Westerman warns of short timeline on permitting reform

Key Takeaways

The SPEED Act is more than just an acronym for the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act. It’s both inspirational —for the acceleration it can offer infrastructure and energy projects — and  aspirational, because the time for it to pass the Senate is running short. 

Sponsor Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, tried to express that urgency.

“March tells me that it’s a fun time for basketball, but it’s getting late into the year during a midterm election year when we can get meaningful legislation passed,” he told the General Session audience Feb. 23. 

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Federal Permitting Reform: What County Leaders Need to Know

The SPEED Act

The SPEED Act, which passed the House in December 2025 on a bipartisan vote, would limit the scope and scale of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews, prevent the federal government from rescinding permits and make counties cooperating agencies for NEPA reviews.

“This bill… has a great chance to get over the finish line, but it’s going to require efforts from folks like you from all over the country, meeting with your senators and telling them how critical this is to the success of your ability to govern in your individual counties,” Westerman said. “I hope you will do that. I know you’ve been doing it, but I promise you can’t do it enough and don’t underestimate how important that is to go through … your senators.”

He noted that permitting delays affect projects ranging from energy development, resource extraction, infrastructure construction, infrastructure upgrades and more, an equal-opportunity complication for counties ranging from rural to urban. 

Westerman also hopes to reform the Endangered Species Act, which he said excels at preventing species extinction but fails at advancing their recovery and moving them off the Endangered Species list. That’s a result, he said, of the act’s limited focus on addressing federal land.

“You can’t fix habitat if you’re only focusing on less than one-third of the land,” he said. “It’s important that we work with private individuals, with county governments, with the federal government of the state, to try and get everybody on the same page of how we actually make the Endangered Species Act work.” 

He suggested incentives to motivate private industries and organizations to work to recover species. 

But Westerman, who worked as a private forester before running for office, said the lack of active forest management threatens habitats.

“We do things in this country in the name of environmental stewardship, that in the end creates a worse environment, for the creatures we’re trying to protect and what they had going forward,” he said. “The forest is a dynamic living organism that’s just going to grow and build a growing space until there’s no more growing space, and trees compete for light, nutrients and water. And when there’s not enough of that, they’re competing with each other. They get brittle, they become subject to insects and disease attack, which kills the trees, and then they’re subject to catastrophic wildfire.”

Westerman argued that a healthy environment and a healthy economy were not mutually exclusive.

“I believe that they’re dependent upon one another,” he said. “If you travel around the world and you look at the most economically prosperous countries, you’re probably going to see the most environmentally conscious countries. You’re going to see a country where people have an economy where they can afford to take care of the environment in a better way.”