WASHINGTON, DC – Congressmen Dusty Johnson (R-SD-At-Large) and Scott Peters (D-CA-50), bipartisan leaders of the ePermit Act, addressed The Ripon Society and Franklin Center for Global Policy Exchange Monday evening, discussing their legislation to modernize federal permitting through digital coordination.
Johnson opened the discussion by reflecting on the bill's unanimous passage in the U.S. House of Representatives, emphasizing the need for comprehensive permitting reform.
“The ePermit Act is just a piece of the puzzle,” Johnson said. “Permitting in this country is broken. I know we're trying to do about a hundred different things. None of them are too much. We should get them all done, and I'm looking forward to further ideas.”
Peters, the Democratic lead on the legislation, highlighted the bill's potential impact.
“This is a really important moment. We have an opportunity to do some major legislation on permitting reform that could really, really help the country. I'm very happy that it's on the way to passage. It just makes sense for integrating work within the federal government in a digital way but also providing better ways for the public to engage more efficiently on some of these issues.”
The ePermit Act will establish a framework for federal agencies to implement a unified digital permitting system and portal, addressing root causes of project delays: reliance on lengthy paper documents, limited public accessibility and transparency that often lead to conflicts and litigation, and outdated technologies for interagency review and coordination.
Later on, the pair of lawmakers were asked about legislators' ability to work across the aisle on major issues, and Johnson acknowledged recent challenges to bipartisan cooperation.
“We have a tendency to have these blow ups; the blow ups dramatically reduce the sense of bipartisanship,” the South Dakotan said. “We need to have, honestly, 12 months of no dumpster fires before you're really going to have a sense of bipartisanship on the floor.”
Peters noted that major legislation often becomes a political target, underscoring the need for bipartisan cooperation.
“If we have both sides invested in something, then we get a good result. It's going to be stable over time, and we'll get out of this habit we have of doing things with one party at a time,” Peters said. “I'm not an engineer or a mathematician, but 218 votes, 60 votes, and 1 vote – you need both parties. I came here to try to help solve problems for my country, and you have to do that in a bipartisan way. So that's why I'm in the bipartisan lane with people like Dusty, and there’s not a lot of traffic in my lane, but that's the right place to be.”
The lawmakers were also asked about data centers and energy generation needs. Johnson, who serves on the Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure, noted the economic opportunity.
“North Dakota has seen their electric rates go down with a large influx of data centers, in part because it was able to use some excess capacity,” Johnson said. “Clearly, we need major new investments in generation and transmission. The last major round of base load generation was in the seventies and much of it in the sixties prior to that. So, we are going to need a new round of generation anyway. I would love to have not just citizen rate payers pay for all those investments but split that cost also with data centers. The data centers that I've talked to are absolutely willing to pay their fair share and then some.”
Peters, who serves on the Energy & Commerce Committee, warned against ideological approaches to energy policy.
“Last year the United States installed 60 gigawatts of new generation. In China, they did 90 of coal, they did 80 of wind, and they did 227 gigawatts of solar,” Peters said. “I'm concerned about the Trump administration's position on wind and solar for a lot of reasons. I think we cut out a lot of projects at the knees that were underway. And I think we're going to deprive ourselves of a lot of the power that we need. We have to get out of this way of ideologically picking an energy source.”
Johnson, who also serves on the Select Committee on China, emphasized the competitive stakes.
“We are in a global race in a lot of ways with Chinese Communist Party. Every three years China adds as much capacity generation as we have in this country. They're running laps around us and we better get our act together.”
To view the remarks of Johnson and Peters in front of The Ripon Society and Franklin Center, please click the link below:
