Emily Domenech leads an interagency staff devoted to helping companies navigate the bureaucratic maze of permitting.
A small, interagency council is at the forefront of the Trump administration’s attempt to unleash American industry through the reduction of burdensome rules and regulations.
Permitting Council executive director Emily Domenech leads an interagency staff fully devoted to helping companies navigate the bureaucratic maze of permitting in order to speed up development timelines. In a wide-ranging interview last week, Domenech spoke with National Review about her staff’s work product and how they navigate existing permitting rules on the federal and state level to help companies get complex projects over the finish line.
“If you have a president who really wants to get things built and use every tool, then we’re a pretty effective agency,” Domenech said, crediting President Trump’s support for unleashing the agency’s potential. Trump’s mandate for the agency is a stark contrast to the Biden administration’s pro-regulatory outlook, which limited the permitting council’s effectiveness.
“If you have a president who is more interested in adding new regulations or new requirements, then it’s very sleepy, and they don’t accomplish a lot.”
During the first year of Trump’s term, Domenech said the council has completed permitting on 13 projects, compared to 17 over the four years President Biden held office.
Congress established the permitting council in 2015 as an independent federal agency designed to help the president get more projects built. It functions as a “sherpa” to guide companies through the regulatory labyrinth of the environmental review process. Rather than changing the law, the permitting council works within it, using every tool at its disposal to accelerate the review process. Her agency is tasked solely with executing the president’s permitting policy across sectors.
An example Domenech cites is Trump’s executive order on the mining sector signed last March. Trump ordered the permitting council to include mining projects as transparency projects on its permitting dashboard. In response, the permitting council began listing mining projects on the dashboard, which now includes 53 of them. Nine projects have finished the permitting process in the past year, a rapid turnaround for a sector where projects can take decades to get through permitting requirements.
The permitting council’s main program is Fast-41, a process companies apply for if they have a large-scale infrastructure project that meets certain criteria. The company has to come from one of 19 sectors under the council’s purview and it must have an investment of $200 million or more. Moreover, the project must trigger federal permitting requirements within the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) or another federal law. If a company applies, the permitting council has 14 days to determine whether the project qualifies for assistance. Afterwards, the council takes 60 days to determine the project’s permitting timetable and how it will navigate federal permitting.
As part of that process, the council figures out the lead federal agency, cooperating agencies, and states and tribes with permitting interests. The permitting council posts project timetables on the federal permitting dashboard and puts staff on every single project to ensure it is getting necessary tasks done on time. Domenech estimates the efficiency of the permitting council’s work allows companies to get projects done 25 percent faster than those that go through the regular federal permitting process.
“We don’t have any shortcuts. We don’t get rid of any permits. Every project that comes to my dashboard has to go through the same requirements they would, whether we supported them or not. We just make the process more coordinated and more efficient, and that’s what makes it faster,” she said.
Domenech’s team is able to navigate the intricacies of the NEPA process depending on the specifics of a certain project. For example, Domenech’s team worked on the Cobra Master Development Plan, a Fast-41 natural gas pipeline that goes through Texas’s Sabine National Forest. Her team is using two categorical exclusions to help the project get done 18 months ahead of schedule while obtaining the appropriate permitting and working with the Forest Service.
Domenech’s work helping companies navigate the permitting process has received praise from Graphite One, a company developing an all-American graphite supply chain to revitalize U.S. production of the critical mineral, as NR previously reported. Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy (R) also praised Domenech in an interview with National Review last month.
Behind the scenes, Domenech’s staff advocates for its projects in meetings with the relevant agencies. The formal permitting council itself features deputy secretaries from 13 regulatory agencies, which allows Domenech to easily get in touch with senior agency leaders if something needs to get done and a roadblock forms along the way.
Although it’s a small agency, Domenech believes the permitting council’s work on making it easier to build things in America is essential to advancing any of the administration’s top priorities.
“We will simply not beat China and or maintain American prosperity if we cannot ensure that we can develop our natural resources, build large infrastructure that supports our economic growth, and, you ensure that we are developing, innovating, producing and manufacturing new technologies in this country. All of those things tie back to federal permitting,” Domenech asserted.
“The federal government has been an impediment to innovators and developers moving things forward in this country, and President Trump is really committed to changing that. We want the federal government to be a partner for those folks and the permitting council really does serve as an advocate inside the federal government and a complex bureaucratic system to help those developers move things forward.”
Given the Trump administration’s sense of urgency, Domenech knows the federal government cannot wait for Congress to pass a much-needed permitting reform package. She believes artificial intelligence will become vital for government agencies and project developers working on these projects to navigate the permitting process even faster. In the meantime, her agency will do whatever it can to further Trump’s mission to build as much as possible.