Federal Permitting Office Launches Streamlining Drive, Immediately Requires 47 Permits to Get Started

WASHINGTON — The Interior Department announced Thursday the launch of its flagship Permit Modernization and Efficiency Acceleration Initiative, a sweeping program designed to cut the federal permitting backlog in half within five years, reduce application processing times from an average of thirty-one months to something a human being might survive waiting for, and restore public confidence in a system that currently enjoys an approval rating roughly equivalent to a DMV located inside another DMV.

The initiative, officials say, is already off to a strong start.

"We are proud to report that as of this morning, we have successfully filed twenty-three of the forty-seven sub-permits required to formally commence the simplification process," said Deputy Assistant Undersecretary for Permit Infrastructure Harmonization Gerald Oates, reading from a binder that appeared to contain nothing but other binders. "The remaining twenty-four applications are progressing through standard review channels, which we expect to complete within the next fourteen to twenty-two months, barring any complications with the environmental review of the review process."

Mr. Oates paused to accept a supplemental form from a junior staffer before continuing.

The Vision

The Permit Modernization and Efficiency Acceleration Initiative — known internally as PMEAI, and externally as "the thing" — was conceived following a 2022 Government Accountability Office report concluding that the federal permitting system had become, in the report's measured language, "a self-perpetuating administrative organism that now exists primarily to generate the paperwork necessary to justify its own continued existence."

The Interior Department responded swiftly, commissioning a task force to study the report, a sub-task force to study the task force, and, eighteen months later, a working group to evaluate whether the sub-task force had been convened with the appropriate level of stakeholder input. The working group ultimately concluded that it had not, recommended a formal consultation period, and was then dissolved pending re-consultation about the consultation framework.

PMEAI is the product of all that effort.

"This is genuinely transformational," said Interior Secretary spokesperson Diane Carruthers at a press briefing held in a conference room that, according to a small laminated sign on the door, was itself awaiting a facilities-use permit renewal. "For too long, Americans seeking to build a small footbridge over a seasonal creek have had to navigate a system designed, apparently, by someone who hated them personally. We are fixing that. We are fixing it with a comprehensive, multi-agency, phased-rollout framework that will, once fully permitted, begin the process of studying how to begin fixing it."

Reporters had several follow-up questions. Ms. Carruthers indicated these would require a media inquiry form, which was available upon request, pending availability.

The Permits Required to Begin Reducing Permits

A review of PMEAI's internal documentation — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that took eleven months and produced forty-two pages of which thirty-nine were blank — reveals the full scope of the initiative's pre-launch requirements.

Before the simplification program can formally begin operations, the Interior Department must obtain:

• A Temporary Office Establishment Permit authorizing the creation of the office that will process permits
• A Permit Processing Equipment Authorization, covering the computers, printers, and filing cabinets the office will use to process permits
• An Environmental Assessment of Administrative Paper Use, required under a 1978 procedural rule that no one has successfully repealed because repealing it requires its own environmental assessment
• A Stakeholder Consultation Commencement Certificate, confirming that all relevant parties have been notified of the intention to consult them about whether consultation is necessary
• And, most notably, a Permit Simplification Framework Pre-Authorization, which is, to be clear, a permit authorizing the department to pursue permits that will authorize the reduction of permits

The last item, sources confirm, is itself subject to a sixty-day public comment period, after which comments will be reviewed, summarized, and filed in a report that will require its own permit to distribute.

"We're aware of how this looks," conceded one Interior Department official who spoke on background because they had not yet received clearance to speak on the record about the process of receiving clearance to speak on the record. "But you have to understand: these requirements exist for reasons. We just don't always know what the reasons are anymore, because the people who knew retired in 2004 and the institutional knowledge was stored in a filing system that was reorganized in 2009 and again in 2017 and is now technically accessible but practically speaking requires a guide."

The Stakeholder Consultation Period

Central to PMEAI's design is an eighteen-month Stakeholder Engagement and Input Harmonization Phase, during which affected parties — including industry groups, environmental organizations, tribal nations, state agencies, and a category of stakeholder described in the program documents only as "relevant others" — will be invited to share feedback on the initiative's proposed approach to simplification.

The consultation period cannot begin, however, until the Stakeholder Consultation Commencement Certificate has been approved. The certificate application, a forty-page document, asks applicants to identify which stakeholders they intend to consult, explain why those stakeholders are relevant, and certify that the list of stakeholders was itself compiled through an appropriate stakeholder consultation process.

When asked how one conducts a stakeholder consultation to produce a list of stakeholders before the consultation period has begun, Deputy Assistant Undersecretary Oates described the question as "a really excellent one" and offered to have someone follow up.

No one has followed up.

Expert Analysis

Dr. Patricia Welles, a public administration scholar at Georgetown University and author of Forms: A Love Story (The Government's, Not Yours), described PMEAI as "a genuinely well-intentioned program operating inside a system that has developed what I can only call a biological immune response to simplification."

"Every time a reform effort enters the permitting ecosystem," Dr. Welles explained, "the system produces antibodies in the form of additional procedural requirements. It's not malicious. It's institutional. The system doesn't know it's doing it. It simply cannot conceive of change that doesn't require documentation of the change, review of the documentation, and a permit for the review."

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that PMEAI, if fully implemented, could reduce average permit processing times by up to 40 percent within a decade, at which point a new administration will likely commission a fresh study of the permitting system and discover it is still, somehow, a problem.

Where Things Stand

As of press time, twenty-three of the forty-seven required pre-launch permits have been approved. Eight are under active review. Eleven are pending additional documentation. Four have been returned for correction. And one — the Permit Processing Equipment Authorization — has been referred to an inter-agency working group for clarification on whether a laser printer constitutes "equipment" under the relevant 1991 regulatory definition.

The Interior Department expects to formally launch the simplification initiative by the third quarter of next year, assuming no further permits are identified as necessary, which officials acknowledge is, historically speaking, not how things tend to go.

"We remain optimistic," said Ms. Carruthers.

The filing cabinet containing that optimism is, sources confirm, awaiting a storage-use permit.