The New Bill That Might Be Trump 2.0’s Biggest Accomplishment

Donald Trump ran on a promise to end job-killing regulation, and now is the moment when we’re within sight of the fulfilment of that promise.

Twilight Patriot | October 20, 2026

Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering a bill called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act. That isn’t a very descriptive name, but the author of a fine Substack called Energy Talking Points has a better one — he calls it “Freedom-to-Build legislation,” and says that it’s the biggest attempt at permitting reform that the United States has made in 46 years.

One weird thing about this law is that it’s supported by pro-business and libertarian think tanks, like the Cato Institute, and also by a lot of left-wing NGOs like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. How could such an odd alliance come together? Well, the short answer is that it involved some hardball politicking by an administration that takes its job a lot more seriously than any previous Republican administration of my lifetime.

But first, an explanation is in order of why permitting reform is so necessary, and why overhauling the system could reduce the cost of living and create hundreds of thousands of new American jobs.

At present, if you want to build a large infrastructure project in the U.S., such as a railway, power line, pipeline, wind farm, road, mine, or refinery, then you have to get a lot of permits, from federal agencies like the EPA, as well as from the state and the city that you’re in. But that on its own isn’t newsworthy — every country has building codes, pollution limits, and some form of environmental protection law.

But America is different from countries like Japan, Canada, and Australia (which have been outcompeting us in physical industry for a long time) because, in the United States (due to laws like NEPA that were signed by the traitorous Nixon Administration in the 1970s):

The environmental laws are vague. If you’re a builder, you must produce “environmental impact statements” (EISs) that spend hundreds or thousands of pages listing ways that your project might affect the environment, without any clear guidance on what impacts are and aren’t acceptable.

Building permits are easy to revoke if there’s a change in the administration. And it’s hard to persuade........

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