SMA Takes Its Permitting Case to the WSJ — and to a Congress That Has to Decide What 'Bipartisan' Means

The Steel Manufacturers Association's decision to put its permitting argument into the Wall Street Journal's letters page — rather than a committee filing or a coalition sign-on — says as much about the state of US permitting reform as the argument itself. Executive Vice President Brandon Farris used the platform to make a simple claim: long and unpredictable approval timelines are "putting billions in committed investment on hold," and the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is the vehicle to fix it. Lawmakers, he wrote, "should pass it immediately upon their return."

That is a well-worn trade-association playbook — a recess-timed op-ed aimed at members returning to Washington. What matters for industry readers is not the letter's existence but what it implies about the legislative window, and about where steel's capital commitments actually sit in the queue.

Why an electric-arc-furnace association cares about permitting

The SMA represents electric-arc-furnace steelmakers and scrap processors. That membership profile shapes its permitting agenda in ways a general manufacturing lobby's would not.

• Air permits. New meltshops, rolling mills and scrap yards need Title V and Prevention of Significant Deterioration approvals. These are multi-year processes in many states, and the timeline varies enormously by jurisdiction — the "unpredictable" in Farris's phrasing.
• Grid and generation. EAFs are large, dispatchable, electricity-intensive loads. Bringing new capacity online often requires new transmission or generation, which sits in its own interconnection and siting queue — a bottleneck entirely separate from the industrial air permit. Farris's reference to "reliable electricity" alongside "operating factories" suggests the association is making that connection explicitly.
• Raw-material and upstream projects. Direct-reduced iron and hot-briquetted iron plants, increasingly contemplated to feed low-carbon EAFs, carry their own environmental review exposure.

The economic logic is straightforward and is the strongest part of the SMA's case: capital committed at final investment decision carries a cost whether or not the plant is running. For an industry where a single greenfield project can run past $1 billion, slippage of a year or two is material even without knowing the exact aggregate exposure — the "billions" figure is SMA's own characterization and is not quantified in the public statement.

As an illustrative calculation, and not a figure sourced from SMA or the Journal: $5 billion of committed capex at an 8% weighted average cost of capital costs roughly $33 million per month of delay in financing and opportunity cost alone, before considering construction-cost escalation or forgone margin. That is the arithmetic behind industry frustration, and it is why permitting has moved from a niche legal concern to a board-level one.

The bill is the open question

Here the public record thins out considerably. The SMA statement names the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act but does not describe its permitting provisions — whether it sets NEPA deadlines, narrows judicial review or imposes statutes of limitation on challenges, expands categorical exclusions, addresses transmission siting, or streamlines EPA air and water permitting. Those distinctions matter enormously to steel projects; a bill that shortens agency deadlines without constraining litigation delivers far less certainty than one that does both.

The bill's number, sponsors, chamber of origin and committee status are likewise not established in the material available. On the available evidence, the honest reading is that the SMA has attached itself to a vehicle whose permitting content it believes is favorable, and is using the Journal to raise the cost of letting that content be stripped in negotiations.

That last point is the real risk. An "affordability" branded package is, by construction, a coalition of cost-of-living measures — energy prices, housing, maybe taxes. Permitting reform is the kind of technically complex, locally contentious provision that tends to be traded away when a package is assembled. The SMA's public pressure is best understood as an attempt to make the permitting title harder to drop quietly.

What to watch

One structural point deserves emphasis. Permitting reform has become a genuinely cross-industry demand — steel, chemicals, utilities, data centres, pipelines — precisely because the binding constraints have migrated from capital availability to approval capacity. That breadth is the reform's political strength and also its weakness: each constituency wants its own permits accelerated and is considerably less enthusiastic about the projects it opposes. Whether the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act resolves that tension, or merely renames it, is the question the SMA's letter cannot answer.

Facts, framing and gaps

To be clear about provenance: the publication of the Farris letter, its core argument and the quotation above are reported by the SMA. The letter's full text, its Journal publication date and any statistics it cites were not available for verification. The bill's contents are unknown from public material reviewed here. The cost-of-delay figure is the author's illustrative arithmetic. The characterization of the legislative dynamics is analysis, not reported fact.

What is verifiable is the strategic choice: the SMA has decided that permitting, not trade or decarbonization subsidies, is the binding constraint on US steel capacity growth in this cycle — and it is willing to say so in the country's most-read business pages.