Community, labor, climate and environmental-justice groups oppose bill
Former officials from the Trump, Biden and Obama administrations warned in a letter scheduled to be sent Tuesday that the United States could lose a technological and industrial race with China unless it adopted a sweeping energy-permitting bill. The officials said China has made energy infrastructure central to its industrial strategy, while the United States faces lengthy delays building the transmission lines and energy components needed to power semiconductors, critical minerals and artificial intelligence.
Arnab Datta, director of policy implementation at the Institute for Progress, a Washington, D.C. think tank, organized the letter. The letter was addressed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.).
The signatories include former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who served in the first Trump administration; former Biden-era Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen; former Federal Reserve governor Stephen Miran, who was appointed by President Trump; Jake Sullivan, who served as President Biden’s national security adviser; and Jason Furman, who served as President Obama’s chief economist from 2013 to 2017.
“While the United States retains enormous advantages in technology, capital markets, attracting the world’s talent, entrepreneurship, and natural resources, those advantages matter less if a company cannot build a factory quickly enough to reach market or if the infrastructure required to power it takes five, ten, or fifteen years to plan and complete,” the letter said. The letter also says China has built more high-voltage transmission in the past 15 years than the entirety of U.S. history.
Miran said in an interview: “If we don’t have abundant cheap energy it’s just too expensive to manufacture here, and we’d be ceding a massive advantage to our competitors and adversaries,” including China.
Sullivan said China would continue building its clean-energy infrastructure and advanced industrial capacity whether or not Congress passes the energy bill. “They’re not waiting around,” he said. “In the meantime, if Congress fails to pass permitting reform this year, America’s investments in the industries of the future will remain mired in delays, litigation, and uncertainty.”
The Senate last month announced legislation to speed the federal permitting process, which has long drawn complaints from energy developers. The proposal includes an overhaul of environmental rules, changes aimed at strengthening the electric grid and a requirement that data centers pay all associated transmission costs.
Trade groups for the oil-and-gas and renewable-energy industries praised the bill, saying it would boost energy projects. Meg O’Neill, chief executive of British oil company BP, which operates in the U.S., said the legislation would help unlock the full potential of American energy and strengthen domestic energy security.
Oil-and-gas companies have grappled with long delays securing permits to erect new pipelines to ship their products to markets, along with yearslong lawsuits from environmental groups. Those companies threw their support behind Trump partly in the hope that a GOP-led Congress would help cut red tape. Developers of wind and solar projects have faced mounting opposition.
A coalition of 185 community, labor, climate and environmental-justice organizations urged congressional leaders last week to reject the bill, saying it would gut environmental safeguards and provide a golden ticket to huge AI data centers and tech billionaires. “We can’t let this trillion-dollar industry keep ravaging neighborhoods and making Americans pay more for their electricity,” said Camden Weber, senior climate and energy policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity.
Some former officials advocating swift adoption said the bill would be good for climate change because it supports clean-energy projects. Furman said the United States has long dealt with the need to send power from renewable-energy sites in the Midwest to places in the East that need it. “We wanted to throw a lot of money at the problem, and as we researched it, we realized that the problem was permitting, not money,” he said in an interview.
The November midterm election is shaping the fight over the bill’s future as the political map shifts in Democrats’ favor. Some unspecified lawmakers want to delay any legislation until a new Congress is in session. Rep. Jared Huffman (D., Calif.), ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, argued instead that Congress should keep working during the lame-duck session. After the bill was introduced, he said: “folding our hand now or in the lame duck makes no sense when we can keep working on this.”