors that qualify for coverage under FAST-41, and we've only really covered about eight of them. So, there's still quite a lot of work to be done. Mining is certainly one area where we're really leaning in, but another area will be manufacturing.

My goal as director is really to bring in a project from every major sector that's in our statute. That includes things like datacenters, [artificial intelligence, and quantum information science and technology] that were added to the statute.

So, will the agency recruit for projects to add to the dashboard or are you already seeing a lot of interest in the program?

We have been working heavily with the agencies to identify projects that either have been waiting for a really long time for one permit or are near the end of their permitting process and need just a little push to get across the finish line.

As far as going out and recruiting projects, I don't know that we need to because the White House is really communicating that we're open for business. I highly doubt we are going to have any trouble tripling the number of projects we have on the dashboard in this administration.

Given the high level of interest, is there a risk that the council could be overwhelmed by the level of projects?

We're not there yet, certainly, because it does take time to go through. I do think that's something we'll have to consider as we move into the future.

As the White House wants the permitting council to take on this kind of more robust role, how do we make sure that we have the staff to do that job? So far, we do, but we have a lot of flexibility and frankly, support from the White House to ensure we can do this mission.

What sort of role do you see for the permitting council to take lessons from its experience to help apply that to broader permitting processes so that all companies can benefit from streamlined permitting?

A huge part of my goal when I approach the permitting council's statutory responsibilities is to think of us as a place to create best practices and try out new things that we could eventually scale to across the whole federal complex.

It doesn't do us any good to come up with really great systems that help 100 projects if thousands of projects are still stuck in the process. One of the tools we really are hoping to build out under the Trump administration is our capability when it comes to project analytics and incorporating technology into what we do both in the forward-facing dashboard and sort of behind the scenes to make sure that we're learning from each project.

We are trying out, in some cases, first-of-a-kind types of projects — we're going to learn something from them, but that means that we need to be able to communicate that to the agencies so that the next five projects go 10 times faster.

I really do think we're at a kind of golden age of thinking about this issue because of AI and machine learning and the ability to do the kind of analytics we haven't been able to do before on what works and what doesn't. We need those analytics to be able to make the system work better.

A horror story about a mine taking 29 years to get a federal permit might get people interested in permitting reform, but it doesn't really help us solve the problem if we don't know why it took 29 years.

So, in your opinion, what does federal permitting reform look like?

There's plenty that the executive branch can do, and we're seeing some of it out of the Trump administration now. Number one, getting rid of the layers and layers of regulatory direction that have accumulated over the 40 years of some of these legacy environmental laws. We really need to right-size the federal regulations to reflect what Congress actually told us to do.

Step two requires Congress to pick up the pen and go back to the statute. The big issues to tackle — like what constitutes a major federal action that triggers the federal permitting process or what are the limits of judicial review for permits that are issued by the federal government — those things are really going to require Congress to weigh in and to take the steps to move legislation that makes it easier to get a permit and also easier to defend that permit once you get it.

There's no way we're going to get people to choose to make big investments in the United States if they have no certainty that, once the federal government gives them a permit, they won't get sued forever. That's just crazy. We ought to be able to put some common sense restrictions on who has standing in the federal courts and how long you can bring those objections to federal permits.

We need to change the culture around permitting. For a really long time, the sort of perspective from top to bottom in the federal government has been we need to take as long as it takes to figure out what we think about this project. Maybe at the end, you'll get a permit, but maybe not. We need to get to a place where the default position is yes.

The default answer has to be, "Yes, we want to let you build in the United States, because we know that we have the ability to do appropriate environmental mitigation to work with communities to make sure projects don't disrupt their daily life." We know how to do all of the stuff to protect species and protect habitats. We need to build that in, but the answer needs to be, at the end of the day, we get to yes.

We've been hearing about the potential for permitting reform in Congress for a long time. Is 2025 the year?

We have a long way to go in Congress. The difference between now and 10 years ago is that 10 years ago, I can't think of more than four or five Democrats who had any interest in talking about permitting reform. Now it's a huge portion of the party.

We may disagree on how to do it. But it used to be that the phrase "permitting reform" could not be uttered or an environmental lobbyist would come and beat down your door and yell at you. We have made huge progress in making this a true bipartisan issue.

A lot of that is due to, frankly, members who engaged on this in their local community about a discrete specific issue. I'll use Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) as an example. Lots of us think of him as a permitting reform guy now, but he really came into the fold because he worked on stopping wildfires in California with Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.). They partnered to fast-track permitting to do forest management to protect the giant sequoias.

Some of it is due to the fact that there were a lot more projects that were favored by the left that got caught up in the permitting onslaught. They now recognize that there's a problem in a way they did not before.

I won't say that this year is the year that we get it done. But I do think there is a real opportunity for substantive legislative permitting reform in the context of the Surface Transportation Bill, which will be up in Congress next year. By the end of this Congress, there's a chance we could take a good step forward.