Senate Permitting Deal S. 5653 Sets a 150-Day Lawsuit Clock and Makes Data Centres Pay for Their Grid Upgrades

On 30 September the chairs and ranking members of the Senate’s two energy and environment committees introduced a bipartisan permitting bill: Republicans Shelley Moore Capito and Mike Lee, and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse and Martin Heinrich. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, S. 5653, is aimed at the lame duck. Leaders want floor time in November. It needs 60 votes.

What it does

The bill touches most of the laws that slow big projects.

Environmental review. It declares the National Environmental Policy Act procedural, narrows what counts as a major federal action, and sets limits of one year for environmental assessments and two years for full impact statements.

Lawsuits. Challenges under NEPA, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and historic preservation law would have to be filed within 150 days, by parties who took part in the review. Cases would go straight to appeals courts. Courts would normally send flawed reviews back to agencies without cancelling permits, and agencies would have 180 days to fix them. Today plaintiffs can have up to six years.

Permit certainty. Agencies generally couldn’t revoke or change permits for fully permitted non-federal projects except for fraud, violations, court orders or new safety or security risks. Developers could sue over unreasonable delay or unequal treatment of project types.

Transmission. FERC could permit interstate power lines after states have had a year to act. The bill adds regional and interregional planning and cost allocation rules, and requires data centres to pay all associated transmission costs.

Water and species. State water quality reviews of pipelines and power lines would be limited to water quality, with nine months to act. Endangered species consultations would drop from 90 to 60 days.

Why Democrats signed on

Supporters on the Democratic side point to the permit certainty clause. They have watched the administration stop approved offshore wind projects. A rule that agencies can’t pull permits from finished reviews protects any kind of project from a hostile future administration, including clean energy. Republicans get faster reviews and limits on lawsuits for pipelines, LNG and mining.

Modelling by C2ES projects $125 billion in grid cost savings by 2040. Industry groups from the American Petroleum Institute to renewable energy associations support it, as does the National Association of Counties. Some environmental groups call it a “five-alarm fire.” The Center for Biological Diversity attacked the Democratic sponsors on the day of release.

The House

The House passed its own bill, the SPEED Act, 221 to 196 in December 2025. It focuses on NEPA and lawsuits and lacks the Senate’s transmission and permit certainty provisions. To become law in the lame duck, the House would have to accept Senate text quickly.

Meanwhile the White House Council on Environmental Quality formally rescinded its NEPA regulations in January 2026, and agencies have written their own procedures. We compared the US approach with Britain’s and the EU’s in an earlier post.

What to watch

The Senate vote in November, and whether the House takes up the Senate bill. If it slips to next year, a new Congress starts over, and the bipartisan coalition that wrote it may not survive the election.