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As a retired U.S. Army Colonel and former commander in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, with decades of experience delivering critical infrastructure projects, I have seen firsthand what it takes to build safely, efficiently, and responsibly.
Whether it's a bridge, power plant, transmission line, or military installation, every project depends on investors willing to commit capital years before construction is complete. That only happens when they have confidence that the rules won't change halfway through the process.
Building that confidence isn't easy. Developers invest millions of dollars, hire engineers and skilled tradesmen, complete exhaustive environmental reviews, and navigate layers of federal, state, and local approvals years before even breaking ground. Yet even after doing everything right, projects can spend years stalled by duplicative reviews, litigation, and political uncertainty.
The offshore wind agreements recently negotiated by the Trump Administration illustrate this problem. TotalEnergies, the first developer to reach an agreement with the Interior Department, concluded that U.S. offshore wind projects "are costly and might have a negative impact on power affordability for U.S. consumers." CEO Patrick Pouyanné added that redeploying the company's capital into liquefied natural gas and other power investments represented "a more efficient use of capital."
The same calculus drove Bluepoint Wind, Invenergy, Golden State Wind, and Duke Energy to reach similar agreements, each closing out projects that had been in early stages or had only pre-construction site activities underway.
Bluepoint Wind, for example, which had advanced its project through years of federal and state review, walked away and reinvested its private capital, rather than absorb further regulatory delay and uncertainty.
The problem isn't that these developers were reimbursed. Refunding their original lease payments was preferable to leaving billions of dollars in investor capital - managed on behalf of pension funds, university endowments, and retirement accounts - stranded in projects that would never move forward. The larger concern is what these cancellations signal to every future infrastructure investor. They turn infrastructure from the bedrock of a well-balanced portfolio into a riskier bet that many long-term investors will simply avoid. That kind of quiet capital flight doesn't make headlines, but it shows up in canceled projects, aging infrastructure, higher financing costs, and America's inability to build with confidence.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave America's energy infrastructure a D+ in its 2025 report card, a drop from the C- it received just four years earlier, citing shortfalls in generation capacity, transmission, and distribution. The grid that powers every defense contractor, military installation, and emergency response system in the country is running on aging pipelines, deteriorating power plants, and fraying transmission infrastructure. That is not a foundation that can absorb decades of permitting dysfunction.
And the dysfunction carries a price tag. An estimated $1.5 trillion in private investment is currently awaiting federal permits, with unrealized GDP gains projected as high as $2.4 trillion. Manufacturers alone absorb an estimated $8 billion a year in costs attributable to permitting delays, according to a recent National Association of Manufacturers survey. Even today, the average energy project spends approximately 4.5 years navigating federal permitting, and despite recent improvements, most Environmental Impact Statements still exceed the two-year statutory timeline.
This is not a wind problem or a fossil fuel problem. Pipelines, transmission lines, LNG terminals, nuclear plants, and critical minerals projects all operate under the same permitting uncertainty. Even the projects that do everything right - file their permits on time, survive multiple rounds of review, and see through frivolous lawsuits - can be unwound in an instant by an unfavorable administration. Today it is offshore wind leases. In another administration, it could be the LNG and pipeline investments where those same lease dollars are now being redirected.
Infrastructure projects routinely span multiple presidential administrations. But they only succeed when the statutory framework remains stable enough for investors, contractors, and communities to plan years into the future. That stability is what Congress can provide, and what today's permitting system too often fails to deliver.
The good news is that Congress recognizes the problem and has tools to fix it. The bipartisan SPEED Act, passed by the House in December 2025, would establish enforceable permitting timelines and increase certainty for developers across all energy sectors. Its co-author, Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a Democrat, put it simply: "America must get back into the business of building." I concur.
The next generation of infrastructure - pipelines, transmission lines, nuclear reactors, data centers, renewable energy projects - cannot afford to repeat this cycle. What the buybacks make plain is that we don't have rules that hold, we have rules that last only until the next election.
America has never lacked the ingenuity to build world-class infrastructure. What we've lacked is a permitting system built to last. Until Congress fixes that, we'll continue permitting great projects to fail.
Tom Magness (U.S. Army colonel, retired) served as a commander in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and he is the founder of the Eagle Leadership Group and currently acts as a strategic adviser to the Grow America's Infrastructure Now Coalition. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.