Nineteen former US officials who served across six presidential administrations have written to Congress urging it to pass a sweeping energy-permitting bill, warning that the United States risks losing its technological and industrial race with China if factories, transmission lines and energy projects keep taking years to approve, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The signatories cross party lines in a way Washington rarely produces: former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from the first Trump administration, former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen from the Biden administration, former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former defence and CIA chief Leon Panetta, and Stephen Miran, a former Federal Reserve governor appointed by President Trump. The letter was organised by Arnab Datta of the Institute for Progress think tank and addressed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“While the United States retains enormous advantages in technology, capital markets, attracting the world's talent, entrepreneurship, and natural resources, those advantages matter less if a company cannot build a factory quickly enough to reach market or if the infrastructure required to power it takes five, ten, or fifteen years to plan and complete,” the letter said. Miran put it more bluntly in an interview: “If we don't have abundant cheap energy it's just too expensive to manufacture here, and we'd be ceding a massive advantage to our competitors and adversaries,” including China.

Source: KuCoin News / wire summary

A Senate vote — and a split among supporters

The Senate is expected to take a procedural vote on the bipartisan permitting bill after lawmakers return from recess. A new interactive analysis from Columbia University's Center on Global Energy Policy, released Wednesday, projects that transmission projects would gain the most time if the bill becomes law. The centre's founding director, Jason Bordoff, has urged environmentalists not to oppose the bill, while some environmental groups argue that faster reviews would come at the expense of essential protections.

The push has Republican champions in the Senate as well. Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania said at a Hudson Institute event that permitting reform is “the single most important thing we could do for national security,” arguing that an energy project can take five-and-a-half to six years in the US against less than six months in China, Nextgov reported. Congress is currently on recess until after next month's midterm elections, so any vote would come in the lame-duck session.

Source: Nextgov

For readers in the diaspora, the stakes are practical: permitting speed decides how fast new transmission lines, semiconductor plants and AI data centres — and the construction and trucking work that comes with them — can actually be built in the states where many Punjabi families now live and work.