Interior Secretary Burgum and Sen. McCormick Push Energy Permitting Overhaul, Citing $1.5 Trillion in Stalled Investment

Interior Secretary Burgum and Sen. McCormick Push Energy Permitting Overhaul, Citing $1.5 Trillion in Stalled Investment

The Setup

On May 11, 2026, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Senator Dave McCormick (R-PA) sat down with Breitbart News for a policy forum called "Harnessing American Power." The event was a right-leaning production with right-leaning speakers. Here are the facts.

The Permitting Problem Is Real

McCormick cited a figure from his office: $1.5 trillion in private capital is currently stranded — sitting idle — because investors can't get energy projects through the federal permitting process.

Over 650 projects are currently listed on the federal Permitting Dashboard. Construction costs run 24 to 30 percent higher when projects are delayed. Roughly 51 percent of manufacturers say permitting uncertainty actively discourages them from expanding U.S. capacity, and 66 percent say they would invest more if the process were faster, according to an industry report cited by McCormick.

The average permit takes five to six years. McCormick compared the timeline to World War II, which took three and a half years.

In Pennsylvania alone, three energy projects were killed — not rejected on environmental grounds after review, but abandoned because companies couldn't survive the permitting timeline.

Burgum's BLM Backlog

Burgum revealed that the Bureau of Land Management's Carlsbad district in New Mexico inherited 5,600 unprocessed drilling permit applications — from companies that had already won lease auctions and paid the U.S. government, only to wait indefinitely. The law requires quarterly lease sales on public lands. The Biden-era BLM apparently treated the follow-on permitting as optional.

Burgum says his team reduced that backlog by 91 percent. If accurate, that represents a significant operational improvement.

The Strategic Angle

McCormick framed the issue geopolitically. China depends heavily on Iranian energy flowing through the Strait of Hormuz. Russia funds its war in Ukraine partly through European energy dependence. Burgum said the U.S. has already displaced roughly two-thirds of Russian gas in Europe with American LNG exports.

If those displacement numbers hold — and they align with European energy data from 2022 onward — the U.S. energy sector has delivered a foreign policy advantage that received minimal mainstream coverage.

What the Left Would Argue — And They're Not Wrong to Argue It

Environmental groups like the Sierra Club and Earthjustice contend the permitting timeline reflects the Clean Water Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and related laws working as designed. Those laws exist because of documented harm: contaminated aquifers, methane leaks, pipeline spills.

Many legal challenges to energy projects have succeeded in court — meaning judges agreed there were legitimate environmental concerns, not just procedural delays.

Progressive economists push back on the framing that energy transition is unrealistic. States like California and Texas have added massive renewable capacity. Wind energy now accounts for a significant share of Texas grid power, according to ERCOT data. The argument that renewables are purely "intermittent" and unreliable is increasingly incomplete.

Burgum's North Dakota example, where a $1.2 billion data center reportedly lowered local electric rates, is a genuine data point. But data center opponents in other states point to cases where grid strain and water consumption created real local costs.

What Mainstream Media Got Wrong

Left-leaning outlets largely ignored this event, which is a coverage failure. The permitting reform argument, the $1.5 trillion in stranded capital, the LNG displacement of Russian gas — these are policy-relevant numbers that deserve scrutiny.

Right-leaning coverage from Breitbart presented Burgum and McCormick's claims without challenge. That's what you'd expect from a house-produced event transcript.

The actual story lies in the middle: the permitting system IS broken and IS costing real money and jobs, AND environmental safeguards exist for real reasons, AND both things can be true simultaneously.

McCormick's Bill

In April 2026, McCormick introduced the Unlock American Energy and Jobs Act, which would cap the federal permitting review process at one year and make decisions binding once issued. Whether that bill advances through the Senate is the story to watch.

Looking Forward

Five-year permitting timelines for pipelines and transmission lines aren't protecting the environment — they're protecting the status quo. $1.5 trillion in stalled investment has real consequences for American workers, energy prices, and national security. Those facts deserve serious debate in mainstream media.

But eliminating environmental review entirely — where some of this rhetoric points — creates a different set of problems. The answer isn't five years or zero years. It's a functioning system that makes a decision, commits to it, and defends it in court if challenged.

America currently has neither.