December 4, 2025 • 33 mins
Newt talks with Congressman Bruce Westerman (AR-4th), Chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources, about the importance of the bipartisan legislation known as the SPEED Act, “Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act.” The SPEED Act aims to reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to streamline permitting processes and expedite economic development. Westerman highlights the inefficiencies of the current NEPA process, which can delay projects for years, contributing to increased costs and hindering the U.S.'s ability to compete globally. Their discussion emphasizes the need for reform to facilitate infrastructure development, energy projects, and national security initiatives, while also addressing environmental concerns. The SPEED Act proposes a more streamlined permitting process, giving states a better role and reducing bureaucratic obstacles. Westerman has been working on this policy for eight years, aiming for bipartisan support to pass the legislation. Their conversation underscores the potential economic and environmental benefits of the proposed reforms, advocating for a balance between development and environmental protection.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
In this episode of news World. Congressman Bruce Westerman represents
Arkansas's fourth Congressional district in the US House Representatives, where
he serves on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and
as chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources. Prior to
serving in Congress, Chairman Westerman worked for twenty two years
(00:25):
at Mid South Engineering in Hount Springs. He served as
a board member for the Fountain League School District and
was later elected to two terms in the Arkansas General Assembly,
where he was the state's first Republican House majority leader
since reconstruction. He's joining the today to discuss bipartisan legislation
(00:45):
known as the speed Act, which stands for Standardizing Permitting
and Expediting Economic de Almanite Bruce, Welcome and thank you
(01:06):
for joining me the NETS World.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Well, thank you, mister speaker. It's great to be on
newts World. And I'm a fan of your podcasts and
I found out about it through my quest to do
permitting reform. I'd read a book by a guy named
Philip Howard talking about how We've got to save Americas
can do, and I was curious if he had done
any podcasts, and I found that you had him on
a podcast. So appreciate what you do and the way
(01:32):
you highlight important issues and get the word out and
obviously all the service that you've given to our country.
And they're with your wife in Switzerland.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Now you mentioned Howard, He's really a smart guy. I'm
delighted that you've connected with him.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Well, I've not connected with him. I've just read his book,
and I feel like I've connected with him and listened
to him on your podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I'm sure he'd be delighted to come and visit because
he is a genuine passion for trying to get us
out of the bureau percy and back to being effective.
Now you've intrigued me because of all of the talking
we have gone on right now about affordability. It really
hit me that a lot of the affordability problems come
directly out of the way in which big government socialism
(02:18):
fevers more and more regulations makes it harder and harder
to get anything done and artificially raises the cost from
what it would have been thirty or forty years ago.
And you've said the National Environmental Policy Act, and quoting
you now is a more than half century old permitting
process that has overdue for a tune up. If we
(02:39):
could start at the basics, because most of us really
don't have the kind of knowledge you do. What was
the Act originally supposed to do back when they first
passed it.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
This was in the late sixties early seventies, when we
started putting a lot more emphasis on the environment, and
a lot of law has passed in. You had the
Clean Water Act, the Claim Air Act, you had the
Endangered Species Act, followed by the Marine Mammal Protection Act,
a lot of underlying statutes that were specifically put in
place to help clean up the environment. There were good laws,
(03:13):
a lot of good things came from that, but over
the years they've been weaponized. And NEPA was kind of
the first environmental law and it was put in place
as a process to analyze things before we got stuff
like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,
And over time NEPA's become this massive kind of a
(03:35):
spider web if you think of it in a flow chart,
where you get in these continuous do loops and you
can't get out. And as a result, on average, it
takes four to five years to get a permit through
NEPA and when you're talking about mining, you can measure
it in decades. The National Mining Association says it takes
(03:55):
twenty nine years from the time you find a resource
until you're producing that resource in a mind in the
United States. And you know what that's led to. It's
led to China dominating critical minerals and rare earth. And
I'm so glad you mentioned affordability because this bureaucratic morass
that's been created by NEPA has created costs that they're
(04:18):
not seen out in the open, Their costs that go
into producing things that consumers ultimately pay for, and they
don't realize that these costs are there. NEPA affects everything,
really with a federal nexus, whether you're trying to build
a road, a bridge, build a navigable waterway, or a
port or an airport, even managing our forest, developing energy projects, poplines,
(04:43):
transmission lines. There's probably not any one issue that affects
every American more than NEPA, other than tax policy that
gets everyone pretty much. But somewhere or another, the NEPA
process affects all America rea.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Isn't that fair to say that unless we can reform this,
we will never be able to compete with China because
they can actually go out and build something as we
start with lawyers and we have to litigate for years
before we build anything.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
They are building things right now at a very rapid taste.
They're building coal fired plants at over one hundred gigawatts
a year. The last coal fired plant built in the
United States was in my district in twenty ten, and
we've shut a lot of coal plants down. But China
is building one equivalent to that plant in my district
(05:36):
about every two days, which is hard to get your
mind around. And you know, we've got this huge demand
for electricity for AI and data and also if we
want to reshore things here in America, we're going to
need more electricity for manufacturing. And we're really behind the
eight ball without the opportunity to build things like we
used to be able to build things here in this country.
(05:58):
So getting the permitting is the first step in being
able to build in America again and to win the
AI battle and critical minerals and rrors and all of
that good stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Is it accurate to say that unless we can cut
through the red tape that we have a real danger
of losing on artificial intelligence, not because of the scientists,
but because in base electricity you need in order to
be able to run those kind of very complicated.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Systems exactly, and we can't lose that race. It's a
national security issue when you think about AI. So what's
going to happen if we don't build more generation and
transmission is the AI companies are going to be competing
with residents and commercial users, so you're going to have
not enough supply and increased demands. So we know that
(06:51):
means that the price goes up. So as we talk
about affordability, it's crucial that we allow new generation and
transmission to be built so that we're not increasing process
and making ourselves in short supply on electricity and the data.
