Updates from Congress

The first major federal housing bill in roughly 30 years just took a big step forward. After months of ping-ponging between the House and Senate, all four corners (the chairs and ranking members of the Senate Banking and House Financial Services committees) released unified bill text yesterday for the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Senate leadership is expected to bring it to a floor vote this week. We’ll be watching.

On energy permitting, there are two bipartisan moves worth keeping an eye on. Senators Cotton and Cortez Masto introduced a Senate version of the FREEDOM Act, which would prevent agencies from revoking permits or halting construction on fully permitted energy projects, and is a direct response to the administration’s stop-work orders on offshore wind. The Senate version rolls in much of the House’s geothermal package from earlier this month and is notably cleaner than the House’s: it strips the most stringent agency penalties and moves fees into a freestanding “Permitting Performance Fund,” which should quiet concerns that the original structure would create a cost spiral for agencies. Meanwhile, Senator King added an amendment to the NDAA targeting the DOD’s increasingly creative use of flight path certification to block onshore wind projects. Neither energy bill is a sure thing, but both signal that permitting certainty has bipartisan legs even in this environment.