While Congress stalled on the SPEED Act, five federal agencies rewrote American permitting from the inside. The revolution is administrative, not legislative. The variable is litigation.
The SPEED Act passed the House on December 18, 2025, by a vote of 221 to 196. It was supposed to be the permitting reform that unlocked American infrastructure. Then Senate Democrats halted negotiations after the administration paused five offshore wind projects. The legislation has been stalled since.
The revolution happened anyway.
In the first five months of 2026, at least five federal agencies adopted new or cross-agency categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act. FERC adopted five from the Tennessee Valley Authority for transmission infrastructure. The Department of Energy created one for advanced nuclear reactors. The Air Force adopted 27 from seven other agencies. The Bureau of Land Management established one for geothermal exploration. And on April 9, the Council on Environmental Quality issued guidance telling every agency to do what these agencies had already done: adopt each other's categorical exclusions, without public comment.
The permitting bottleneck that has delayed transmission lines, power plants, data centers, and clean energy projects for decades is cracking. Not from Capitol Hill. From the agencies themselves.
What categorical exclusions are
Under NEPA, every federal action that might affect the environment requires review. The most common form, used for roughly 95% of federal actions, is a categorical exclusion. A CE is a determination that a category of actions does not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the environment. Projects that qualify skip the environmental assessment and environmental impact statement process entirely.
The traditional bottleneck was establishing new CEs. Each agency had its own rulemaking, usually with public comment periods that stretched over years. The 2023 amendments to NEPA (42 U.S.C. §4336c) authorized agencies to adopt other agencies' existing CEs. CEQ's April 2026 guidance accelerated this by explicitly discouraging agencies from soliciting public comment when adopting another agency's CE.
The practical effect: a CE that took one agency five years to establish can now be adopted by another agency in weeks.
The timeline
February 2, 2026. The Department of Energy establishes a new CE for advanced nuclear reactors, covering siting, construction, operation, and decommissioning. Projects that meet safety thresholds for fission product inventory, fuel type, and reactor design skip the NEPA process entirely. Comment period closes March 4.
February 24. FERC adopts five CEs from the Tennessee Valley Authority for electric infrastructure. TVA's CE 16 covers new transmission lines up to 10 miles, substations, and interconnection facilities, with up to 125 acres of ground disturbance. Effective March 22.
Same day. The Department of the Air Force adopts 27 CEs from seven agencies: 16 from DOE, plus CEs from USGS, the Forest Service, NRCS, DOI, BLM, and the Farm Service Agency. It is the largest single cross-agency CE adoption on record.
April 7. USDA finalizes its NEPA implementing procedures.
April 9. CEQ issues updated guidance replacing the 2010 framework. The key change: agencies should adopt cross-agency CEs and should not solicit public comment when doing so. Publication in the Federal Register is sufficient.
April 28. BLM establishes a CE for small-scale geothermal exploration on federal land, covering operations that disturb up to 10 acres. Geophysical surveys, core drilling, and temperature gradient wells proceed without environmental assessment.
Five agencies. Five months. Most of it happened before CEQ told them to. The guidance codified momentum already underway.
Why it matters for infrastructure
Executive Order 14318, signed July 23, 2025, directed agencies to accelerate permitting for data center infrastructure. Its implementation deadline of July 1, 2026 is five weeks away. The CE adoptions are part of the response.
But the implications go beyond data centers. Transmission capacity is the binding constraint on American electricity. The average time to permit and build a new transmission line stretches 10 to 14 years. FERC's adoption of TVA's CE 16 means new transmission infrastructure up to 10 miles, with associated substations, can proceed without an environmental assessment or impact statement. For qualifying projects, that compresses years into months.
For nuclear, the DOE CE means advanced reactor projects that meet safety thresholds face one regulatory review (NRC licensing under Part 53, finalized January 2026), not two. The NEPA bottleneck is gone.
For geothermal, the BLM CE removes the review requirement for initial exploration on public land. Small-scale exploration is the prerequisite for larger development. Accelerating the first stage accelerates the entire pipeline.
The litigation variable
There is one force that can reverse this: the courts.
CEQ's April guidance explicitly discouraged public comment on adopted CEs. But the Administrative Procedure Act may require it independently of NEPA. Federal courts issue 100 to 140 NEPA decisions per year. An agency's failure to solicit public comment on a new or adopted CE creates litigation risk for both the agency and any applicant relying on it.
The legal question is specific: can an agency adopt another agency's CE and apply it to projects without ever soliciting public input? The 2023 NEPA amendments authorized cross-agency adoption. CEQ's 2026 guidance says comment is unnecessary. Environmental groups will argue that the APA's notice-and-comment requirements apply regardless of what NEPA says.
If courts uphold the no-comment approach, the permitting landscape has permanently changed. If they strike it down, agencies will need notice-and-comment rulemaking for each adoption. That does not kill the reform. Cross-agency adoption remains authorized. But it adds years of delay to each one, returning agencies to something closer to the old timeline.
The first test cases will likely target the largest adoptions: FERC's transmission CEs and DOE's nuclear CE. Expect litigation before the end of 2026.
Who benefits, who's exposed
Transmission developers gain the most. FERC's adoption of TVA's CEs directly addresses the bottleneck constraining grid expansion. Companies building lines that connect new generation to load centers operate on shorter timelines. Nuclear developers with advanced designs meeting DOE safety thresholds face one regulatory process instead of two. Geothermal exploration on federal land starts without the review step that previously delayed the first stage of development.
The companies most exposed are the ones that break ground under the new CEs before the legal questions are resolved. If a court invalidates a CE after a project has started construction, that project faces a retroactive environmental review. The speed benefit accrues immediately. The legal challenge unfolds over years. The asymmetry is real.
The structural lesson
Congress spent years debating the SPEED Act. Agencies acted in months. This is not a story about political will. It is a story about institutional mechanics. Legislative reform requires consensus across hundreds of legislators with competing interests. Administrative reform requires agency heads reading an executive order and deciding that their existing authority allows them to act.
The risk mirrors the speed. Administrative reforms are easier to reverse than legislative ones. A future administration's CEQ could withdraw the April 2026 guidance. A court could void CEs adopted without public comment. What Congress enacts is durable. What agencies establish is contingent.
The infrastructure being permitted under these CEs operates on 30-to-50-year horizons. The permitting regime authorizing them may not last 30 months. That gap between the lifespan of the asset and the lifespan of the permission is the central tension. Every project approved under the new CEs is a bet that the legal and administrative framework will hold long enough to matter.
Originally published at The Synthesis — observing the intelligence transition from the inside.