Companies are willing to fund these projects, but they just
have to be able to build them.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
The money can sit in the bank, but if you
don't know the bureaucracy's signing off, you're not going to
get it out of the bank.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Right, And what NEPA has done and the abuse of
our other environmental laws, it's put a wet blanket on
investments in our country. People would love to invest in
our country everywhere I travel. Recently, countries are saying we
would like to invest in America because they know it's
a good investment, but nobody's going to invest if they
can't get a return on that money. And they've seen
(07:40):
examples of the Keystone popeline where billions of dollars were
spent and a drop of oil never went through that pipeline.
There's a mine in Arizona that there's been two billion
dollars spent on it and they've never mined an ounce
of copper out of it. The process has stopped right
now because of an injunction through the NEPA process. And
(08:00):
that's what we're trying to fix with permitting reforms to
make it where people will have certainty that they can
go through the process in a timely manner, get their
permit and build things.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And don't you also almost up to you to like
a one stop at a place where you can shop,
because otherwise you can end up with so many different
regulators with so many different kind of rules that it
just becomes mindless.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
That's correct, and we do that in the Speed Act
as well. And we also give states a better seat
at the table because we get a lot of duplicity
on top of having multiple federal agencies in charge. So
we want to streamline it, have one person or one
group in charge, and then take down roadblocks and obstacles
(08:47):
that have been added on to NIPA throughout the years.
You know, there was this seven Counties decision out of
the Supreme Court for a case in Utah where the
Supreme Court said in a unanimous decision that NIPA is
a process. It's a procedural statue. It cannot dictate outcomes.
So we're going to codify that in the Speed Act
(09:08):
and make it a streamlined process. I continue, we will
have better environmental conditions because we can permit quickly and
do things that are better for the environment by building
them here in America. But I hate to say the left,
because this is a bipartisan build with the far left,
seems like they just don't want to build here in
(09:29):
our country and they're using the permitting process to stop that.
But if you truly care about the environment, you would
want to process that allows you to develop new kinds
of energy, that allows you to take care of our
forest and our infrastructure in a way that is better
for the environment in the long run.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Isn't it fair to say that any kind of regulatory
process which discourages investment in the US and leads them
to occur in China or in a thirderal country is
almost guaranteed to be more environmentally destructive than if you
have some did it right here in the United.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
States, without question, we do things cleaner, safer, healthier, and
more efficiently than anybody else in the world. When we
on leash American innovation and we're allowed to do that,
it not only puts a wet blanket on investments, that
puts a wet blanket on innovation. That's been our edge
in this country for so long that we've been able
(10:27):
to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. But if
you can't build what you dream, then someday we're going
to lose that innovative advantage.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
One of the examples, but I know you know well,
is the effort to build a three hundred mile pipeline
from Westwodgin in to Virginia. Can you talk just a
little bit about it. It's sort of crazy how these
things to Boo Moon and cost.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, that's the Mountain Valley popeline, and that was a
provision that Joe Manchin basically got spelled out in the
I guess that was in the IRA or the IJA.
One of those bills was passed during the Obama administration,
and it was some of the most explicit legislation that
I've ever seen. It was almost like it came from scripture.
(11:28):
They shall build a pipeline, and it shall go through
this area, and nothing shall impede its development. But you
think about natural gas is one of the cleanest forms
of energy that we have. My co sponsor on the bill,
Jared Golden, the Democrat from Maine. One of his main
concerns is they're burning heating oil in Maine and he
(11:50):
even came to me and asked if I could help
him get an LNG import facility in Maine because they're
blocking popelines going through New Hampshire, Massachusetts in New York,
and all he wants is affordable, clean energy for his constituents,
But you cannot get a popline permitted up through that area.
(12:11):
And people think of the Permian Basin in Texas and Alaska,
but the largest deposit of natural gas in the planet
is in the Marcellus and Judifacheale there in Pennsylvania and
New York and Ohio. It's right there available for the northeast.
But if you can't get a popline to use it,
it's of no use to you.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Say a farmer, if you have two cousins who own
farms and warms in Pennsylvania and the others twenty miles
away in New York, because New York will not allow
them to develop the Marcella shale. So the cousin who
lives in Pennsylvania is making a tremendous amount of money
(12:52):
out of this product which is right there on his land,
the exact same product twenty miles away. The kind of
get to it because the state Gilmont, I mean, the
mount to much New York has itself made people poor
with that kind of regulation. It's just I think crazy.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
I don't think that's what our founders were dreaming about
two hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I don't think that George Washington, who was very big
on development, would have understood the current attitudes. Let me
ask you, though we have made some reforms then you've
been involved in and as I understand that the Fiscal
Responsibility Act of twenty twenty three actually made some significant
changes in the national Environmental Policy Act. Can you sort
(13:40):
of explain the progress we have made.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah, So that was the famous budget cat deal when
Speaker McCarthy was Speaker of the House, and we got
some concessions on putting tomlines on doing something called an
environmental analysis, and we said that could only be one
hundred pages in one year, or an environmental impact statement,
so that could be two hundred pages or two years,
(14:05):
which never really got implemented during the Biden administration. But
what we found out is that the bureaucrats said, Okay,
we'll follow that one year and two year guideline. There's
no requirements on how long we can delay before we
actually start the process. So they're delaying months and years
before they ever start the time clock, and then once
(14:28):
they get the decision, they'll delay issuing the permit. So
we're fixing that in the Speed Act. A lot of
this should just be common sense, and it's frustrating that
you have to pass laws in Congress to try to
outthink what the bureaucracy is going to do. But I
think we've got them finally in the corner on this one.
(14:49):
If we can get the Speed Act passed.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Did it strikes whether you do have some people who
want to end the government for the purposes of stopping everything,
not for the purpose of helping it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And the system's rigged for people who want to stop something.
It's very difficult to build things, but if you've got
enough money and some lawyers, you can stop just about
anything in our country. I came from a background where
I did engineering work for twenty or twenty five years.
I understand the frustrations of the people that are really
(15:25):
focused every day, working hard, trying to build something, and
then all of a sudden, it's like this curve ball
comes out of left field that nobody was expecting, and
it's somebody that shouldn't even be involved in the process
is saying, well, you got to do it this way,
or we've got to delay, and the cost just goes
through the roof. McKenzie put out a report in July
(15:47):
of this year looking at just public infrastructure projects, and
they looked at a four year window because these projects
public infrastructure takes around six years to get a permit.
