The Orange County Register: Washington’s energy permitting fast lane is slow
The federal government is America’s largest landowner. For decades, policymakers and experts have assumed that the “quick” way to access resource-rich federal lands works as advertised. New research suggests otherwise.
Developing the vast energy and mineral resources under federal control often means going through the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a notoriously slow federal review process.
But worry not. For small, low-impact projects, the government created a streamlined pathway: categorical exclusions (CXs). In theory, projects that keep the lights on, phones working, and supply chains moving—without posing much environmental risk—get approved faster.
Using CXs to speed critical projects on federal land has become conventional wisdom. Politicians and academics of all stripes champion wider CX use as common-sense permitting reform. The Trump administration’s new CX-first policy is only the latest example.
But that consensus rests on shaky ground. Reformers have expanded access to CXs without confirming they actually work.
Now, research suggests that CXs can be remarkably slow. And sometimes, they are slower than the more intensive reviews they’re supposed to bypass.
If NEPA is a three-lane highway, CXs occupy the fast lane, environmental assessments (EAs) the middle lane, and environmental impact statements (EISs) the slow lane. Unless granted an extension, EAs must be completed within one year and EISs within two.
Speeds on the NEPA highway are not as disconnected from daily life as they may seem. Projects subject to NEPA review produce the electricity and raw materials that eventually make your home, car, and computer possible. When permitting slows, costs can trickle down to consumers.
CXs are supposed to keep that traffic moving. But unlike the middle and slow lanes, they have no deadline. The supposed fast lane can legally run indefinitely. As a result, some reviews have been allowed to drag on.
The study examined 88 CX reviews for geothermal exploration projects. Nearly one in five took over 200 days to gain approval, and nearly one in 12 took more than a year. That means 8 percent of projects in the “fast” lane took longer than any project in the middle lane is generally allowed to take.
One possible explanation is that the longest reviews reflect environmental necessity. Perhaps the projects that took more than a year were unusually large, complicated, or environmentally risky and required more scrutiny.
The data suggest otherwise. Across the 88 CXs studied, neither acreage disturbed nor the number of wells drilled meaningfully predicted review time. Bigger projects did not reliably take longer than tiny ones.
The individual cases tell the same story. Seven CXs completed since 2023 took more than a year. If project scale drove delay, we’d expect them to be unusually large. They were not.
Consider the Dead Camel Temperature Probe Survey. Workers would create very small probe holes, disturbing a total of 0.19 square feet—about the size of an index card. Workers would remove the probes, and the holes would naturally refill. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) concluded that the project would have no significant impact on public health, wetlands, drinking water, protected species, cultural properties, or other ecologically sensitive areas. Approval still took one year and 128 days.
Despite qualifying for quicker treatment, its review far exceeded the limit Congress set for EAs—a more intensive process. In cases like Dead Camel, one must wonder whether to thank Uncle Sam for the CX gift.
Yet Washington keeps handing them out. The BLM boasts recent adoption of over 100 new routes for CX qualification, the White House touts 195, and the administration presses on with its “Categorical Exclusions-First Approach” in pursuit of “expedited review and focused analysis where it is most needed.”
Some of that enthusiasm targets an illusory problem. Two recent reforms intended to expand CX access would have changed the pathway for fewer than 4 percent of qualifying projects studied. The goal was to grant more CXs, but nearly all qualifying projects already received a CX or another streamlined form of review before the reforms were enacted.
CXs are neither reliably fast nor inadequately available. It’s time to hit pause on everyone’s favorite NEPA reform strategy.
The goal is sound: Projects critical for modern society with little environmental impact should not languish in federal review. And expanding CXs may indeed help some projects at the margins. But CXs can’t be a cure-all for delay unless they are reliably quicker than full-blown NEPA review.
Washington should start with the obvious fix: Put a reasonable clock on CX reviews, just as Congress did for EAs and EISs. The Trump administration is right to want more projects in NEPA’s fast lane. Before Washington widens it again, it should make it fast.
This op-ed was originally published in The Orange County Register on September 24, 2026.
(Photo: The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
