Lawmakers introduce bill to digitize government permitting

A bipartisan duo in the House wants to digitize permitting with a new bill introduced last week.

The ePermit Act would require data standards and guidance; prototype tools for permitting agencies; and, ultimately, an interagency system connecting agencies and their data for the sake of enabling better coordination across the permitting landscape.

Reps. Dusty Johnson, R-S.D., and Scott Peters, D-Calif., say that their proposal would speed up permitting by moving the government to modern technology.

“Completing the permitting process by paper is an archaic waste of time,” Johnson said in a statement. “Digitizing the system will speed up the process, save federal dollars, and cut down delays.”

Their bill follows the release of a Trump plan last month to streamline and modernize the technology for environmental review and permitting processes as the White House pushes an agenda to expand oil, gas and coal production and slash green energy projects. 

That strategy followed up on a 2024, congressionally requested report by the Biden White House’s Council on Environmental Quality, which found that better and more connected technology could speed up permitting. 

Johnson and Peters say that their bill would build on the current momentum and give legislative direction on how agencies should implement an electronic permitting system. 

If their proposal makes it into law, CEQ would have 180 days to publish data standards for agencies, meant to enable shared systems that could support data exchanges across agencies. Trump published an initial data and tech standard last month alongside his permitting plan.

The bill would also push for new prototypes to be used for permitting, like case management systems.

The end goal: a unified, interagency data system made up of interconnected agency systems and shared services for environmental reviews, including a common authorization portal to track real-time data on environmental reviews, serve as one place for project sponsors to submit all their information and enable data sharing.

It would be a big change from the current setup, where agencies have siloed systems that make it difficult to share information, even though permitting often spans multiple agencies at a time. 

GSA would host the system, which CEQ would have until the end of 2027 to stand up.

One thing to watch moving forward: obtaining the necessary funding and staffing to do the work in the face of cuts could complicate the effort. Among the offices that’ve been slashed under Trump 2.0 is the government tech consultancy at the General Services Administration that helped author the Biden report.