But they analyze the four year window and they said
that it's costing Americans two point seven trillion dollars for
these public infrastructure projects. That are held up in permitting.
(16:11):
And part of that is the extra cost of doing
the permit. It's a big part of it is the
cost that the project takes on because it's being delayed
and you have to mobilize and demobilize and all of that.
But then you've got this big opportunity cost that's lost
because you don't have a breach replaced, and you've got
traffic congested. And again, these are hidden costs that every
(16:33):
American's paying, and they don't realize that. At the root
of that is the permitting laws.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And I think this is a listening for the average citizen. Ruiz.
When you get to legislation that is this big and
this complicated, it takes time to think it through, to
study it, to put together the right language, to make
sure that the hearings where people can command and help
you improve it. How long have you personally been working
(16:59):
on the speed at.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
The policy and the Speed Act. I've been working on
it for eight years.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's complicated to build a bridge. It's complicated to write
the law to improve regulations.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
For building the bridge exactly. And in this instance, we've
got to have sixty votes in the Senate, so it
has to be bi partisan. This bill will not get
signed into law without bipartisan votes, So we've got to
work with our colleagues across the aisle that will work
with us on it. We've actually built a great coalition
with our Democrat co sponsors, and we've got letters of
(17:33):
support from all fifty states and over two hundred and
thirty different letters from organizations that range from energy companies
to data centers to people in construction to utilities. It's
a wide variety of people who realize just how important
permitting reform is. So we've built a huge amount of
(17:55):
momentum and there's a lot of conversations taking place on
how do we get the Speed Act not only out
of the House, but through the Senate and signed into law.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And you know the sense that you'll be able to
get it done in this Congress.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, we plan to get the bill to the Senate
before the end of the year, and the Senate is
working on their version of permitting reform as well. Having
been the Speaker of the House, you understand there's only
so much we can do. We can give them the
bill and then you've got to deal with the Senate.
But you've got to take it one step at a time.
But we are trying to work with the Senate and
(18:31):
with the Administration to make sure that we've got all
of our bases covered in the bill that we send over.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
I think we have a three part process I've begun
to work on about affordability, and one part of it
is the things that exists in the current system that
make everything less affordable. You can produce out of your
committee trillions of dollars that we could take out of
(19:00):
the current costs over the next decade that will clearly
make America more affordable. I mean, if that sound about.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right and more when you think about if we start
using our resources and building here. So the USGS use
Geological Survey. They do a report every year on material
that's mined and processed in the United States, and they've
been doing this for a long time. Currently, we produce
(19:28):
about one hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of raw
material and recycle material. That's net of imports and exports.
When that material gets processed into metals or the next product.
This includes aggregates everything that you mind, it's worth almost
a trillion dollars. So you take one hundred and twenty
(19:49):
billion dollars worth of raw material. You process it and
refine it, and you've got a trillion dollars of material.
You put that into the economy and it's worth three
two point seven trillion dollars to our GDP. So you
take one hundred and twenty billion dollars of raw material
and it has a three point seven trillion dollar impact
(20:09):
in our economy. You know this. Over time, the federal
tax revenue runs about fifteen or sixteen percent of the GDP,
So if you grow the economy by trillion dollars, you're
adding another one hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue
to the budget to help reduce the deficit. You're also
(20:30):
employing more people. For every one percent we increase the
labor participation rate, we grow the economy of trillion dollars.
So you've got all these other benefits on top of
having better national security, you get better jobs, a stronger economy,
and it's just crazy that we've not been doing more
of this all along.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Do you find a substantial number of Democrats understand the
importance of this kind of economic development and actually the
national security crisis that we're going to be in both
in terms of minding key things and in terms of
energy production for artificial intelligence. Is there a growing bipartisan
(21:13):
awareness of how realness is.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
There is and we have to take advantage of that
while we can. The advent of data and AI and
the realization of how much energy it's going to take
for that, I think has gotten everybody's attention on both
sides of the aisle, and also understanding the impacts that
can have on energy affordability. If you've got all this
new consumption taking place and you're not able to supply it,
(21:40):
that's a big issue. The other thing is in the
Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats approved a lot of projects
that they found out they couldn't get their projects permitted either.
It kind of brought a dose of reality to everyone
that if you want to build in our country, you
can't do it under the current permitting system. So I
(22:02):
think people are realizing the situation we're in, and it
has created a bipartisan effort to get permitting reform done.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah. I saw a study and said that on the
expansion of the New York Subway that it would cost
eight to ten times what the same expansion would cost
in London or Paris.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, I think Philip Howard actually mentioned that in his book,
talking about the original construction and how much it would
cost today. There's so many examples. I know you're from Georgia.
The last runway at the Atlanta Airport, it took eleven
years to build it. It actually only took eighteen months
to build it, but it took nine and a half
years to get the permit to build it. It's just
(22:46):
crazy stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I want this also have a significant impact both at
the War Department and NASA on making it faster to
do the kind of construction and the kind of things
they need to get done.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Absolutely. You know, I've traveled around and talked to military commanders,
and I'll never forget a guy out in the Pacific
telling me that the Chinese Communist Party understand our environmental
law is better than we do. And at the time
China was building an island on a coral reef, like
hauling big rocks out in the ocean and dumping them
(23:39):
on a coral reef to build an island to put
military assets on. We were trying to redevelop a site
on Tinian where the bombers took off with the atomic bombs.
