President Donald Trump’s point person on permitting isn’t just keeping her office running in the midst of an almost monthlong shutdown that’s ground the government to a standstill.
Emily Domenech, a Hill veteran and executive director of the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council, is also calling some of the hundreds of thousands of furloughed workers back to ensure Trump’s priority projects — including mines in Idaho and Utah — move forward.
“I’d say it’s probably about a dozen people that we brought back across agencies,” Domenech told POLITICO’s E&E News. “We’ve also been working with agencies to, frankly, identify staff that are critical to bring back.”
The permitting shop’s ongoing work is yet another example of the Trump administration plowing ahead with work on its energy priorities, even as a government shutdown drags on. The administration is pushing that agenda right as federal workers at agencies needed to review projects leave in droves through retirements and layoffs.
Domenech oversees a team of 20 political and career staffers at the permitting council, an independent agency created in 2015 under the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, or FAST Act. Tasked with improving coordination between agencies for environmental reviews and approvals of big infrastructure projects, the council includes Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought; Katherine Scarlett, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality; and representatives from more than a dozen federal agencies.
Congress funds the group’s work through the Environmental Review Improvement Fund using annual appropriations and laws like the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, which set aside $350 million for the council’s activities. The group also has the limited ability to shift funding to other agencies like the U.S. Forest Service to support the efficient and timely permitting of FAST-41 projects, Domenech added.
“We’re fortunate that we have no-year and multiyear funding here in our Environmental Review Improvement Fund [and] are able to keep operating during the shutdown,” she said.
Domenech, whose office is a block away from the White House, talked with E&E News about wins, challenges, and marching on during the shutdown:
How are you making projects move faster?
In many cases, a number of our transparency projects have been waiting for years for some of these permits. Transparency works both for the public, but also for federal agencies to see which priorities are being identified by the White House, by the permitting council. It makes it harder for a project to sort of get lost in the pile of applications in a field office.
We just finished permitting … the Perpetua stibnite gold project in Idaho, they had been waiting for their last permit for almost a decade with not a lot of real information on why it wasn’t getting done. … We listed it … in May and completed federal permitting in July, and then moved forward to the construction phase in these last few weeks.
Almost entirely, we were able to finish that project in that time frame, almost entirely because it had been sitting in a pile of projects in a field office, and the field staffer thought they were going to get sued and didn’t want to put the work into completing that project.
How do you enlist the help of other agencies during the shutdown?
We’re able to fund ongoing operations at other agencies.
They’re not our employees or detailees … but we can provide funding to agencies through interagency agreements to pay employees to do work that’s in support of Fast-41, so we have transfer authority in our original statute, it’s been there since 2015 when Congress stood up the permitting council.
Sometimes we fund [full-time employees] to do work on the ground to help a project move faster if there aren’t available staff to do the work they need. A good example is the U.S. Forest Service, which has really been building out its mining review capacity. In some cases, they needed to hire contractors to do that. Sometimes we fund technology improvements to reduce man hours and make projects move forward faster.
Talk about the council’s focus on mining.
When the Trump administration began, we started with one mining project, the South32 Hermosa project in Arizona, which is a great project and we’re excited to finish it next year.
But now we have 48 mining projects on the permitting dashboard. So we’ve gone from one to 48 in a matter of months. And more impressive, six of those projects that we’ve listed have completed federal [permitting].
It’s an exciting example of how using our transparency dashboard authority, for the first time, that was established by Congress 10 years ago, never used before. Now that has really been an effective tool for moving mining projects across the country. We have set ourselves a goal of getting to 50 projects by the end of the year.
What about renewable projects?
We have some renewable projects that are on the dashboard currently. We have a number of solar projects, for example, that are already on the dashboard.
We haven’t gotten a draft application from a solar project in a while. It’s industry driven, so it kind of is a little bit dependent on what we get. The mining sector, for example, we’ve gotten tons of interest because we’ve shown some progress in that area and shown the value for Fast-41, same is true on the pipeline side of our portfolio.
What are some of what you consider your biggest wins?
We completed two of our Fast-41 transparency projects, have completed permitting during the shutdown, and that’s entirely because we were able to help to focus those agencies, to provide funding, if necessary, to bring folks back so that they could continue working on them and keeping them on time.
We completed the Caldwell Canyon mining project, and then we just completed the Lisbon Valley copper project’s expansion permitting. We’ve also been able to list two more mining projects on the permitting dashboard. We listed the Donlin gold project late on Friday … and the Kilbourne graphite project.
We’re getting new projects and completing them at a pace that, frankly, the council’s never operated at before.
What about roadblocks?
I’m a longtime congressional staffer. I worked on permitting for a really long time. You could always come up with a litany of potential roadblocks, but I think it’s the same things you always hear.
Much of what the permitting council solves is agencies that are just simply not on the same page … doing redundant reviews, not coordinating, not sharing their best practices, or not sharing what their findings are in a timely manner, and that just slows down the process.
We’re doing environmental reviews that are required by the law in the most efficient way possible. And frankly, you kind of need a task master to keep people focused on that. Otherwise it’s really easy to get stuck in the federal system.
What do you think will happen on Capitol Hill?
It’s wonderful to see folks like [House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.)] really moving the needle early to get their legislation out into the public, to get comments, get input, to start that legislative process.
I think there’s a lot of interest in solving the permitting challenges that we can’t solve from the executive [side]. There’s a lot we can do to move things forward and to ensure things get built during President Trump’s term. But … we can’t fix judicial review, and Congress needs to address that issue.
Again, It’s great to see [Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W. Va.)] and Chairman Westerman, particularly, really sort of moving forward on this issue. I’m hopeful that since we’re doing it in the first session of the Congress, not second, maybe we’ll get better luck than previous years. But it’s always a little bit hard to predict the congressional tea leaves, especially in the middle of a shutdown.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
