December 5, 2025
U.S. House of Representatives
Washington, DC 20515
Re: Oppose H.R. 3898 the PERMIT Act, H.R. 4776 the SPEED Act, and other anti-environmental legislation (H.R. 3668, H.R. 3628, H.R. 3616, H.R. 3632)
Dear Representative:
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) believes that everyone has a right to clean air, clean water, public lands, and a safe climate protected by a just and equitable democracy. Each year, LCV publishes the National Environmental Scorecard, which details the voting records of members of Congress on environmental legislation. The Scorecard is distributed to LCV members, concerned voters nationwide, and the media.
We urge you to OPPOSE the following anti-environmental bills when they come up for votes in the House. These bills fail to address skyrocketing energy costs, the Trump administration’s efforts to ban wind and solar energy, and other challenges holding back clean energy deployment. The bills also attempt to cut out community engagement, public input and legal redress through the courts, all while advantaging polluting and expensive fossil fuel projects and facilities.
Clean energy is the fastest and cheapest way to bring new energy online, increase energy supply at a time of historic demand, and lower energy costs. The PERMIT Act, SPEED Act, and all the other pro-polluter bills do nothing to support clean energy deployment; they neither restart the consultations and permitting for clean energy projects the administration has unilaterally banned nor address the urgent need for new and improvements to transmission lines to connect new clean energy projects to our grids. The bills also do nothing to address the most significant previously existing permitting bottlenecks: the understaffed and under-resourced permitting agencies, which have been made significantly worse by the administration’s attacks on the federal workforce. The best way to address the energy affordability crisis is to build clean, affordable energy that creates jobs and protects the health of our communities; not create more ways to further advantage expensive fossil fuels.
- H.R. 3898, the Promoting Efficient Review for Modern Infrastructure Today (PERMIT) Act, would shield polluters who dump into or destroy our streams, lakes, wetlands and other waters from responsibility, passing the burden of pollution and costs onto downstream communities. The legislation would hamstring states’ and Tribes’ ability to prevent harm to their critical waterbodies; make it easier for polluters to dump pollutants like PFAS into our waters; allow the US Army Corps to exclude any waterbody from Clean Water Act protections; eliminate EPA’s ability to stop the most devastating projects; fast-track permitting for destructive oil and gas pipelines; allow massive amounts of pesticides into waters; and severely limit judicial review and public input. Unfortunately, at a time when our waters are more vulnerable than ever, this legislation prioritizes polluters instead of our public health, and would especially impact low-income communities and communities of color. This bill’s suite of anti-clean water provisions represents one of the largest congressional assaults yet on our clean water safeguards.
- H.R. 4776, the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act, would turn the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) into a box-checking exercise, in direct conflict with congressional intent that it deliver improved environmental outcomes and community engagement in the design and completion of large projects. It would restrict what federal agencies can consider when evaluating the environmental and public health consequences of major proposed projects, including removing agencies’ ability to incorporate new scientific analysis during reviews and limiting agencies’ environmental analysis to near-term and proximate impacts. It would give project sponsors the power to deny an agency’s request for a reasonable extension to complete an environmental review. The SPEED Act would also limit public input and legal recourse by imposing narrow procedural requirements that make it much harder for impacted parties and communities to raise concerns or challenge flawed environmental reviews or permit decisions in court, including effectively denying communities their day in court by cutting the window for filing lawsuits down from six years to an unreasonably short 150 days and prohibiting courts from challenging agency environmental findings.
- H.R. 3668, the Improving Interagency Coordination for Pipeline Reviews Act, would create rushed timelines for pipelines to be reviewed and approved, after attempts to create a pay-to-play permitting scheme were abandoned from this year’s budget reconciliation bill H.R. 1, and would limit harmed communities from having a say in the process. Specifically, it would undermine federal and state agencies’ power to safeguard our lands and waters by expanding the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) authority over reviews and approvals of methane gas pipelines. By undermining and transferring key Clean Water Act and National Environmental Policy Act authorities on permitting methane pipelines to FERC, an agency that has almost never turned down a pipeline project, the bill would subvert environmental protections to benefit Big Oil and Gas executives. H.R. 3668 would allow FERC to institute insufficient deadlines for other agencies’ reviews, require simultaneous agency and state reviews, and wield unprecedented power in resolving disputes between agencies–all to expedite destructive, dangerous methane gas and oil pipeline expansion.
LCV opposes the following trio of bills that preference dirty, expensive fossil fuel electricity generation over affordable clean energy:
- H.R. 3628, the State Planning for Reliability and Affordability Act, would require states covered by Integrated Resource Plans to favor fossil fuel fired power plants over wind and solar generation in their plans to ensure electricity reliability. The bill attempts to legislate fossil fuel companies’ misinformation that wind and solar projects are less reliable than fossil fuel plants, while the evidence shows the opposite. Coal plants shut down unexpectedly at twice the rate of wind turbines, and the most recently completed coal plant in the U.S. recently had such a major malfunction that it is completely shut down for more than a year to be fixed. Frigid temperatures and winter ice storms frequently shut down methane gas plants, but solar panels are able to keep generating power. And when paired with long duration battery storage, clean affordable wind and solar electricity can be provided to the grid instantaneously when needed, whereas fossil plants need hours to ramp up their electricity generation.
- H.R. 3616, the Reliable Power Act, would give the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) the over-reaching authority to suggest changes and block any rule from any other agency if it relates to any electricity generation resource. There are already statutory requirements that other agencies consider the impact to the electricity sector in developing agency actions, and no agency has this sort of broad veto power. Providing FERC this undue authority would unfairly skew the process in favor of utilities and grid operators, and take decisions on air and water pollution and other important safeguards further away from the public’s awareness, input, and oversight.
- H.R. 3632, the Power Plant Reliability Act, would concentrate in FERC broad powers to require utilities to continue operating electricity generation assets for five years, or upon extension, up to 10 years, if FERC finds the interstate supply of electricity of any utility is likely to be insufficient in the next five years. It would also require notice of planned retirement of generation assets 5 years in advance, locking utilities into expensive fossil fuel power plants well beyond reasonable predictions about their volatile fuel costs, and leaving customers to foot the bill. This is a huge giveaway to polluting power plants that will hit ratepayers hard; experts estimate that keeping open for years power plants slated for retirement would cost customers additional billions of dollars. A recent cautionary tale is the Campbell coal-fired power plant, which the Trump administration has ordered to stay open — at the cost of more than $600,000 per day — when closing the plant would have ultimately saved consumers money.
For all these reasons, we urge you to vote NO on H.R. 3898, H.R. 4776, H.R. 3668, H.R. 3628, H.R. 3616, and H.R. 3632. LCV will strongly consider including votes on these bills in our 2025 National Environmental Scorecard. If you would like more information, please reach out to a member of our government relations team.
Sincerely,
Pete Maysmith
President
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