Trump’s Permitting Chief Wants To Take ‘Yes’ For An Answer

FILE – President Donald Trump holds an executive order regarding the reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the Oval Office of the White House, May 23, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci, File)

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Efforts to streamline federal permitting processes related to energy projects of all types have been long promised by officials in both the executive and congressional branches of government, but real progress has been hard and slow to come by. The complexities of the issues and the broad array of competing stakeholders, along with lawsuits which often delay progress for years at a time, all combine to create a permitting morass which is extremely hard to untangle.

Former West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, then the powerful chairman of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee, ran into this wall when he tried build a critical mass of support for semi-comprehensive legislation in the wake of the passage of the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Despite having made a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in exchange for his becoming the deciding Senate vote on the IRA, Manchin was unable to put together a majority in either house of congress.

The simple reality is that none of this is simple: If it was, it would have already been done.

Emily Domenech Wants to Change the Permitting Culture

This is where Emily Domenech comes in. Appointed by President Donald Trump in May to lead the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council (Permitting Council), Domenech’s mission is to lead the executive branch’s search for innovative ways to speed up the process while maintaining environmental protections and respecting stakeholder rights.

As I’ve written here previously, it is a simple fact that the vast majority of federal permitting mandates and delays emanate from major statutes governing environmental protections. These are longstanding laws like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which were enacted with bipartisan support and have attained broad public buy-in.

“I think everyone would agree that these laws were well-intended when they were first written,” Domenech told me in a recent interview. “But,” she continues, “they’re a little out of date, and frankly, have been expanded far beyond what Congress originally intended.”

Pointing to NEPA as an example, Domenech notes that it’s a 12-page law which has led to thousands of pages of complex regulations as bureaucrats in previous administrations have worked to expand the scope of their authority. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she explains, “If Congress gives you clear directives, you should be able to follow them without adding on thousands of new requirements that change with every administration. That just doesn’t work.” It isn’t just about revising processes and regulatory restructuring: A culture shift needs to happen.

Mining: A 29-Year Permitting Endurance Test

When then-President Joe Biden promised in July, 2021 to mount a “whole of government approach” to onshoring mining and supply chains for an array of minerals critical to the success of the wind, solar, and electric vehicles industries, many pointed out the reality that none of this can happen unless those new mines, plants, and factories could obtain timely permits to move forward. The Biden White House’s lack of focus on speeding the permit process meant his administration ended with precious little to show for the whole-of-government approach that failed to address this key element.

Where mining is concerned, Domenech points out that “no one’s financing from the private sector if it takes you 29 years to get a permit, which is the average time it took to get a permit for a mine in America until this administration.” That has all begun to change over the last six months as the Permitting Council has named at least 13 new mines to qualify under the Fast-41 transparency process to speed environmental reviews required under the NEPA law. Included among the new list are mines for lithium, copper, molybdenum and other critical and rare earth minerals.

“We have an incredibly abundant country with incredibly available resources that are just waiting to be tapped into,” Domenech says, “but unfortunately, particularly in the critical minerals and mining space, the federal government has been the primary impediment to developing those resources. That’s backwards. We have to turn that around.”

Indeed, the turnaround has already begun, as three of the mines have received their final permits to proceed in recent weeks, including the first new domestic coal mine in years, to Hurricane Creek Mining, LLC to mine coal on Bryson Mountain in Claiborne County, Tennessee. The Department of Interior approved the permit “through expedited environmental review under newly established procedures designed to speed up reviews of energy projects in response to the national energy emergency declared by President Trump earlier this year.”

Nuclear Also Has a Need for Permitting Speed

Amid a rising consensus that the U.S. will need a major expansion in its nuclear power fleet to meet rapidly-rising electricity demand driven by AI datacenters, Domenech says big changes must take place in the way nuclear projects are permitted.

Fortunately, those efforts have already begun. Pointing to Trump executive actions and provisions in the recently-enacted One Big Beautiful Bill Act, she says, “Congress has taken some great steps forward when it comes to nuclear. We’ve prioritized investments in research. We’ve empowered the Department of Energy to build first of their kind reactors on DOE sites. You saw that reflected in some of President Trump’s executive orders on nuclear in the last few months.”

There is also a pressing need to modernize the decades-old regulatory structure and administrative processes at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to better reflect both the evolution of nuclear technologies and current societal needs. “We’ve also directed the NRC to change the way they think,” she says. “We have the gold standard of nuclear regulation here in the United States, but unfortunately that often leads to a position where the default is to build nothing. The safest option is always to do nothing. And unfortunately, that’s not the safest option when it comes to our national security in the long run because we must be able to make these investments.”

That default to doing nothing is an approach which evolved out of America’s lone significant nuclear power incident, which took place at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island facility 46 years ago. Today’s nuclear technology is vastly safer than the technologies that were in place half a century ago.

“The new, innovative technologies coming online today are incredibly safe,” Domenech notes. “They are built and designed with safety as the top priority. So, we have to change the culture over at the NRC to say, how do we get to ‘yes’ in the safest way possible?”

The Permitting Road Ahead

Domenech is quick to point out that these same principles, the same need to find ways to change the default permitting answers from ‘no’ to ‘yes,’ apply all forms of energy projects. She is also fast to note that this can and must be done while continuing to ensure proper focus on protecting the environment.

“America has an incredible track record when it comes to environmental responsibility,” she says. “We are a prosperous nation that has the ability to invest in not only our environmental standards, but also conservation in a way that doesn’t exist in the rest of the world.”

Domenech’s view is that America’s track record of leadership on protecting the environment is perhaps the best argument for speeding the permitting of new domestic energy projects. “Building it here in the United States, changing that default answer to ‘yes,’ is not only best for our national security, it’s also best for the environment. And that’s something I think people miss all the time.”

The fact that she doesn’t miss that key factor helps explain why Domenech was the choice to head up the Permitting Council during such a crucial inflection point in America’s energy history.