That was one of the largest airfields in the world
back in World War Two and had grown up in
the jungle, and the military wanted to go in and
redevelop a little piece of that total dead end. They
(24:02):
could not get the permits to go in and redevelop
this site that was strategic to our national security. Yeah,
it has a major impact on the Department of War,
talk about the corp of engineers and the projects that
they do. It creates a tremendous additional cost for government
funded infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
People really often don't realize that the original purpose of
creating West Point was to produce engineers. Robert E. Lee,
for example, it's about part of his early career developing
the port at Saint Louis. And nowadays, in twenty twelve,
they were building a second wider Panama Canal, and the
(24:48):
studying for whether or not you could improve the Charleston
Harbor to take then the larger ships was going to
take longer to study. It was going to take them
to build the entire brand new canal. They would have
ships that could not come into Charleston because it'd be
too big, and the core literally could not get out
(25:10):
of the way of all the different regulatory requirements.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Now, anybody who's ever served in Congress has their core
of engineer's horror story that they've dealt with, and it's
happening every day. These are great people that want to
do good work where there's a problem in the leadership
somewhere in the core and getting projects approved and getting
them done. And we also fund core of engineering projects
(25:34):
in a backwards way. Instead of funding the whole project
at one time, we fund them on the appropriations process,
so they have to build in are we going to
have to stop and wait for more funding? That whole
process needs to be reordered.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
The name they figured out years ago. When they buy
an aircraft carrier, they structure a contract so the technically,
because the Constitution requires annual funding, technically it has to
be renewed. But they built in such a prohibitive costs
for not renewing that Congress will consistently pay for it.
(26:13):
I'm looking at the air traffic control situation where Secretary
Duffy I think has a huge challenge. We have not
been able to fix the air traffic control system for
forty years because of the point it is made, which says,
by the time you get to hangle appropriations, you get
to the federal bureaucracy, you get to the various opportunities
(26:35):
to file lawsuits to screw up everything. We literally have
not been able to modernize the air traffic control system.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I've been on the Aviation Subcommittee, and in the first
Trump administration we looked at updating the air traffic control system. Now,
in the reconciliation bill that we did, we put twelve
billion dollars in there for the air traffic control system.
I was with Secretary Duffy last night and we were
talking about this. You know what's holding up air traffic
(27:04):
control is getting fiber optics cables to the towers. And
they can't get the fiber optics cables to the towers
because of the NEPA permitting process. They've got twelve billion
dollars and they can't run a new fiber optics line.
They're trying to work around that, but it's ridiculous that
something so important to safety and to our economy and
(27:26):
it's being held up because they can't run fiber to
control towers.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
When I was a speaker, it was so unusual to
have the first Republican speaker in forty years that when
we finished the ten items that were in the contract,
CBS gave me a half hour to do sort of
a national address. And I actually had a vacuum tube
that was part of the air traffic control system that
(27:51):
was manufactured in Poland because it was the last factory
on the planet that made these vacuum tubes, and we
had not been able. No, I think we've since gotten
away from them, but at the time, we literally have
not been able to get out of vacuum tubes.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
I remember seeing that great job.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Look with your leadership. I think this is a big deal.
Now it is the Act in the Senate, also called
the Speed Act.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
No, there's not a bill that I'm aware of that
the Senate's filed. Yet they're working on the policy, and
I think the Speed Act will be the center point
of maybe some larger permitting reform. There's some statutes and
other committees that aren't in natural resources jurisdiction. You've got
Energy and Commerce in the House that has clean air
(28:39):
and clean water and furk. You've got T and I
that's got a clean water nexus. And then you get
over in the Senate and you've got Senate E and
R and Senate EPW that has cross jurisdiction, so all
those committees are working together, and you know, at some
point a lot of other stuff may get added into
the Speed Act, the biggest and best permitting reform bill
(29:02):
that we can get passed and signed into law.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So in a real sense, if you look at this,
this could become as the title Standardizing Permitting and Expediting
Economic Development, could be expanded substantially beyond NEPA and still
fit within the framework.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, So I would say if all we can get
is NEPA, that will be a huge victory. But there's
opportunity because there's also some areas that have bipartisan support
with things like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean
Air and the Clean Water Act that could kind of
some bits and pieces that get sprinkled in with the NEPA.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Do in the mood that's building in the country. If
we can find a way to communicate an affordability issue,
how much, for example, your family will be better off at
electricity cost, or how much you'll be better off just
in terms of your county or your state building a
highway or fixing our bridging there are ways to translate
(30:05):
all this so it becomes very personal and more people
realize this is really about their lives. This isn't just
some abstract.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Theory, right. It's really intuitive if you stop and think
about it, that if the cost for energy rises, the
costs for everything rises. When the Ukraine War started, we
saw an increase in input costs for agriculture. And what
a lot of people didn't realize that was directly related
to the fact that there was so much nitrogen fertilizer
(30:35):
that's made in the Ukraine and the cost of gas
went up there. And natural gas is the main ingredient
in fertilizer and fertilizers of globally traded commodity. So even
though we've got a lot of natural gas in the US,
we don't have a lot of fertilizer plants, and you
had fertilizer shortages that drove up agg cost and everything
(30:57):
in agg The fertilizer that you put on the farmland
is like a base input cost for chickens and pork
and beef because they end up eating the crops you grow.
So when you have a constraint on supply of energy
and the things that are made from that energy. It
percolates throughout the whole supply chain, and that can be
(31:20):
both ways. You can get positive effects or negative effects.
You get those costs low and you get in abundance.
Your affordability is going to be much better, and plus
you're going to have better jobs.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I really want to congratulate you. This is a hard topic.
It's a topic a lot of people have spent years
working on. You have brought it together into a serious
reform built which could have an enormous impact on our
national security, on our economic growth, on the cost of energy,
(31:52):
on our ability to do artificial intelligence. So, Bruce, I
think the work you're doing is sort of Congress at
its best. How it is thoughtful, bipartisan, with a huge
impact in the real world. I want to thank you
for joining me, and I want to let our listeners
know they can find out more about the work you're
doing by visiting your website at Westerman dot house dot gov.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Thank you very much, New it's been great to be
with you, and I would add to that list, we're
going to do more to protect the environment. Some people
think by reforming permitting, we're going to just say the
heck with the environment. But we'll have better environmental outcomes
by having better permitting processes.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
I promise you, Chairman, you are providing wheel leadership in
the best tradition of the Congress.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I comment you, thank you, nude, appreciate you, Thank you to.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
My guest Chairman, Bruce Westerman. Neut World is produced by Gagers,
Sweet sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan.
Our research sure is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the
show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the
team at Ginglish three sixty. If you've been enjoying news World,
(33:10):
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Join me on
substack at Gingwish three sixty dot net. I am new Gingwish.
This is Newsworld.
