North Dakota's Fedorchak Wants to Give Senate a Menu For Permitting Changes
Providing the Senate with a variety of permitting reform packages may lead to a consolidation of ideas with bipartisan support, she said.
WASHINGTON, Feb 6, 2025 – At her INCOMPAS Policy Summit appearance on Thursday, Rep. Julie Fedorchak R-N.D. said that she senses that there’s desire and urgency to pass permitting reform on both sides of the aisle in an effort to speed up the process of infrastructure development.
As a result, the House has passed several bills such such as the PERMIT Act, which amends the Clean Water Act by redefining navigable waters in an effort to speed up permitting timelines for infrastructure project.
And it's passed the SPEED Act which revises provisions in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to limit the number of actions that would require an environmental review, often cited as main driver of delays for infrastructure projects.
“We can shove just about anything through [the House], even with one vote: We can get it done,” Fedorchak said. “But, the Senate still definitely has to work in a bipartisan nature”
Fedorchak said that another bill, the RAIL Act, which has received bipartisan support in the House, has a better chance of passage in the Senate.
As a result, she's hopeful that other bills currently making their way through the Energy and Commerce Committee will find their way out of the House soon.
The Senate will have a “menu of options to choose from,” she said, noting that combining some of these ideas may be pulled into one larger package of reforms to garner the most bipartisan consensus.
