GOP Chairman Behind House Permitting Bill Warns ‘We’re Running Out Of Time’ As Senate Vote Likely Slips To November

The House Republican behind Congress’ permitting overhaul warned lawmakers are running out of time as Senate negotiators signaled a vote will likely wait until November.

Republican Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, said “we’re running out of time” to pass permitting reform on the Republican Study Committee’s “Right to the Point” podcast, according to a transcript provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday. Democratic Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse — a lead upper chamber negotiator — said that day that a vote on the Senate’s package will likely wait until the lame-duck session after the November midterm elections.

“I commend [Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore] Capito. She’s working really hard,” Westerman said of the chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. “She’s working with Sen. Whitehouse on a bipartisan version in the Senate.”

“All these committees are working with bipartisan solutions that hopefully will get put in a good permitting bill, and hopefully it will happen sooner than later because we’re running out of time,” Westerman added.

Whitehouse told reporters that negotiators are “over the hump on the deal-break issues” and that text “should be finalized within a matter of days, maybe even hours,” Roll Call reported Thursday.

Capito told WV MetroNews that “we have a deal, we have a negotiated bill,” but said Democrats had “walked away” and wanted to wait for the lame-duck session, which she called “so unpredictable in terms of what you can really accomplish.”

The House passed Westerman’s Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act 221-196 on Dec. 18, 2025, five months after he introduced it with Democratic Maine Rep. Jared Golden. The bill would set deadlines for reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, a 1970 law that requires federal agencies to study the environmental effects of major projects, and would limit lawsuits against approved projects, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The bill has 14 cosponsors, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and has sat with the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee since Dec. 18, 2025, according to Congress.gov. It would need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate.

“We want to go through the process, but we want to make the process happen more quickly. And we want to take away the ability for activists to shut down projects,” Westerman said on the podcast.