In this episode of news World. Congressman Bruce Westerman represents
Arkansas's fourth Congressional district in the US House Representatives, where
he serves on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and
as chairman of the Committee on Natural Resources. Prior to
serving in Congress, Chairman Westerman worked for twenty two years
(00:25):
at Mid South Engineering in Hount Springs. He served as
a board member for the Fountain League School District and
was later elected to two terms in the Arkansas General Assembly,
where he was the state's first Republican House majority leader
since reconstruction. He's joining the today to discuss bipartisan legislation
(00:45):
known as the speed Act, which stands for Standardizing Permitting
and Expediting Economic de Almanite Bruce, Welcome and thank you
(01:06):
for joining me the NETS World.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
Well, thank you, mister speaker. It's great to be on
newts World. And I'm a fan of your podcasts and
I found out about it through my quest to do
permitting reform. I'd read a book by a guy named
Philip Howard talking about how We've got to save Americas
can do, and I was curious if he had done
any podcasts, and I found that you had him on
a podcast. So appreciate what you do and the way
(01:32):
you highlight important issues and get the word out and
obviously all the service that you've given to our country.
And they're with your wife in Switzerland.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Now you mentioned Howard, He's really a smart guy. I'm
delighted that you've connected with him.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
Well, I've not connected with him. I've just read his book,
and I feel like I've connected with him and listened
to him on your podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:53):
I'm sure he'd be delighted to come and visit because
he is a genuine passion for trying to get us
out of the bureau percy and back to being effective.
Now you've intrigued me because of all of the talking
we have gone on right now about affordability. It really
hit me that a lot of the affordability problems come
directly out of the way in which big government socialism
(02:18):
fevers more and more regulations makes it harder and harder
to get anything done and artificially raises the cost from
what it would have been thirty or forty years ago.
And you've said the National Environmental Policy Act, and quoting
you now is a more than half century old permitting
process that has overdue for a tune up. If we
(02:39):
could start at the basics, because most of us really
don't have the kind of knowledge you do. What was
the Act originally supposed to do back when they first
passed it.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
This was in the late sixties early seventies, when we
started putting a lot more emphasis on the environment, and
a lot of law has passed in. You had the
Clean Water Act, the Claim Air Act, you had the
Endangered Species Act, followed by the Marine Mammal Protection Act,
a lot of underlying statutes that were specifically put in
place to help clean up the environment. There were good laws,
(03:13):
a lot of good things came from that, but over
the years they've been weaponized. And NEPA was kind of
the first environmental law and it was put in place
as a process to analyze things before we got stuff
like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,
And over time NEPA's become this massive kind of a
(03:35):
spider web if you think of it in a flow chart,
where you get in these continuous do loops and you
can't get out. And as a result, on average, it
takes four to five years to get a permit through
NEPA and when you're talking about mining, you can measure
it in decades. The National Mining Association says it takes
(03:55):
twenty nine years from the time you find a resource
until you're producing that resource in a mind in the
United States. And you know what that's led to. It's
led to China dominating critical minerals and rare earth. And
I'm so glad you mentioned affordability because this bureaucratic morass
that's been created by NEPA has created costs that they're
(04:18):
not seen out in the open, Their costs that go
into producing things that consumers ultimately pay for, and they
don't realize that these costs are there. NEPA affects everything,
really with a federal nexus, whether you're trying to build
a road, a bridge, build a navigable waterway, or a
port or an airport, even managing our forest, developing energy projects, poplines,
(04:43):
transmission lines. There's probably not any one issue that affects
every American more than NEPA, other than tax policy that
gets everyone pretty much. But somewhere or another, the NEPA
process affects all America rea.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
Isn't that fair to say that unless we can reform this,
we will never be able to compete with China because
they can actually go out and build something as we
start with lawyers and we have to litigate for years
before we build anything.
Speaker 2 (05:16):
They are building things right now at a very rapid taste.
They're building coal fired plants at over one hundred gigawatts
a year. The last coal fired plant built in the
United States was in my district in twenty ten, and
we've shut a lot of coal plants down. But China
is building one equivalent to that plant in my district
(05:36):
about every two days, which is hard to get your
mind around. And you know, we've got this huge demand
for electricity for AI and data and also if we
want to reshore things here in America, we're going to
need more electricity for manufacturing. And we're really behind the
eight ball without the opportunity to build things like we
used to be able to build things here in this country.
(05:58):
So getting the permitting is the first step in being
able to build in America again and to win the
AI battle and critical minerals and rrors and all of
that good stuff.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Is it accurate to say that unless we can cut
through the red tape that we have a real danger
of losing on artificial intelligence, not because of the scientists,
but because in base electricity you need in order to
be able to run those kind of very complicated.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Systems exactly, and we can't lose that race. It's a
national security issue when you think about AI. So what's
going to happen if we don't build more generation and
transmission is the AI companies are going to be competing
with residents and commercial users, so you're going to have
not enough supply and increased demands. So we know that
(06:51):
means that the price goes up. So as we talk
about affordability, it's crucial that we allow new generation and
transmission to be built so that we're not increasing process
and making ourselves in short supply on electricity and the data.
Companies are willing to fund these projects, but they just
have to be able to build them.
Speaker 1 (07:12):
The money can sit in the bank, but if you
don't know the bureaucracy's signing off, you're not going to
get it out of the bank.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Right, And what NEPA has done and the abuse of
our other environmental laws, it's put a wet blanket on
investments in our country. People would love to invest in
our country everywhere I travel. Recently, countries are saying we
would like to invest in America because they know it's
a good investment, but nobody's going to invest if they
can't get a return on that money. And they've seen
(07:40):
examples of the Keystone popeline where billions of dollars were
spent and a drop of oil never went through that pipeline.
There's a mine in Arizona that there's been two billion
dollars spent on it and they've never mined an ounce
of copper out of it. The process has stopped right
now because of an injunction through the NEPA process. And
(08:00):
that's what we're trying to fix with permitting reforms to
make it where people will have certainty that they can
go through the process in a timely manner, get their
permit and build things.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
And don't you also almost up to you to like
a one stop at a place where you can shop,
because otherwise you can end up with so many different
regulators with so many different kind of rules that it
just becomes mindless.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
That's correct, and we do that in the Speed Act
as well. And we also give states a better seat
at the table because we get a lot of duplicity
on top of having multiple federal agencies in charge. So
we want to streamline it, have one person or one
group in charge, and then take down roadblocks and obstacles
(08:47):
that have been added on to NIPA throughout the years.
