PPI's Progress Report: Joe Manchin’s right: We need permitting reform

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Progress Report

News, events, and must-read analysis from the Progressive Policy Institute.

Joe Manchin’s right: We need permitting reform

Joe Manchin’s right: We need permitting reform

By Jeremiah Johnson
Policy Director for the Center of New Liberalism
For New York Daily News

In November 2016, Seattle voters approved a plan to expand the city’s light rail transit system. Almost six years later, the project still hasn’t properly begun. Instead, in January 2022 the city’s Sound Transit released a draft of their required Environmental Impact Statement, which ran more than 8,000 pages long. The final version of this EIS won’t be ready until 2023, at which point the project will already have spent hundreds of millions of dollars before a single shovel hits the ground. Current timelines, which might be delayed, call for services on the new lines to be open by 2039.

If a 23-year timeline from voter approval to project completion seems ridiculous to you, you’re not alone. America has a huge problem with not being able to build anything cheaply or quickly. One of the key obstacles is our environmental permitting process. The National Environmental Policy Act is one of America’s foundational environmental laws, but it now requires incredibly long review processes that end up doing more harm than good.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality estimates that an average Environmental Impact Statement under NEPA takes 4.5 years to complete and runs more than 660 pages long. These long reviews are also getting longer over time; average NEPA review times are estimated to be increasing 39 days per year. These delays make it difficult to build anything. They can cost millions of dollars directly, but even more importantly they slow projects down for years and make financing and planning such projects a nightmare.

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TOMORROW: Tune in to learn more about antimicrobial resistant superbugs and the threats they pose

Join us on Wednesday, September 21 at 2:00 p.m. ET to hear from leading experts about the health and economic costs of the crisis, and the policy actions needed now.

RSVP HERE

The puzzle Democrats must solve

By Will Marshall
PPI's President
For The Hill

Democrats’ midterm election prospects are brightening as voters’ attention shifts from high prices to abortion and the Republicans’ subservience to former President Trump and rightwing extremism.

By striking down the constitutional right to abortion, the Supreme Court has galvanized suburban women. According to liberal analyst Ruy Teixeira, Democrats now have a 27-point lead among white, college-educated women in party matchups. The ruling has thrown Republican candidates on the defensive and is spurring higher Democratic registration and turnout.

Damning testimony by former Trump White House officials in the Jan. 6 hearings, plus Trump’s inexplicable refusal to hand over top secret documents he illegally took home after leaving the White House, also seems to be moving independent voters back toward the Democrats.

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ICYMI: The superbugs are coming — oh wait, they’re here.

By Krista Mahr and Daniel Payne

Today, a new report released by the Progressive Policy Institute and shared exclusively with Pulse recommends additional concrete steps the federal government can take to reign in the AMR problem before it spirals further out of control. Here are a few:

Tighten up antibiotic use in livestock. About 80 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. are used in livestock, leading to drug-resistant bugs in the food and water supply. Unlike the EU, the U.S. (and other countries) doesn’t limit or collect data on how farmers can use antibiotics, according to the report. The feds should track that information, improve surveillance for AMR in the food chain and limit the use of “medically important” drugs in animals, the paper says.

Improve testing. Doctors overprescribe antibiotics because it’s cheaper to prescribe a broad-spectrum drug than order and perform an expensive lab test. PPI says policymakers should ensure that more resources are allocated to improving affordable diagnostics that are readily available to doctors.

Create incentives for drugmakers. Policymakers must find a way to encourage new drugs to be developed, given the tough profit environment. The authors suggest offering cash prizes to companies, having government bodies like the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority and the Strategic National Stockpile purchase more drugs for preparedness and creating subscription-model systems in which drugmakers are paid upfront for their product, along the lines of what the PASTEUR Act suggests.

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Mark Your Calendar!

September 21: Superbugs: The Coming Global Crisis to our Public and Economic Health
⮕ RSVP Here

September 27: Digital Decade 2030
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October 20: Women in Policy Alliance: Coffee and Conversation
⮕ RSVP Here

Be sure to keep an eye out for future PPI events!

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RADICALLY PRAGMATIC:

Is American Technological Leadership Under Attack?

The Progressive Policy Institute's Innovation Frontier Project released a comprehensive research deck on the threats facing American innovation. The authors of the deck, innovation experts Ashish Arora and Sharon Belenzon of Duke University, found the United States has lost a substantial amount of corporate research since the 1980s, with only a handful of present-day U.S.-based companies investing in research at a meaningful level.

THE NEOLIBERAL PODCAST:

Saving the World from Catastrophic Weapons ft. Christine Parthemore

Jeremiah welcomes Christine Parthemore to discuss catastrophic risks to humanity from nuclear and biological weapons. How likely is it that nuclear weapons or bioweapons are actually used in the next 50 years? What can be done to minimize those risks? Is technology developing too quickly and exposing us to existential risk?