A core tenet of my party is that government can deliver for the American people. We have also generally supported the regulations that protect our safety, the environment, and community input. But those regulations have calcified into a huge obstacle to building anything at all. A few months ago, I realized that over the last three years of providing Congressionally Directing Spending to my district, not a single earmarked transportation or infrastructure project had begun construction. More broadly, as of April 2024, almost 80 percent of IIJA’s available funding nationwide through 2026 had not been spent, a full three years after it was passed by Congress. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is one of our country’s bedrock environmental laws, but it often imposes time-burning burdensome process. Each federal agency, including sub-agencies, has adopted its own NEPA procedures, resulting in duplicative environmental reviews across multiple agencies. The IIJA addressed this issue by implementing the One Federal Decision policy, but this process is still rarely followed. Permitting reform is also gaining bipartisan momentum in Congress, particularly for energy projects and transmission lines.
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