Permitting reform ‘single most important thing we could do for national security,’ senator says

Permitting reform should be a top priority when it comes to ensuring that America maintains its technology dominance over global adversaries, according to a U.S. senator. 

During an event at the Hudson Institute on Friday, Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., said the United States needs to out-build China — particularly when it comes to artificial intelligence capabilities — as a bulwark against Beijing’s world power aspirations.  

But AI advancements are leading to increasing electrical needs and the construction of more data centers — areas where, McCormick said, China’s policies could allow it to outpace the U.S. 

“I can assure you, China's permitting challenges are not ours,” the senator said. “If we take five-and-a-half to six years for an energy project, they take less than six months. And so their energy production is really something we have to compete on, and right now we can't do that without permitting.”

With Congress on recess until after the midterm elections next month, McCormick said one thing lawmakers should quickly prioritize in the lame duck session is legislation to speed up this process. 

“I think the single most important thing we could do for national security is permitting reform, because the permitting reform bill would streamline our capacity to put energy production in place,” he said. 

Lawmakers in both chambers of Congress have introduced a variety of proposals over the past year to speed up the permitting process. McCormick has championed several reform-focused measures as well, including co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill introduced by Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., in February that looks to modernize the permitting process by turning to cloud-based technologies. 

One of the more notable reform bills was introduced last month by Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., Mike Lee, R-Utah, Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I. Their proposal, which McCormick alluded to, would overhaul the permitting process by, in part, imposing deadlines on environmental reviews, limiting the period for legal challenges and creating new digital tracking tools. 

“If you think energy production is a necessity for our economic well-being but also our national security, because energy feeds the compute power, compute feeds the AI capability … then permitting is probably the biggest thing we could do,” McCormick said.

Although data center construction has become a hot-button issue, with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle introducing various bills to limit their impact on surrounding communities, McCormick voiced his support for the infrastructure development. 

“To have AI leadership, you have to have compute,” he said. “To have compute, you have to have energy. To have this, you need data centers.”

He blamed some of the negative coverage of data center development, in part, on “Beijing's efforts to poison public opinion around this issue” — something that President Donald Trump has also echoed, and something that congressional Republicans have also been investigating. 

But McCormick said data center construction is something that should ultimately be decided by the local citizenry, requiring “a compact between the community and the hyperscalers that are building the data centers.”