President Shapiro: Would Permitting Reform Become a National Democratic Priority?

Hero photo: File Josh Shapiro December 2025 — Maryland GovPics, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

01 The record and the scenario

Josh Shapiro's permitting record is a three-year case study in governing around a legislature. In his first week in office — Executive Order 2023-05, January 24, 2023 — he created the Pennsylvania Office of Transformation and Opportunity, a single front door charged with speeding up permits for economic-development and energy projects. He backed it with siting and process reforms under the PERMIT PA banner, then took the fight somewhere governors rarely go: in December 2024 his administration filed a complaint against PJM Interconnection at FERC over capacity-auction design — and in April 2025 won a settlement, approved by FERC, capping capacity prices between $175 and $325 per MW-day for two auctions, which his office says saved consumers more than $21 billion across 13 states.

In January 2025 he unveiled the Lightning Plan — an all-of-the-above energy strategy (natural gas, solar, wind, nuclear, hydro) to build more and faster — and by October 2025 he was co-leading, with Oklahoma's Kevin Stitt, a bipartisan National Governors Association push for energy permitting reform priorities. This is the verifiable record: a governor who treats permitting as a consumer-price issue and a jobs issue at once, and who has used every tool a state executive has.

This is scenario analysis, not a prediction or endorsement: as of September 18, 2026, AP describes Gavin Newsom and Kamala Harris as potential 2028 Democratic contenders and reports Republican discussion around JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz; most figures profiled have not formally entered a presidential race. The question here is only what the first 100 days of this record would look like at the federal level.

02 Day 1: executive orders

Day 1 of a Shapiro presidency would look like his first week in Harrisburg, scaled up. The signature move: an executive order creating a federal equivalent of the Office of Transformation and Opportunity — a single permitting front door inside the Executive Office of the President, with deadline discipline and a mandate to shepherd "first-of-kind" projects through agencies. Shapiro has spent three years arguing that the permitting problem is coordination, not law; a Day 1 order asserting coordination authority is exactly how he would test that thesis.

The second Day 1 lever is personnel with a price agenda attached. His PJM record implies directive memos to FERC-adjacent energy policy shops on auction design and consumer costs, plus an executive order or memorandum instructing agencies to inventory their permitting timelines and publish them — transparency as pressure, a Shapiro signature. None of it requires Congress; all of it requires the agencies to comply, which is where his real 100-days fight begins.

03 Days 2-30: agency changes

Days 2-30 would be the interagency grind of making a permitting office real. A President Shapiro inherits a federal permitting landscape scattered across FERC, the Army Corps, EPA, the Interior Department and the Council on Environmental Quality. His record suggests the moves: name a high-profile "permitting czar," set 180-day targets for priority project categories, and direct CEQ to steer how agencies implement environmental review under the post-2025 NEPA framework — the same play he ran with Pennsylvania's DEP, applied to a much bigger machine.

The friction points are predictable. Environmental-justice review requirements, species consultations, and state-issued permits under federal programs (Clean Water Act Section 401, coastal zones) cannot be ordered away — Shapiro knows this, because Pennsylvania's hardest permitting fights were not his to win alone. Watch instead for quiet rulemaking starts: categorical exclusions for small projects, deadline rules, and interagency data-sharing agreements — unglamorous, and the actual substance of permitting reform.

04 The first budget

A first Shapiro budget request would put money where the executive orders are. Expect: staff surges at the permitting agencies themselves — reviewers, inspectors, data systems — framed as "processing capacity"; funding for interconnection-queue and grid-transmission studies at DOE; and, uniquely for a Democrat, a budget that defends natural gas infrastructure alongside renewables and nuclear, matching the Lightning Plan's all-of-the-above framing.

The tell will be whether the budget treats permitting as an economic-development line or a climate line. Shapiro's Pennsylvania budgets ran the first framing: permitting speed as a jobs-and-consumer-cost issue, with clean energy riding along. A federal budget that funds both gas-pipeline review capacity and transmission simultaneously would be the first visible marker that the Shapiro model — build everything, price everything — has gone national.

05 First legislation and what requires Congress

Here is the honest limit: the biggest federal permitting levers are statutory, and a President Shapiro cannot amend NEPA, the Clean Water Act, or FERC's siting authorities by order. The 2025 Republican Congress moved its own permitting overhaul; a Shapiro first-100-days legislative ask would be narrower — permitting-process deadlines with real teeth, interagency coordination codified, and transmission-siting reforms for the grid he says is the binding constraint. Whether he gets any of it depends on whether his bipartisan governors coalition — Stitt included — translates into Senate votes.

The reconciliation route is mostly irrelevant here: permitting procedure is not a spending item. What Shapiro can realistically do in 100 days is executive — which is precisely his self-image. The record in Pennsylvania is a governor who built what he could by order, sued what he could not order, and only then asked the legislature for more.

06 Two parties, one word: what makes a Democratic permitting reform different

The comparative question: what distinguishes a Shapiro permitting presidency from the Republican version? Both parties now say "build, baby, build." The differences are in the model's interior. Shapiro's Lightning Plan is all-of-the-above — natural gas explicitly welcome — while the conservative version leans gas and nuclear and treats renewables as the concession; Shapiro's version treats consumer-price intervention (the PJM fight) as core, where the Republican model treats rate design as a market question. And Shapiro arrives with the rarest asset in this debate: a bipartisan governors' letter he co-authored with Oklahoma's Republican governor, giving him cross-party cover no other 2028 Democrat has on energy.

Within the Democratic field, the contrast is starker. Against a Newsom-style climate-forward framework or a Harris-style continuity agenda, Shapiro's pitch is the same one he ran in Pennsylvania: permitting reform is not a retreat from climate policy — it is how you deliver anything at all. The first 100 days would test whether Democratic primary voters and a Democratic Congress agree.

07 What courts could constrain

The courts constrain a Shapiro presidency at exactly the point his executive orders would push. NEPA reviews and permit decisions are litigated as a matter of course; an order compressing timelines invites APA challenges from project opponents, while an order skipping analysis invites them from both sides. His PJM settlement survived FERC review, but a President Shapiro directing FERC policy raises the separation-of-powers question that shadows every modern White House: how far can the president steer an independent agency before a court calls it unlawful interference? The 2024-26 litigation over agency independence — decided largely against aggressive White House control — is the framework a Shapiro Day 1 would inherit.

State preemption cuts against him, too. The federal government cannot order a state to issue a 401 water-quality certification faster, and the Clean Air Act deliberately preserves state authority. Shapiro's Pennsylvania record is honest on this point: he sped what the state controlled. The first 100 days of a Shapiro presidency would be a referendum on how much of the map is actually colored federal — and the answer courts have repeatedly given is: less than presidents wish.