A Full Court Press for Permitting Reform in 2025

Permitting reform became one of the few cross-cutting infrastructure buzzwords in 2025. It became a shared obsession for broadband builders seeking BEAD funding and for energy developers racing to add generation, transmission, and data-center-linked capacity. 

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Broadband and energy deployment are both critical to national digital infrastructure investment. Both can be slowed by the same environmental, historic, and right-of-way bottlenecks that haunt power lines and pipelines.

In the broadband world, 2025 was less about a single breakthrough than a layered push across the White House, Congress, the Federal Communications Commission and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration of the Commerce Department — with most of the momentum aimed at eliminating repetitive review for routine work and setting clearer timelines for the rest.

The White House seeks streamlining

President Donald Trump moved early to frame permitting speed around infrastructure, signing an executive order aimed at reducing permitting delays across infrastructure categories, including broadband and energy, while pushing agencies toward broader use of “generalized permits” and “permit-by-rule” mechanisms.

That executive action built on groundwork NTIA had already laid in 2024.

The agency adopted 36 categorical exclusions for BEAD-funded projects under the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) — 30 new ones and six drawn from FirstNet — enabling many common broadband construction activities to bypass full environmental assessments and impact statements. These exclusions reflected a broader federal judgment that most broadband construction carries comparatively low environmental risk, even if it can trigger complex process requirements.

Trump expanded the technology side of his permitting agenda with a presidential memorandum issued April 15, 2025, directing agencies to modernize environmental review systems and move away from paper-based processes. The memorandum required the Council on Environmental Quality to stand up a Permitting Innovation Center and to develop a government-wide technology plan.

CEQ met that mandate on May 30, releasing the Permitting Technology Action Plan. The plan outlines standards for digitized applications, interoperability between agencies, improved case management, and more transparent scheduling for applicants. It explicitly ties modernization to faster infrastructure review times across sectors, not just energy.

Years-long effort at streamlining permits

The NTIA and Jill Springer, senior advisor for permitting at NTIA, have been making a years-long effort to stand up a system for processing federal broadband permits as quickly as possible, an effort to avoid bottlenecks when BEAD funding starts flowing.

As far as other federal land management agencies, Springer said NTIA had agreements with a number of them that allow NTIA to be the main supervisor of a project. With the help of the Permitting Council, the federal agency tasked with streamlining permitting processes, Springer said in a Broadband Breakfast Live Online event that NTIA was able to “direct resources that will help the broadband permitting reviews, to make sure that there’s adequate staff and that they run smoothly.”

On the NTIA’s side, the agency has made a series of tools and policy changes aimed at making the process as painless as possible. 

The agency pushed for an expanded set of projects that won’t require an in-depth historical review and additional exclusions from the full environmental review process for program participants. Those are largely built on past reviews that found federally funded broadband projects have minimal environmental impact in many situations.

Congress tests the limits of preemption and shot clocks

On Capitol Hill, the most ambitious broadband-focused effort came from House Republicans, who rolled out (and then advanced pieces of) a 29-bill package designed to impose timeline discipline on permitting authorities and narrow the scope of some reviews. The package proposed 90-day shot clocks for infrastructure modifications and 150-day clocks for new construction, with some applications deemed approved if deadlines were missed.

The debate sharpened around the risk that broad shot clocks could override local and tribal processes. Democrats argued that a race to accelerate could become a backdoor roll-back of environmental and historic preservation protections.

The House Communications and Technology Subcommittee advanced seven measures to the full Energy and Commerce Committee on Nov. 18. Those bills included provisions to speed federal broadband reviews on public lands, direct agencies to build online permitting systems, standardize fee structures, and address railroad crossings through the Broadband and Telecommunications RAIL Act.

The package included the Broadband and Telecommunications RAIL Act, sponsored by Rep. John Joyce, R-Pa., which aimed to speed approvals where public rights-of-way intersect with private railroads. 

The full committee then cleared the seven-bill package on Dec. 3. The most contentious element remained the broader shot-clock approach to state and local reviews.

At the same time, state officials reinforced the argument that federal review rules could slow BEAD compared with earlier programs. Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar, in a Feb. 6 letter and subsequent congressional attention, argued NEPA and National Historic Preservation Act obligations had created a level of friction not present in ARPA and Capital Projects Fund builds. These requirements are seen by many providers as redundant for routine broadband construction.

NTIA tries to automate federal review

While Congress fought about preemption, NTIA focused on execution.

A key centerpiece was the Environmental Screening and Permitting Tracking Tool, which the agency positioned as a way to standardize and accelerate NEPA screening for BEAD subgrants. In late September, NTIA Administrator Arielle Roth said the tool could help up to 95 percent of BEAD projects bypass traditional environmental reviews by efficiently matching projects to categorical exclusions.

In a Sept. 30 permitting webinar, NTIA outlined its post-award process and framed the target as two-week federal approvals for roughly 90 percent of BEAD deployments — a dramatic compression compared with historical timelines measured in months.

The agency has also emphasized that even with broadened NEPA exclusions, other requirements remain. Section 106 historic preservation reviews, as well as endangered species and tribal consultation obligations, can still complicate schedules.

In other words, NTIA’s strategy is not to eliminate all reviews, but to push the highest-volume, lowest-risk portion of the pipeline into standardized workflows, leaving the truly complex cases in the slower lane.

FCC joins the permitting fight

The FCC is not the lead environmental agency for BEAD, but in 2025 it signaled a willingness to test federal preemption authority in the name of deployment speed.

On Sept. 11, commissioners prepared to open dockets exploring whether state and local barriers are unlawfully impeding wireless buildouts, and whether the agency should establish a faster dispute-resolution path for siting conflicts.

Later in September, the FCC adopted a Notice of Inquiry on wireline barriers under Section 253 of the Communications Act, asking for data on delays, fees, and in-kind requirements that might “materially inhibit” deployment. The signal to industry was that the FCC might be willing to bring the logic of its wireless siting framework into the wireline world.

Local governments responded with force. By mid-November, the FCC’s wireless siting proposal had attracted more than 200 comments opposing changes that cities said would erode local zoning authority. Wireline permitting drew its own backlash, including pointed testimony at a Nov. 17 workshop where municipal officials warned that rigid national timelines could ignore legitimate engineering and public-works coordination realities.

Industry urges intervention, citing real-world ‘horror stories’

Carriers and business groups came to the FCC with the argument that the costs of delay are no longer theoretical.

USTelecom, in an August letter highlighting uneven local processes, said providers in New York faced approval timelines ranging from eight weeks to six months, and cited examples of deployments abandoned because municipalities simply failed to respond.

In November, USTelecom pressed the FCC to impose national shot clocks of 60 days for standard projects and up to 90 days for complex or multi-jurisdictional builds. ACA Connects similarly signaled interest in stronger federal action not only on affordability mandates but also on local permitting rules.

Railroad crossings emerged as a particularly vivid case study. The RAIL Act, which would require railroads to respond within 90 days and coordinate construction within 180 days, became the most tangible example of bipartisan overlap between “local control” advocates and “speed the build” proponents. 

States try to solve the ‘information problem’

Even as federal agencies debated preemption, states demonstrated that some permitting delays are less about policy disputes and more about the basic challenge of navigating hundreds of local jurisdictions.

Arizona’s launch of an interactive Broadband Permit Finder in November offered a simple but powerful model: centralize the rules, contacts and requirements so providers can plan builds without losing months just figuring out who controls what. The state framed the tool as the first of its kind nationally.

This approach doesn’t resolve fee disputes or legal authority fights, but it addresses what several state officials say is the quiet culprit in many delays: Fragmented, hard-to-find local information.