Oil Drillers, Solar Companies and Big Labor All Want This Senate Bill to Build Faster

Here’s a bill you’d expect to die in a lame-duck Congress. It rewrites the rules that decide how long it takes to build a pipeline, a power line, a solar farm or a steel mill. It touches the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act. Washington has been arguing about those laws for decades.

Instead, 73 senators voted Monday to take it up. On Wednesday afternoon, the country’s biggest labor federation, the AFL-CIO, endorsed it too. That put the oil industry, the solar industry, the building trades and the Senate’s Republican leadership on the same side of one bill.

It’s called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. The name is a mouthful, so the senators behind it just say BAAJA. Majority Leader John Thune filed cloture on it Wednesday. That’s the step that sets up the votes to end debate. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the bill’s lead Democrat, told Reuters the amendment fights and the vote on final passage should come next week.

Four senators who don’t usually agree

The bill comes from two committees and four people. On the Republican side are Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, and Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee, who chairs Energy and Natural Resources. On the Democratic side are Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

Capito put the problem plainly on the Senate floor Monday. Roads, bridges, energy projects and factories, she said, have been “forced to sit on the sidelines due to endless red tape, duplicative reviews, and regulatory uncertainty.”

She came with numbers. The National Association of Manufacturers says permitting delays cost manufacturers $12.1 billion a year. McKinsey estimates $1.8 trillion in investment is stuck in the federal permitting system right now. In West Virginia alone, she said, that comes to $22.3 billion in sidelined projects.

The vote wasn’t close, and Lee posted the tally within minutes.

A second procedural vote passed Tuesday night, 62-21, according to The Hill.

What changes if it passes

The bill comes in two halves. The first rewrites the environmental review rules, the paperwork and lawsuits that can hold a project up for years before anyone breaks ground. It also gives builders something they’ve wanted for a long time: if a project gets its permit and stays within the law, it keeps the permit. Today a permit can get pulled back into court long after the money is spent.

The second half covers historic preservation rules and the Federal Power Act, the law that governs the electric grid. Tucked inside is something a lot of families will care about more than anything else in the bill. Capito calls it the Ratepayer Protection Act. In her words, it makes data centers “pay their own way instead of American consumers facing increased costs through rising utility bills.”

Power-hungry SI data centers are going up across the country, and the question of who pays for the plants and wires that feed them keeps landing on regular customers. The bill’s answer is the data center, not your electric bill.

Capito said the rules apply to every kind of project, from “coal mines, windmills, gas pipelines, solar farms, and steel mills.” That’s how this bill holds together. Nobody’s favorite energy source gets a special lane, so everybody’s favorite energy source gets built faster.

The White House is on board

The Trump administration has backed the deal, and its economists put a number on it. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates the reforms would add $82 billion to $164 billion in economic output every year. Capito said the council expects real wages to rise and electricity bills to fall for the average household.

That gives President Trump’s team a piece of a big bipartisan win on energy before the new Congress arrives in January. The House has already passed its own permitting bills, the SPEED Act and the PERMIT Act. Whitehouse told Reuters that members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus have assured senators the House will hold a vote on the Senate version.

Mike Sommers, who runs the American Petroleum Institute, called it “a generational opportunity to fundamentally transform a broken permitting system.” Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor who now runs the Solar Energy Industries Association, said it’s “the kind of bipartisan action America needs.” The building trades unions and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce signed on too, and Capito said more than 1,000 groups have sent letters of support.

The fight over landowners

It isn’t unanimous on the right. South Dakota Sen. Mike Rounds was the only Republican to vote no on Monday, and his reason is one a lot of farm-state voters will recognize.

In his full statement, reported by South Dakota Searchlight, Rounds said the bill would send contested power-line siting cases to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission if they aren’t settled within 12 months, “giving a weighted advantage to the developer.” He said South Dakota landowners “deserve to negotiate with stakeholders at the state and local level before federal intervention is required.”

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is working the same seam from inside the process. Reuters reports he has filed amendments to protect farmers and other landowners from having their land taken by eminent domain for transmission lines. Those votes decide how much the bill leans toward the property owner or the project.

The Democratic objections run the other way. A group led by California Sen. Adam Schiff wants to strip out the historic preservation changes, saying they weaken protections for tribal sites. Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet voted no over tribal consultation. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen voted no over offshore wind and the Chesapeake Bay.

Why it’s moving now

Timing is the whole story here. Republicans hold the Senate until January. After that, the Senate changes hands and every committee chair changes with it. Capito and Lee won’t be writing the next version.

Whitehouse is flying back from the climate summit in Turkey for Monday’s vote. A bill with the oil industry, the solar industry and the unions all pulling one direction doesn’t come along often, and this Congress has only weeks left.

For anyone who has watched a highway widening drag on for a decade, or a power line get tied up in court while the bill for it keeps climbing, that’s the stake. Capito summed it up on the floor: “It is time for Congress to act. It is, actually, well past time.”