The US Senate left town on Saturday for a five-week summer break without finishing its work on a bipartisan infrastructure permitting bill, complicating the path to enacting the legislation this year.
Getting the bill done before the August recess was the "best chance" for it to become law, Senate Environment Committee chairman Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia) said in June. But on 8 August, the Senate recessed after voting 90-6 for a funding bill that would avoid a shutdown in seven weeks. Senate negotiators have yet to release any text of the permitting bill, and they only have three weeks in session before the midterm elections on 3 November.
Oil and renewable industry officials see an increasing likelihood that any votes on the permitting bill will not take place until after the midterms. If Democrats win control of either chamber, Republicans see slim chances to pass a permitting bill in the lame duck session or the next two years because of friction between Democrats and President Donald Trump.
"It's going to be almost a dead issue from my perspective, in terms of thinking that the House is going to be able to do something constructive if the House flips," US senator Alan Armstrong (R-Oklahoma) said on 29 July.
Congressional negotiators say they are not giving up on permitting, although they are floating the idea of narrowing the bill's scope to focus on issues with bipartisan agreement. Timing will not be an issue if the final bill has broad enough support among Republicans and Democrats, Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Martin Heinrich (D-New Mexico) said in a podcast interview POLITICO published on 3 August. He attributed delays with the bill to the Trump administration rather than his Republicans counterparts.
"It has been the White House that consistently throws up new challenges, and that just makes it harder for us to sell any product to our caucuses," Heinrich said.
Democrats have spent the last year warning the White House that taking further steps to undermine wind and solar development would make it more difficult for them to support a permitting bill, with little apparent success. The administration halted work on offshore wind projects that were under construction until they were blocked in court. The US Department of Defense was recently ordered by a federal judge to restart reviews of wind farms that had been frozen for a year. A recent proposal by the administration to weaken enforcement of the National Historic Preservation Act was "not helpful" to permitting legislation, Heinrich said.
Republicans who are pushing for a permitting deal say it would be short-sighted of Democrats to scuttle a deal just because the administration has been blocking some projects. Armstrong, who was the executive chairman of pipeline company Williams before being appointed to the Senate, said a permitting bill would address the issue Democrats want to resolve.
"Our industry's had its toes stepped on plenty of times," Armstrong said on 29 July. "I totally understand the emotions of that, but this is about legislating in a way that we don't have to tolerate that."
The White House appears poised to unilaterally make changes to permitting policy even absent any legislation, although oil and renewable industry officials say those changes would not offer the certainty they need to invest billions of dollars in new infrastructure. As early as this month, the administration plans to finalize changes to make it harder for states to block "section 401" water permits for pipelines and to propose new rules for offshore wind permitting, according to a regulatory dashboard.
