Recently, four senators who rarely share a podium introduced the most serious permitting reform effort in a generation. Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee and Democrats Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, the chairs and ranking members of the Senate’s two energy and environmental committees, unveiled the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act.
There is a lot to like. The bill sets deadlines for environmental reviews, shrinks the window to sue over a project to 150 days, speeds up interstate transmission, and requires data centers to pay for the transmission infrastructure needed to serve them. Each of those deserves support.
But the provision that may matter most over the long run has less to do with how quickly a permit is issued than what happens afterward. The bill makes it much harder for an administration to revoke or suspend a permit once it has been issued, except in specified circumstances such as a violation of law or a court order.
That should hardly be controversial. You would think that once the government lawfully approves a project, a company should be able to rely on that decision. But recent history shows otherwise.
Consider the record. Keystone XL was rejected by President Obama in 2015, approved by President Trump in 2017, and killed by President Biden on his first day in office in 2021, after its developer had already invested billions. The Twin Metals copper-nickel project in Minnesota had its federal leases denied renewal under Obama, reinstated and renewed under Trump, and canceled under Biden. In 2023, Biden’s Interior Department canceled seven oil and gas leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that had been issued less than three years earlier, citing legal deficiencies in the original leasing process.
Then the pendulum swung back.
In April 2025, the Trump administration halted Empire Wind off the coast of New York, even though the project had its federal and state permits and was already under construction. In August, it stopped work on Revolution Wind off the coast of Rhode Island, with the project roughly 80% complete. Then, days before Christmas 2025, it suspended work on all five offshore wind farms under construction in federal waters, citing national security concerns. Federal judges subsequently allowed work to resume, but only after construction delays, disrupted operations, and mounting legal costs.
Whatever you think of pipelines, mines, or wind turbines, the pattern should concern you. Each party has learned that a permit issued by the other team may be provisional, and each assumes the next election will hand it the eraser.
The new Senate bill attacks this problem directly. First, it raises the bar for pulling a permit that has already been issued. Second, it bars an administration from systematically delaying or blocking an entire class of energy projects, whether they wind, solar, oil, or gas. Third, it gives developers new legal remedies and cost recovery when the government improperly suspends permits or engages in a pattern of discriminatory permitting decisions.
None of this guarantees approval. Agencies can still say no. Courts can still find a permit unlawful. And the government can still act when a permit holder violates the law or circumstances meet the bill’s exceptions.
What changes is something simpler: A yes, once lawfully given, becomes much harder to turn into a no because political control of Washington changes hands.
That matters because capital is patient only when the rules are stable. Major energy and infrastructure projects take years to build and decades to pay off. Investors price political risk just as they price other risks, and every reversal raises the premium on the next project, regardless of fuel or technology. ConservAmerica documented the consequences of such uncertainty in a recent study of major energy projects, finding that litigation-induced delays and cancellations routinely doubled or tripled project budgets. Higher financing costs ultimately show up in the price of energy, and some projects never get built at all.
Durability is also what keeps the private sector, rather than the White House, at the center of investment decisions. In a functioning market, companies decide what to build based on prices, demand, and established rules. When government approvals can disappear after the next election, political risk becomes a much bigger factor in investment decisions and political influence becomes more valuable than it should be.
That is why this legislation is genuinely bipartisan. Senator Heinrich can see it as protection for wind and solar; Senator Lee can see it as protection for oil and gas. Both are right.
Washington will always change course after elections. That is democracy. But election results should not automatically put previously settled government decisions back on the table.
Presidents of both parties may grumble about giving up that power.
And that is exactly the point.