New Research Report: Federal Permitting System is Failing Consumers, Workers, and Communities — Congress Must Act Now
Independent research commissioned by Next American Era finds that permitting delay costs Americans billions each year; NAE calls on Congress to prioritize reform as a top priority
WASHINGTON, DC — September 9, 2026 — Next American Era today released a new independently commissioned research report on the cost of delaying federal energy permitting reform. The report found that a broken, fragmented permitting system is driving up energy costs, holding back billions in economic activity, and leaving workers and communities waiting. This is happening while the infrastructure America urgently needs sits in queue for years.
The report, entitled “The Cost of Delay: Federal Permitting and America's Energy Challenge,” was authored by the Responsible Business Initiative (RBI), a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) policy and research organization, and commissioned by Next American Era.
Click here to read the full white paper. Click here to read the accompanying fact sheet.
NAE is calling on Congress to prioritize permitting negotiations and reform now, before the midterm election calendar makes action impossible.
“America’s out of date and broken energy permitting system is a significant problem that hurts consumers, workers and innovators alike and it is time for Congress to finally address this problem,” said Cheri Bustos, President of Next American Era and former U.S. Congresswoman. “We commissioned this research to take an objective look at the cost of continued inaction and this is a very significant financial burden on American households. It's the family that can’t afford their energy bill, the construction worker waiting on a halted project to get started, and the community still waiting on the jobs and investment a stalled project would have brought who are paying the price. Congress has several bipartisan bills on the table and it’s time for Washington to get to the negotiating table, strike a pro-growth compromise and address this significant problem that’s raising costs on all Americans.”
The release of this report comes as Congress continues to negotiate permitting reform legislation ahead of a narrowing legislative window this fall. Three bipartisan bills – including the SPEED Act, which passed the House in December 2025, the CERTAIN Act, and the FREEDOM Act – are all currently before the Senate with no clear timeline for action.
“Permitting reform is one of the most important and bipartisan infrastructure challenges facing the U.S. But unfortunately, it’s also one that is poorly understood,” said Timothy M. Doyle, Co-Founder and President of the Responsible Business Initiative. “Our research was designed to establish a shared factual foundation that cuts through the ideological noise and focuses on what the tangible evidence actually shows: delay is costing consumers, workers, and communities much more than most people realize.”
Key findings of the white paper include:
America’s energy grid is already strained, and getting worse: Grid congestion cost more than $12 billion in 2024 alone, the fourth consecutive year costs exceeded $10 billion – money that consumers ultimately pay because cheaper power can’t get where it needs to go.
Roughly 8,200 projects representing 2,061 gigawatts of generation and storage are currently waiting in interconnection queues, with a median wait of more than five years from request to commercial operation.
Most projects never get built: Of all the capacity that requested grid interconnection between 2000 and 2020, only 13 percent had reached commercial operation by the end of 2025. Roughly three-quarters had withdrawn from the queue entirely.
Federal review takes too long: Environmental Impact Statements for major projects averaged 4.5 years from notice of intent to record of decision between 2010 and 2018, with roughly a quarter taking more than six years.
Equipment delays compound the problem: Lead times for large power transformers – critical for grid infrastructure – have stretched from roughly one year in 2021 to two years or more by 2024, with some reaching five years.
Transformer prices have risen 60 to 80 percent since 2020, meaning equipment ordered today may not arrive until 2031.
The burden falls hardest on those who can least afford it: Of 6.23 million U.S. households earning under $10,000 annually, 3.97 million reported at least one form of energy insecurity in 2024 – going without food or medicine to pay an energy bill, keeping their home at an unsafe temperature, or being unable to run heating or cooling equipment because of cost.
Workers pay the price too: More than 864,000 construction workers support energy generation, transmission, distribution, and storage.
What that means in practice: When Revolution Wind – an offshore wind project in New England, roughly 80 percent complete – was halted by executive action in August 2025, more than 2,000 workers and two million labor hours stopped with it. Eighteen vessels sat idle under contract, costing the developer an estimated $2 million a day in losses.
When projects stall, these workers lose wages, healthcare eligibility, and apprenticeship hours – the minimum 2,000 hours of on-the-job learning required for a registered apprenticeship can only be earned when the work is there.
As the Laborers' International Union of North America told the Senate: in their industry, permitting uncertainty goes by another name: “unemployment.”
Delay is not ideologically neutral: It slows clean energy and conventional energy alike – transmission lines, renewables, storage, nuclear, gas pipelines, and LNG. Consumers, workers, and communities pay the price regardless of which projects are held up.
Reform keeps failing because it targets the wrong things: The paper’s central finding is that delay has no single cause – not any one agency or statute. It is the accumulation of sequential review, interagency conflict, understaffed agencies, litigation uncertainty, interconnection and equipment backlogs, and administration-to-administration reversals.
A reform package calibrated to one of these obstacles does little about the rest.
Common ground exists – but it’s narrower than the rhetoric suggests: The strongest bipartisan agreement is on governance quality: better interagency coordination, concurrent review, lead-agency accountability, agency staffing and capacity, digital permitting, and more durable decision-making.
The window to act is now: The midterm elections are approaching and the congressional calendar is shrinking. Three bipartisan bills are currently moving in Congress: the SPEED Act (passed the House in December 2025), the CERTAIN Act, and the FREEDOM Act. If Congress can find common ground, permitting reform may still be possible.
The paper is the first in a two-part series. Phase II, to be released later this year, will evaluate specific policy proposals and make recommendations for reform.
Click here to read the full white paper. Click here to read the accompanying fact sheet.
About Next American Era
Next American Era is a national 501(c)(4) organization focused on advancing a pro-growth, pro-consumer, and pro-worker agenda that strengthens communities, fuels innovation, and expands economic opportunity for all Americans. NAE is led by Cheri Bustos, former Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and former U.S. Representative for Illinois’s 17th congressional district.
About the Responsible Business Initiative
The Responsible Business Initiative is a 501(c)(3) organization working to find bipartisan common ground on policy questions where business and investment decisions have become politicized. RBI combines policy, political, and legal analysis to support durable solutions across the political spectrum. “The Cost of Delay” was authored by Timothy M. Doyle and Robert G. Eccles of RBI. RBI retained full editorial independence throughout the research process. The analysis, conclusions, and any errors are those of the authors alone.
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