Median elapsed time from permit application to construction start has roughly doubled over the past decade for large infrastructure. No single statute did this.
It is the interaction: federal environmental review, state siting, local zoning, and the litigation window that attaches to each. Any one of them is tractable. Sequentially, with standing to challenge at every stage, they compound.
Nobody voted for a seven-year review. It is the emergent product of four processes that each looked reasonable in isolation.
Reform proposals have generally targeted the federal layer, which is the most visible and often not the binding one. In several documented cases the federal review completed years before local siting resolved.
The politics are genuinely hard because the same procedural rights that delay a transmission line also delay a project a community has good reason to oppose. There is no version of this that only blocks the projects you dislike.