You know, there was this seven Counties decision out of
the Supreme Court for a case in Utah where the
Supreme Court said in a unanimous decision that NIPA is
a process. It's a procedural statue. It cannot dictate outcomes.
So we're going to codify that in the Speed Act
(09:08):
and make it a streamlined process. I continue, we will
have better environmental conditions because we can permit quickly and
do things that are better for the environment by building
them here in America. But I hate to say the left,
because this is a bipartisan build with the far left,
seems like they just don't want to build here in
(09:29):
our country and they're using the permitting process to stop that.
But if you truly care about the environment, you would
want to process that allows you to develop new kinds
of energy, that allows you to take care of our
forest and our infrastructure in a way that is better
for the environment in the long run.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Isn't it fair to say that any kind of regulatory
process which discourages investment in the US and leads them
to occur in China or in a thirderal country is
almost guaranteed to be more environmentally destructive than if you
have some did it right here in the United.
Speaker 2 (10:05):
States, without question, we do things cleaner, safer, healthier, and
more efficiently than anybody else in the world. When we
on leash American innovation and we're allowed to do that,
it not only puts a wet blanket on investments, that
puts a wet blanket on innovation. That's been our edge
in this country for so long that we've been able
(10:27):
to innovate and stay ahead of the curve. But if
you can't build what you dream, then someday we're going
to lose that innovative advantage.
Speaker 1 (10:52):
One of the examples, but I know you know well,
is the effort to build a three hundred mile pipeline
from Westwodgin in to Virginia. Can you talk just a
little bit about it. It's sort of crazy how these
things to Boo Moon and cost.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Yeah, that's the Mountain Valley popeline, and that was a
provision that Joe Manchin basically got spelled out in the
I guess that was in the IRA or the IJA.
One of those bills was passed during the Obama administration,
and it was some of the most explicit legislation that
I've ever seen. It was almost like it came from scripture.
(11:28):
They shall build a pipeline, and it shall go through
this area, and nothing shall impede its development. But you
think about natural gas is one of the cleanest forms
of energy that we have. My co sponsor on the bill,
Jared Golden, the Democrat from Maine. One of his main
concerns is they're burning heating oil in Maine and he
(11:50):
even came to me and asked if I could help
him get an LNG import facility in Maine because they're
blocking popelines going through New Hampshire, Massachusetts in New York,
and all he wants is affordable, clean energy for his constituents,
But you cannot get a popline permitted up through that area.
(12:11):
And people think of the Permian Basin in Texas and Alaska,
but the largest deposit of natural gas in the planet
is in the Marcellus and Judifacheale there in Pennsylvania and
New York and Ohio. It's right there available for the northeast.
But if you can't get a popline to use it,
it's of no use to you.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Say a farmer, if you have two cousins who own
farms and warms in Pennsylvania and the others twenty miles
away in New York, because New York will not allow
them to develop the Marcella shale. So the cousin who
lives in Pennsylvania is making a tremendous amount of money
(12:52):
out of this product which is right there on his land,
the exact same product twenty miles away. The kind of
get to it because the state Gilmont, I mean, the
mount to much New York has itself made people poor
with that kind of regulation. It's just I think crazy.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
I don't think that's what our founders were dreaming about
two hundred and fifty years ago.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I don't think that George Washington, who was very big
on development, would have understood the current attitudes. Let me
ask you, though we have made some reforms then you've
been involved in and as I understand that the Fiscal
Responsibility Act of twenty twenty three actually made some significant
changes in the national Environmental Policy Act. Can you sort
(13:40):
of explain the progress we have made.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Yeah, So that was the famous budget cat deal when
Speaker McCarthy was Speaker of the House, and we got
some concessions on putting tomlines on doing something called an
environmental analysis, and we said that could only be one
hundred pages in one year, or an environmental impact statement,
so that could be two hundred pages or two years,
(14:05):
which never really got implemented during the Biden administration. But
what we found out is that the bureaucrats said, Okay,
we'll follow that one year and two year guideline. There's
no requirements on how long we can delay before we
actually start the process. So they're delaying months and years
before they ever start the time clock, and then once
(14:28):
they get the decision, they'll delay issuing the permit. So
we're fixing that in the Speed Act. A lot of
this should just be common sense, and it's frustrating that
you have to pass laws in Congress to try to
outthink what the bureaucracy is going to do. But I
think we've got them finally in the corner on this one.
(14:49):
If we can get the Speed Act passed.
Speaker 1 (14:52):
Did it strikes whether you do have some people who
want to end the government for the purposes of stopping everything,
not for the purpose of helping it.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
And the system's rigged for people who want to stop something.
It's very difficult to build things, but if you've got
enough money and some lawyers, you can stop just about
anything in our country. I came from a background where
I did engineering work for twenty or twenty five years.
I understand the frustrations of the people that are really
(15:25):
focused every day, working hard, trying to build something, and
then all of a sudden, it's like this curve ball
comes out of left field that nobody was expecting, and
it's somebody that shouldn't even be involved in the process
is saying, well, you got to do it this way,
or we've got to delay, and the cost just goes
through the roof. McKenzie put out a report in July
(15:47):
of this year looking at just public infrastructure projects, and
they looked at a four year window because these projects
public infrastructure takes around six years to get a permit.
But they analyze the four year window and they said
that it's costing Americans two point seven trillion dollars for
these public infrastructure projects. That are held up in permitting.
(16:11):
And part of that is the extra cost of doing
the permit. It's a big part of it is the
cost that the project takes on because it's being delayed
and you have to mobilize and demobilize and all of that.
But then you've got this big opportunity cost that's lost
because you don't have a breach replaced, and you've got
traffic congested. And again, these are hidden costs that every
(16:33):
American's paying, and they don't realize that. At the root
of that is the permitting laws.
