OPINION:
Unified government with one-party rule rarely lasts. The groundwork that President Trump laid in his first term, combined with Republican majorities on Capitol Hill, enabled quick energy-sector wins when Mr. Trump returned to office almost two years ago.
Yet in just a few weeks, one-party Republican rule in Washington will be over for this term. This stark reality must sink in as Congress takes up bipartisan permitting reform legislation crafted with the White House.
The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026 represents a meaningful improvement over our current federal permitting chaos. If it is not enacted by the time this Congress ends, the prospects for permitting reform will be effectively dead. That is because opportunities for members of Congress and the administration to enact permitting improvements into law are extraordinarily rare.
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It could be decades before the opportunity returns. Just ask a former Republican chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee whether he regrets rejecting what he considered a too-modest improvement of the Endangered Species Act during the late 1990s. The law still awaits the update that has never occurred.
Passing permitting reform now is a critical first step to ensure that the law is properly enacted and cannot be gutted in the future. With two years remaining in Mr. Trump’s second term, regulators will have the necessary runway to implement the law in a manner consistent with its authors’ intent.
During Mr. Trump’s first term, when I served as deputy secretary and then secretary of the Department of the Interior, a 2017 reconciliation law opened a portion of the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to energy development, a longtime Republican goal. Those of us at Interior spent nearly three years developing a plan and held the first congressionally directed lease sale a few weeks before Mr. Trump left office.
Likewise, we spent years developing a plan for oil and gas operations in the National Petroleum Reserve, Alaska, which was finalized in 2020.
On Day 1 of the Biden administration, President Biden threw a wrench into those plans. His Interior Department suspended the coastal plain program and began returning the nearby National Petroleum Reserve to a more restrictive framework.
By 2023, the Biden Interior Department had canceled the leases held by an Alaska state development authority, a move a judge later invalidated. Interior also closed about three-fourths of the coastal plain to development.
Roaring back into office in 2025, Mr. Trump issued his own order directing that Interior restore his 2020 plans for both areas. Then the Republican Congress decided to do some heavy lifting. Signed in July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act required, based on plans crafted in 2020, four coastal plain lease sales and at least five sales of 4 million acres each in the petroleum reserve.
Congress also used the Congressional Review Act to void the Biden-era plans for both areas, which bars Interior from reissuing anything substantially similar without new authority.
Mr. Trump’s historic return to the Oval Office gave him a second chance to extend and expand his first-term tax cuts and to restore key pieces of his first administration’s energy policy.
Still, such second chances are few and far between.
Not since President Cleveland’s return to the White House in 1893 had a president come back after his successor was sworn in — until Mr. Trump did so in January 2025. Yet unlike Cleveland — whose tariff bill was substantially changed by Congress and allowed to become law without his signature — the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act already has the support of the White House and key congressional leaders. It has already been thoroughly debated and is primed for passage in its current form.
With time running out on Republican control of Congress, it is critical that we get permitting reform done now — to put it beyond the reach of a future interior secretary or president who might try to gut it. A reversal could then occur only through subsequent congressional action and presidential signature.
That is why Congress and the administration should put permitting reform at the top of the list during the 119th Congress’ lame-duck session.
• David Bernhardt was nominated by President Trump and served as the 53rd secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior from 2019 to 2021. He is the only person to be confirmed to serve as the secretary, deputy secretary and solicitor of the U.S. Department of the Interior.
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