By Jeff Kupfer, President of ConservAmerica
Permitting reform has been on Washington’s to-do list for the better part of two decades. Every attempt has ended the same way: broad agreement that the system is broken, followed by a stalemate over how to fix it. The last serious effort, a 2024 bill from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso, never even reached the Senate floor.
That may soon change. On September 30, the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Environment and Public Works Committee, Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich, introduced the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA). The 417-page bill is a comprehensive permitting package that deserves to pass.
The case for it is straightforward. Reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law passed more than 50 years ago, now routinely take years, sometimes decades. Environmental documents are written to survive lawsuits rather than to inform decisions, and many of those lawsuits can be filed up to six years after a permit is issued. We have seen that the delays don’t discriminate by fuel. They hold up pipelines, solar projects, and transmission lines—and consumers often end up shouldering the cost.
The bill addresses these problems across the board, with firm deadlines for decisions, faster and narrower litigation, and limits on reopening settled questions. The clearest way to see what it does, though, is to look at a single industry: geothermal.
Geothermal is the kind of energy both parties say they want. It is baseload power with low emissions, and it is becoming one of the more innovative energy sources. Developers are adopting drilling techniques that drove the shale revolution. At a federal test site in Utah, for instance, oil-and-gas drilling technology cut the time needed to drill 6,000 feet from about four hundred hours to sixty.
Geothermal can now reach heat sources far beyond the natural hot springs where the industry began, and it is poised for major growth.
Much of that growth is likely to occur on federal lands. According to a new Government Accountability Office report, about two-thirds of America’s geothermal capacity is on federal land, making the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) a key gatekeeper for development. And interest is surging; land nominated for geothermal leasing rose from about 26,000 acres in 2020 to more than a million in 2025.
That makes an effective federal permitting process critical, and right now, it isn’t working very well. GAO found that developers have little visibility into their permits once they’re filed, that BLM has no target timelines for processing them, and that key permitting handbooks have remained in draft since 2022. For an industry where projects can take eight to ten years to go from exploration to commercial operation, that unpredictability is costly.
BAAJA fixes much of this by incorporating a package of bipartisan geothermal bills, most of which have already passed the House. Interior would have to approve or deny geothermal authorizations within 60 days of completing environmental review. Certain low-impact exploration would get the same streamlined treatment already available to oil and gas, avoiding a full NEPA review. BLM would gain a geothermal ombudsman and a permitting task force to resolve disputes. And where the land surface is privately or state-owned, the federal government owns less than half the subsurface, and the state has already issued a permit, developers would no longer need a duplicate federal drilling permit.
Interior would also be required to hold geothermal lease sales every year. BLM adopted that goal administratively last December, but a memo can be rescinded by the next administration; a statute cannot.
Today geothermal enjoys rare goodwill across the aisle. But energy politics shift quickly. Offshore wind once looked like a bipartisan growth industry too, and within a few years fully permitted projects faced stop-work orders and lease suspensions. It is not hard to imagine a future administration souring on geothermal, whether over its drilling methods, its water use, or simply because it becomes a proxy in some unrelated fight.
That is why the bill’s permitting-certainty provisions matter for geothermal as much as for anything else. Once a project is fully permitted, an agency could revoke, suspend, or alter its permits only on narrow grounds: a court order, fraud, a violation of law, the holder’s own request, or a specific and urgent threat to life, property, or national security. The agency, not the developer, would have to prove that exception by clear and convincing evidence. If it acted wrongly, it could owe the developer a share of the money already spent.
The bill also lets developers sue when an administration shows a pattern of improperly denying or delaying an entire category of energy projects. And it sets a one-year deadline for energy permits that require no environmental document, so a project can’t be quietly smothered by inaction.
For a developer weighing a bid on a federal lease, that is the difference between a gamble and an investment. Lenders will be more willing to finance projects when they believe the approvals are durable. The proposed geothermal provisions will make it faster to get to yes. And the certainty provisions make sure yes stays yes, no matter who wins the next election.
The Senate is expected to take its first procedural vote on the bill when it returns after the midterms. It should pass the bill, and the House should follow suit. After decades of trying, Congress may not get a better chance.
Jeff Kupfer is the president of ConservAmerica.