Speaker 1 (16:39):
And I think this is a listening for the average citizen. Ruiz.
When you get to legislation that is this big and
this complicated, it takes time to think it through, to
study it, to put together the right language, to make
sure that the hearings where people can command and help
you improve it. How long have you personally been working
(16:59):
on the speed at.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
The policy and the Speed Act. I've been working on
it for eight years.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It's complicated to build a bridge. It's complicated to write
the law to improve regulations.
Speaker 2 (17:11):
For building the bridge exactly. And in this instance, we've
got to have sixty votes in the Senate, so it
has to be bi partisan. This bill will not get
signed into law without bipartisan votes, So we've got to
work with our colleagues across the aisle that will work
with us on it. We've actually built a great coalition
with our Democrat co sponsors, and we've got letters of
(17:33):
support from all fifty states and over two hundred and
thirty different letters from organizations that range from energy companies
to data centers to people in construction to utilities. It's
a wide variety of people who realize just how important
permitting reform is. So we've built a huge amount of
(17:55):
momentum and there's a lot of conversations taking place on
how do we get the Speed Act not only out
of the House, but through the Senate and signed into law.
Speaker 1 (18:05):
And you know the sense that you'll be able to
get it done in this Congress.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
Yeah, we plan to get the bill to the Senate
before the end of the year, and the Senate is
working on their version of permitting reform as well. Having
been the Speaker of the House, you understand there's only
so much we can do. We can give them the
bill and then you've got to deal with the Senate.
But you've got to take it one step at a time.
But we are trying to work with the Senate and
(18:31):
with the Administration to make sure that we've got all
of our bases covered in the bill that we send over.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
I think we have a three part process I've begun
to work on about affordability, and one part of it
is the things that exists in the current system that
make everything less affordable. You can produce out of your
committee trillions of dollars that we could take out of
(19:00):
the current costs over the next decade that will clearly
make America more affordable. I mean, if that sound about.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right and more when you think about if we start
using our resources and building here. So the USGS use
Geological Survey. They do a report every year on material
that's mined and processed in the United States, and they've
been doing this for a long time. Currently, we produce
(19:28):
about one hundred and twenty billion dollars worth of raw
material and recycle material. That's net of imports and exports.
When that material gets processed into metals or the next product.
This includes aggregates everything that you mind, it's worth almost
a trillion dollars. So you take one hundred and twenty
(19:49):
billion dollars worth of raw material. You process it and
refine it, and you've got a trillion dollars of material.
You put that into the economy and it's worth three
two point seven trillion dollars to our GDP. So you
take one hundred and twenty billion dollars of raw material
and it has a three point seven trillion dollar impact
(20:09):
in our economy. You know this. Over time, the federal
tax revenue runs about fifteen or sixteen percent of the GDP,
So if you grow the economy by trillion dollars, you're
adding another one hundred and fifty billion dollars of revenue
to the budget to help reduce the deficit. You're also
(20:30):
employing more people. For every one percent we increase the
labor participation rate, we grow the economy of trillion dollars.
So you've got all these other benefits on top of
having better national security, you get better jobs, a stronger economy,
and it's just crazy that we've not been doing more
of this all along.
Speaker 1 (20:51):
Do you find a substantial number of Democrats understand the
importance of this kind of economic development and actually the
national security crisis that we're going to be in both
in terms of minding key things and in terms of
energy production for artificial intelligence. Is there a growing bipartisan
(21:13):
awareness of how realness is.
Speaker 2 (21:16):
There is and we have to take advantage of that
while we can. The advent of data and AI and
the realization of how much energy it's going to take
for that, I think has gotten everybody's attention on both
sides of the aisle, and also understanding the impacts that
can have on energy affordability. If you've got all this
new consumption taking place and you're not able to supply it,
(21:40):
that's a big issue. The other thing is in the
Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats approved a lot of projects
that they found out they couldn't get their projects permitted either.
It kind of brought a dose of reality to everyone
that if you want to build in our country, you
can't do it under the current permitting system. So I
(22:02):
think people are realizing the situation we're in, and it
has created a bipartisan effort to get permitting reform done.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Yeah. I saw a study and said that on the
expansion of the New York Subway that it would cost
eight to ten times what the same expansion would cost
in London or Paris.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, I think Philip Howard actually mentioned that in his book,
talking about the original construction and how much it would
cost today. There's so many examples. I know you're from Georgia.
The last runway at the Atlanta Airport, it took eleven
years to build it. It actually only took eighteen months
to build it, but it took nine and a half
years to get the permit to build it. It's just
(22:46):
crazy stuff like that.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
I want this also have a significant impact both at
the War Department and NASA on making it faster to
do the kind of construction and the kind of things
they need to get done.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
Absolutely. You know, I've traveled around and talked to military commanders,
and I'll never forget a guy out in the Pacific
telling me that the Chinese Communist Party understand our environmental
law is better than we do. And at the time
China was building an island on a coral reef, like
hauling big rocks out in the ocean and dumping them
(23:39):
on a coral reef to build an island to put
military assets on. We were trying to redevelop a site
on Tinian where the bombers took off with the atomic bombs.
That was one of the largest airfields in the world
back in World War Two and had grown up in
the jungle, and the military wanted to go in and
redevelop a little piece of that total dead end. They
(24:02):
could not get the permits to go in and redevelop
this site that was strategic to our national security. Yeah,
it has a major impact on the Department of War,
talk about the corp of engineers and the projects that
they do. It creates a tremendous additional cost for government
funded infrastructure.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
People really often don't realize that the original purpose of
creating West Point was to produce engineers. Robert E. Lee,
for example, it's about part of his early career developing
the port at Saint Louis. And nowadays, in twenty twelve,
they were building a second wider Panama Canal, and the
(24:48):
studying for whether or not you could improve the Charleston
Harbor to take then the larger ships was going to
take longer to study. It was going to take them
to build the entire brand new canal. They would have
ships that could not come into Charleston because it'd be
too big, and the core literally could not get out
(25:10):
of the way of all the different regulatory requirements.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
Now, anybody who's ever served in Congress has their core
of engineer's horror story that they've dealt with, and it's
happening every day. These are great people that want to
do good work where there's a problem in the leadership
somewhere in the core and getting projects approved and getting
them done. And we also fund core of engineering projects
(25:34):
in a backwards way. Instead of funding the whole project
at one time, we fund them on the appropriations process,
so they have to build in are we going to
have to stop and wait for more funding? That whole
process needs to be reordered.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
The name they figured out years ago. When they buy
an aircraft carrier, they structure a contract so the technically,
because the Constitution requires annual funding, technically it has to
be renewed. But they built in such a prohibitive costs
for not renewing that Congress will consistently pay for it.
