November 9, 2026
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National Taxpayers Union urges all senators to vote “YES” on the Manager’s Amendment to H.R. 2347, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (BAAJA) sponsored by Sens. Capito (R-WV), Lee (R-UT), Whitehouse (D-RI), and Heinrich (D-NM). This legislation would be a meaningful step toward restoring common sense to the federal permitting process, unleashing private investment, creating jobs, and making it easier and more affordable to build the infrastructure America needs.
The need for permitting reform is serious. An increasingly complex web of government red tape suffocates investment and makes it unnecessarily difficult, costly, and time-consuming to build in America. From oil refineries and wind farms to interstate highways and advanced manufacturing facilities, projects that could strengthen our economy, create good-paying jobs, and improve Americans’ quality of life are routinely subjected to years of regulatory delays.
In some cases, securing an energy permit can take more than four and a half years, while approval for a new transmission line can take as long as eight years. These prolonged delays drive up project costs, discourage investment, and ultimately leave consumers and utility ratepayers footing the bill through higher energy prices.
Thankfully, BAAJA fixes these government-caused problems. It includes important provisions to protect approved energy projects from being arbitrarily canceled by future administrations, providing the regulatory certainty businesses need to make billions of dollars in long-term investments across both clean and fossil fuel energy. It also curbs frivolous litigation that has allowed anti-energy activists to tie up major infrastructure projects for years, creating costly uncertainty for developers. It also rightly modernizes the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act to ensure projects proceed safely, responsibly, and efficiently.
Permitting reform won’t lead to lower energy prices today, but it will help us meet future energy needs. It means extracting underground oil faster, building more efficient refineries to turn oil into gasoline, and utilizing abundant solar and wind energy to power our homes and businesses. While this bill is imperfect, particularly some of the language pertaining to transmission lining and new mandates on data centers, enacting this legislation would still rank among the most consequential pro-growth achievements of Congress in a generation and should not be delayed.
Roll call votes on the Manager’s Amendment to H.R. 2347 will be included in NTU’s annual rating of Congress and “YES” votes will be considered the pro-taxpayer position.
If you have any questions, please contact NTU’s Vice President for Federal Affairs Thomas Aiello at Taiello@ntu.org
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