In 2025, The American Society for Civil Engineers gave the United States a C on its annual infrastructure report card, while nine out of 18 categories were graded in the D range, including roads, wastewater, and energy infrastructure. There is widespread agreement that these systems must be improved, and the public remains open to increased infrastructure spending. But why is improving the grade such a challenge?
The obstacle is not public perception, but a permitting process that delays, complicates, and prevents projects that modernize America’s infrastructure. Before things like highways or wind farms are built, a developer must complete an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The median EIS takes 2.2 years, while some even go beyond 10 years.
There’s been no shortage of legislative attempts to bring these times down and make permitting more efficient. Congress tried to fix this by introducing the Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) in 2023. The FRA put a two-year deadline on EIS reviews and limited documents to 150 pages. The SPEED Act passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025, and Executive Order 14154 asked agencies to be faster with energy reviews.
Despite these measures, data shows that many projects still remain behind schedule. Data from the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in 2025 shows that median time dropped from 3 years in 2020 to 2.2 years in 2024, a modest improvement overshadowed by the fact that 61 percent of reviews still miss the deadline and that the downward trend started two decades before the FRA. Furthermore, attorneys at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission found that the FRA gives agencies more regulations but no new resources or staff, and they are expected to do more with the same resources. Perhaps most importantly, they also found an “appendix loophole” in permitting regulations. Since the 150-page limit does not apply to appendix pages, agencies often move content there and the final document is the same length.
Marc Levitt at the Breakthrough Institute called the FRA’s limits “cosmetic.” He also argues that agencies are working with the same resources and old systems, none of which will be changed by deadlines. The CEQ’s E-NEPA report also agrees with the fact that agencies need digital tools. All the attempts to make the permitting system more efficient have been focused too narrowly on imposing time limits and deadlines, while ignoring other important factors like labor and outdated systems.
Additional research by OPEF examined the CEQ’s 2025 EIS Timeline Database, which has 1,903 EIS records from 2010 to 2024. Through regression analyses, OPEF tested whether the FRA’s deadline actually affected completion times. The raw before-and-after made the law appear effective, as post FRA EISs averaged 13.5 months compared to 49 months before. However, after controlling for agencies and what year the project started, this dropped to an 11 percent reduction and was not statistically significant. Most of the improvement was already happening before the law passed.
Through a separate difference-in-differences model, slow and fast agencies can be compared, revealing that slow agencies marginally sped up, but the result was also not statistically significant. The biggest problem is that only 16 EISs in the data were initiated after June 2023, and they were all faster ones. The slow ones that the law was supposed to impact were not completed until after the data was published or even still ongoing.
The longstanding issue is bigger than how fast the agencies work, it is about how they work. Environmental reviews involve agencies, consultants, project sponsors, subject-matter experts, and legal reviewers working across long timelines and complicated administrative records. When documentation is fragmented and difficult to trace, delays can arise not only from disagreement but from the administrative burden of formal documentation and review.
The permitting debate should not be focused exclusively on statutory deadlines. Deadlines create pressure to move faster, but agencies and developers need the operational capacity to meet them. Digital NEPA workflow tools, including platforms being developed by OPEF, point towards a new response. Systems that make environmental review more transparent, auditable, and easier to manage could impact review timelines more effectively than laws directing agencies to simply move faster.
Permitting reform is broadly popular, long overdue, and critically important. The next phase of reform should focus not only on making agencies move faster, but on giving all stakeholders the tools, staffing, and systems they need to do so.
Guest Post Written by Aqib Ali, Marketing and Policy Research at OPEF
The Alliance for Innovation and Infrastructure (Aii) is an independent, national research and educational organization working to advance innovation across industry and public policy. The only nationwide public policy think tank dedicated to infrastructure, Aii explores the intersection of economics, law, and public policy in the areas of climate, damage prevention, eminent domain, energy, infrastructure, innovation, technology, and transportation.