Lummis, Colleagues Introduce Bipartisan, Bicameral Highway Permitting Reform Legislation

U.S. Senators Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Mark Kelly (D-AZ), along with Representative Dusty Johnson (R-SD) introduced the Interactive Federal Review Act. The legislation would direct the Federal Highway Administration to select a minimum of ten federal highway projects to demonstrate the use of interactive, digital, cloud-based platforms in carrying out the environmental analysis and community engagement processes required in Federal Highway Administration projects.

Senator Lummis said that people in Wyoming should not have to wait for the better part of a decade for improvements to the roads they rely on very day and that we use streamlined technology for nearly every part of our lives, so it only makes sense that the environmental review process saves some paper and occurs online as well.

According to a media release from Lummis, the Interactive Federal Review Act would address one of the root causes of the delays of environmental reviews for infrastructure projects by moving the development of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) documents from trading static PDFs over email to interactive, cloud-based platforms. These digital tools are estimated to shorten the cumulative amount of time spent reviewing documents on traditional schedules for large projects by 50 percent through real-time, concurrent reviews by agencies and more transparency of the NEPA process for impacted communities and individuals.