Abundance Movement Spurs Rare US Bipartisan Push for Permitting Reform

The “Abundance” movement is a bipartisan push to speed permitting and remove what supporters call artificial regulatory constraints that they say have contributed to rising housing, energy and food costs by restricting supply. Proponents argue that permitting backlogs and regulatory barriers reduce market entry and production, raising prices and prompting some traditionally pro-regulation Democrats to join free-market reformers. Data cited include a rise in median time for top-level federal permits from roughly two years in 2010 to nearly five years in 2016, grid interconnection delays growing from under two years to about five, and some projects (like new mines) facing average timelines measured in decades. Clean-energy projects are disproportionately affected: about 12% of renewables permitted by the Bureau of Land Management required an environmental impact statement versus 0.3% for oil and gas, and in 2023 roughly 90% of energy-related projects on the federal permitting dashboard were for clean energy while only 3% were for fossil fuels, a gap attributed to investor shifts and larger footprints of clean projects.