Bruce Westerman: “Again, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding. I do rise in support of this amendment. H.R. 1 would allow…”

“Again, I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania for yielding. I do rise in support of this amendment. H.R. 1 would allow non-Federal entities to provide money to certain Federal agencies to improve permitting efficiency. This good-governance amendment, offered by my friend from Pennsylvania, would require the Secretaries who accept this money to report on where it came from and how much was provided. I think there is some confusion about the intent of what is in H.R. 1 about speeding up permitting. Mr. Chair, before I came to Congress, I did engineering work for over two decades. I am a professional engineer, so I worked on a lot of projects where permits were required. Fortunately, we were working with State permitting agencies, and we would hear the same argument from the State permitting agencies: We don't have enough resources and enough people to do these permits. It is going to take longer. A lot of States have programs where they allow the entity trying to attain the permit to pay money to the agency so their employees can work overtime. It is really a way to increase the resources and get more out of the resources. It is not degrading the environmental protections at all. It is just moving the process forward at a faster rate. That is what the intent of H.R.…”