{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://scalise.house.gov/press-releases/Scalise-Westerman-The-SPEED-Act-Helping-America-Build-Again", "Scalise, Westerman: The SPEED Act: Helping America Build Again", "2025-12-18", "2025", "2025-12", "Republican", "House", "LA", "Steve Scalise", "S001176", "scalise.house.gov", "scalise", "https://scalise.house.gov/media/press-releases", "scraper", "WASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014Today, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise and House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Bruce Westerman published an op-ed in the Washington Times highlighting the importance of the SPEED Act, legislation that will simplify and streamline America\u2019s overly burdensome permitting process. The legislation will allow America to start building again, which will create new jobs, reduce costs, and unleash American energy. Read the full op-ed below or here.\n\nThe SPEED Act: Helping America build again\n\nThe economy today faces a large but, thankfully, simple problem. Our demand for energy is rising faster than our ability to generate it. The solution is also simple: build more infrastructure \u2014 more power plants, more roads, and pipelines \u2014 so we can produce more energy.\n\nPresident Donald Trump\u2019s administration has made it clear that energy dominance is a priority. The private sector is ready to invest billions in energy abundance, and workers are ready to break ground on next-generation infrastructure. Unfortunately, for decades now, shovel-ready projects across the country have been routinely stalled and even strangled by our antiquated federal permitting system.\n\nAs AI data centers and reshored manufacturing drive demand higher, Congress has to decide whether the next decade brings the United States an energy crisis or global energy dominance. Permitting reform \u2014 specifically the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act \u2014 is a generational opportunity to deliver higher wages and real affordability for working families.\n\nAt the heart of permitting dysfunction today is the National Environmental Policy Act. Passed in 1969, NEPA used to require federal agencies to consider the environmental impact of any new government construction project. But five decades of bureaucratic mission creep and agenda-driven lawsuits have twisted the original, sensible law into a black hole of costly red tape.\n\nFor construction workers to law professors to small business owners, the very word \u201cNEPA\u201d is today more synonymous with waste and abuse than environmental protection. Consider that the average NEPA Environmental Impact Statement from 2013 to 2018 totaled 575 pages and took nearly five years to complete. A quarter of them took six years or more. These delays cost the economy hundreds of billions of dollars.\n\nAnd even when reviews do get completed, approved projects face a gauntlet of expensive, time-consuming lawsuits. NEPA is the nation\u2019s most litigated and frivolously litigated environmental statute. According to research by the Breakthrough Institute, it takes an average of more than four years to resolve legal challenges after publication of NEPA environmental review documents. And where do these lawsuits come from? Ten extremist environmentalist groups are responsible for 35% of all NEPA lawsuits.\n\nThe scrapped Atlantic Coast Pipeline is a textbook case. It was a 600-mile, $8 billion project, initially approved in 2015 to deliver affordable natural gas from West Virginia to North Carolina. By the time the project was abandoned in 2020, NEPA had delayed it 894 days, and litigation another 570 days. Billions of dollars\u2019 worth of affordable and reliable energy for one of the fastest-growing regions of the country was lost. And all the jobs, economic development, and tax revenue that went with it disappeared in a tsunami of legal fees and broken promises.\n\nThese aren\u2019t failures of planning or engineering. They are failures of policy. And in 2025, the federal government\u2019s tolerance for NEPA\u2019s red tape is becoming existential. If the U.S. cannot build energy and mineral infrastructure, China will surpass us in AI technology \u2014 for both civilian and military applications. That would have disastrous economic and strategic consequences for America and our allies. If, due to our policy failures, we cede global leadership to China, America would become a less safe, less affordable, and less free country.\n\nA generation from now, we cannot tell our children that a heavily abused permitting process contributed to losing the AI arms race. If Congress passes the SPEED Act, we won\u2019t have to.\n\nThe bill, scheduled for a vote in the House of Representatives this week, fixes several of NEPA\u2019s systemic problems by restoring the law to its original purpose: a procedural review for proposed projects.\n\nThe SPEED Act would restrict NEPA lawsuits to parties actually affected by a project and establish reasonable filing deadlines.\n\nIt would codify key elements of the Supreme Court\u2019s Seven County decision, clarifying judicial review in NEPA cases. It would align judicial remedies with the fact that NEPA is, after all, a procedural statute, not a progress impediment.\n\nFinally, the SPEED Act would reaffirm the scope of NEPA reviews as they were initially intended.\n\nThe SPEED Act would establish clear rules and a level playing field for federal projects across all agencies and industries. It enjoys bipartisan sponsorship in the House and support from over 300 NEPA-adjacent industries and organizations.\n\nNEPA was originally written to facilitate thoughtful growth, not reckless obstruction. The SPEED Act restores its proper function and will finally empower the people to build. The challenges we face demand that we act. It\u2019s time to pass the SPEED Act and protect America\u2019s future.", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T20:09:11Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://scalise.house.gov/press-releases/Scalise-Westerman-The-SPEED-Act-Helping-America-Build-Again"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9016469120979309, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}