(26:13):
I'm looking at the air traffic control situation where Secretary
Duffy I think has a huge challenge. We have not
been able to fix the air traffic control system for
forty years because of the point it is made, which says,
by the time you get to hangle appropriations, you get
to the federal bureaucracy, you get to the various opportunities
(26:35):
to file lawsuits to screw up everything. We literally have
not been able to modernize the air traffic control system.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
I've been on the Aviation Subcommittee, and in the first
Trump administration we looked at updating the air traffic control system. Now,
in the reconciliation bill that we did, we put twelve
billion dollars in there for the air traffic control system.
I was with Secretary Duffy last night and we were
talking about this. You know what's holding up air traffic
(27:04):
control is getting fiber optics cables to the towers. And
they can't get the fiber optics cables to the towers
because of the NEPA permitting process. They've got twelve billion
dollars and they can't run a new fiber optics line.
They're trying to work around that, but it's ridiculous that
something so important to safety and to our economy and
(27:26):
it's being held up because they can't run fiber to
control towers.
Speaker 1 (27:30):
When I was a speaker, it was so unusual to
have the first Republican speaker in forty years that when
we finished the ten items that were in the contract,
CBS gave me a half hour to do sort of
a national address. And I actually had a vacuum tube
that was part of the air traffic control system that
(27:51):
was manufactured in Poland because it was the last factory
on the planet that made these vacuum tubes, and we
had not been able. No, I think we've since gotten
away from them, but at the time, we literally have
not been able to get out of vacuum tubes.
Speaker 2 (28:06):
I remember seeing that great job.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Look with your leadership. I think this is a big deal.
Now it is the Act in the Senate, also called
the Speed Act.
Speaker 2 (28:18):
No, there's not a bill that I'm aware of that
the Senate's filed. Yet they're working on the policy, and
I think the Speed Act will be the center point
of maybe some larger permitting reform. There's some statutes and
other committees that aren't in natural resources jurisdiction. You've got
Energy and Commerce in the House that has clean air
(28:39):
and clean water and furk. You've got T and I
that's got a clean water nexus. And then you get
over in the Senate and you've got Senate E and
R and Senate EPW that has cross jurisdiction, so all
those committees are working together, and you know, at some
point a lot of other stuff may get added into
the Speed Act, the biggest and best permitting reform bill
(29:02):
that we can get passed and signed into law.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
So in a real sense, if you look at this,
this could become as the title Standardizing Permitting and Expediting
Economic Development, could be expanded substantially beyond NEPA and still
fit within the framework.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
Yeah, So I would say if all we can get
is NEPA, that will be a huge victory. But there's
opportunity because there's also some areas that have bipartisan support
with things like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean
Air and the Clean Water Act that could kind of
some bits and pieces that get sprinkled in with the NEPA.
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Do in the mood that's building in the country. If
we can find a way to communicate an affordability issue,
how much, for example, your family will be better off at
electricity cost, or how much you'll be better off just
in terms of your county or your state building a
highway or fixing our bridging there are ways to translate
(30:05):
all this so it becomes very personal and more people
realize this is really about their lives. This isn't just
some abstract.
Speaker 2 (30:13):
Theory, right. It's really intuitive if you stop and think
about it, that if the cost for energy rises, the
costs for everything rises. When the Ukraine War started, we
saw an increase in input costs for agriculture. And what
a lot of people didn't realize that was directly related
to the fact that there was so much nitrogen fertilizer
(30:35):
that's made in the Ukraine and the cost of gas
went up there. And natural gas is the main ingredient
in fertilizer and fertilizers of globally traded commodity. So even
though we've got a lot of natural gas in the US,
we don't have a lot of fertilizer plants, and you
had fertilizer shortages that drove up agg cost and everything
(30:57):
in agg The fertilizer that you put on the farmland
is like a base input cost for chickens and pork
and beef because they end up eating the crops you grow.
So when you have a constraint on supply of energy
and the things that are made from that energy. It
percolates throughout the whole supply chain, and that can be
(31:20):
both ways. You can get positive effects or negative effects.
You get those costs low and you get in abundance.
Your affordability is going to be much better, and plus
you're going to have better jobs.
Speaker 1 (31:30):
I really want to congratulate you. This is a hard topic.
It's a topic a lot of people have spent years
working on. You have brought it together into a serious
reform built which could have an enormous impact on our
national security, on our economic growth, on the cost of energy,
(31:52):
on our ability to do artificial intelligence. So, Bruce, I
think the work you're doing is sort of Congress at
its best. How it is thoughtful, bipartisan, with a huge
impact in the real world. I want to thank you
for joining me, and I want to let our listeners
know they can find out more about the work you're
doing by visiting your website at Westerman dot house dot gov.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Thank you very much, New it's been great to be
with you, and I would add to that list, we're
going to do more to protect the environment. Some people
think by reforming permitting, we're going to just say the
heck with the environment. But we'll have better environmental outcomes
by having better permitting processes.
Speaker 1 (32:34):
I promise you, Chairman, you are providing wheel leadership in
the best tradition of the Congress.
Speaker 2 (32:40):
I comment you, thank you, nude, appreciate you, Thank you to.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
My guest Chairman, Bruce Westerman. Neut World is produced by Gagers,
Sweet sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guernsey Sloan.
Our research sure is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the
show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the
team at Ginglish three sixty. If you've been enjoying news World,
(33:10):
I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate
us with five stars and give us a review so
others can learn what it's all about. Join me on
substack at Gingwish three sixty dot net. I am new Gingwish.
This is Newsworld.
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