Ricketts Questions Infrastructure Experts on the Permitting Process and Necessary Reforms

February 19, 2025 WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Pete Ricketts (R-NE) questioned infrastructure policy experts during a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing on improving the federal environmental review and permitting process. During the hearing, Sen. Ricketts said the following: Click here to watch “I believe we can make common-sense permitting reform to unleash projects for American energy, infrastructure, homebuilding, agriculture, all those sort of things—while protecting our environment. Permitting reform is about modernizing our regulatory system to ensure that we’re deploying projects efficiently, not about undercutting environmental standards. Regulatory delay for permitting infrastructure, energy and environmental projects is a hidden tax on Americans,” Sen. Ricketts said. “As Governor, one of the things I did to be able to help streamline this was I implemented a process called Lean Six Sigma. It’s about streamlining the process, which we’ve been all talking about here today. So, for example, we can’t change environmental regulations for the state, but we could look at the process. It was 110 steps long, for example, to issue an air construction permit. We cut that down to 22 and cut the time delay down for issuing that permit from 190 days to just 65 days. Those are the kind of reforms that are possible.”