John,
You do not need us to tell you that Washington looks broken right now. It is so easy to watch the shutdown threats and messaging votes and conclude that nothing serious will ever get done. The country's real problems do not wait for Washington to get its act together, and pressure is growing to address one of America’s most consequential problems: we have forgotten how to build, not because we lack the workers, capital or engineering talent, but because it can take a decade for a permit to put a shovel in the ground.
But a few new and familiar No Labels allies are finally pushing for an ambitious solution.
To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, the Mountain Valley Pipeline – a critical natural gas pipeline to tap into the resources of the Appalachian region – was proposed in 2014 and expected to finish by 2018 at a cost of around $3.5 billion. It finally opened in June 2024 at a cost of nearly $8 billion, after years of litigation and stop-work orders, and it took an act of Congress to get it across the finish line. Resolution Copper in Arizona could supply up to a quarter of America's copper demand to build out our energy and communications infrastructure, but it has been stuck in the permitting process for more than twenty years, with over $2 billion spent and not a single ounce of ore mined. These are not outliers. McKinsey estimates that more than $1 trillion in infrastructure investment sits frozen in the federal permitting pipeline at any given moment.
And while all this work goes unfinished in the U.S., China builds. In the 2020s, China has completed more than 8,000 miles of ultra-high-voltage transmission lines versus only 375 in the United States, and it now processes close to 90 percent of the world's rare earth minerals that are essential for everything from wind turbines to jet engines.
Senator Alan Armstrong of Oklahoma, sworn in only this spring, has made permitting reform his central project, and he is not starting from scratch. His most dogged recent predecessor on this issue was our longtime ally, former Senator Joe Manchin, who, in 2024, moved a bipartisan permitting bill out of committee on a 15-to-4 vote, with backing from both parties. The bill stalled before it reached the floor, but the problem it was meant to solve did not, and Senator Armstrong's just-released American Energy and Mineral Infrastructure Act picks up where Senator Manchin and his Republican co-author Senator John Barrasso left off.
This is one of the few issues where the commonsense majority already agrees. Labor unions want it, manufacturers want it, clean-energy developers who cannot connect their projects to the grid want it. Most of all, Americans worried about rising electricity bills want it. Tell Congress to stop stalling and pass permitting reform this Congress.
