"Permitting Jobs and Business Investment: Streamlining the Federal Permitting Process” lays out a roadmap to streamline the federal permitting process and unleash the jobs- and growth-creating potential of major, ready-to-build U.S. industrial projects.

The report finds that the federal permitting process is burdensome, slow and inconsistent. Too many permits are required from too many agencies, often with overlapping jurisdictions. Applicants typically must negotiate a complex maze of review by multiple federal agencies with no real deadlines and no single federal entity responsible for managing the process. Several federal statutes allow citizen suits to be filed up to six years after a permit is issued. 

The report recommends that Congress should:

• Provide adequate resources for permit processing;
• Require that permits be issued in 180 days; and
• Put in place a more stringent process for judicial review of federal permits, including imposing a 180-day statute of limitations, clarifying that challengers must satisfy bond requirements as is the case with other federal suits and establishing that permanent injunctions are impermissible in all but the most extraordinary of circumstances.

The report recommends that the Administration should:

• Designate a single agency to have primary responsibility for each project;
• Ensure that permits are processed by multiple agencies in parallel on an expedited basis;
• Catalog the inventory and status of pending permits, by agency and program;
• Work with business to develop best practices for prompt and timely evaluations; and
• Create a public online permit tracking dashboard that would track the dates and status of all federal permit applications across agencies.

• Avenal Power Center, LLC waited more than three years for EPA to issue an air emissions permit – and then only after a federal court ordered EPA to issue the permit – to build an efficient, state-of-the-art, natural gas-powered electric generating plant in Central California. 
• EPA revoked a permit for the Spruce No. 1 surface coal mine in Logan County, WV, almost three years after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued the permit (in consultation with EPA) and after mining operations had already begun.
• It took 10 years to issue a permit for the $2.5 billion Cape Wind renewable energy project off the shore of Massachusetts. 
• Shell waited five years – idling thousands of U.S. jobs and more than $2 billion worth of drilling leases – to obtain an air emissions permit for offshore operations near the coast of Alaska. While Shell expects to receive all needed permits in 2012, it has yet to drill a single well.

Expedited Federal Permitting Will Help Put America Back to Work Today.