Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, talks with Emy Lesofski, director of the Utah Office of Energy Development, after a summit on federal regulations held at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 15, 2025. (Katie McKellar/Utah News Dispatch)
Mining and energy industry representatives discussed the regulatory hurdles they say are holding back “responsible” industrial growth across Utah with Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, at a summit she held at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Friday.
Titled “The Regulatory Pendulum,” Maloy’s forum focused on how federal regulations have swung back and forth depending on what political party controls the White House, and how that’s created uncertainty not only in energy development, but also delays in completing major projects like bridges and pipelines.
She and the panelists argued it’s holding Utah and the U.S. back by bogging major projects down in years of bureaucratic processes.
The forum’s perspectives focused on regulatory issues, and speakers did not include environmental advocates. The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a preservation nonprofit that has been a vocal critic of mining and industrial development in Utah’s redrock wilderness, did not immediately return a request for comment Friday.
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE
During the form, Maloy highlighted proposed legislation she’s sponsoring — the Full Responsibility and Expedited Enforcement Act, or the FREE Act — meant to streamline the federal permitting process.
Simplifying federal regulations has been discussed for decades, with only incremental statutory changes passed by Congress and temporary changes from presidential executive orders. But Maloy said she’s “hopeful” that Congress can get it done, saying “we have the right alignment right now between all three branches of government.”
“We have an administration that’s willing to break out of a lot of paradigms and do things differently than they’ve been done before,” Maloy said, though she acknowledged that approach alone is “controversial.”
But she argued “that’s what it’s going to take to get permit reform done.”
“We have a Congress that has bipartisan agreement that we need to do a permitting reform. That alone is a huge rarity. And we have a judicial branch that, in my opinion, keeps daring Congress to do it better,” she said.
Maloy said the courts have sent a clear message that Congress needs to write clearer laws that leave federal agencies the power to “fill in the gaps,” which she said has led to an unwieldy federal permitting process.
“Much like a weed that grows up in (a crack in ) the sidewalk, it doesn’t just fill the gaps. It makes the gap wider, causes problems, and makes everything uneven,” Maloy said
Even though Republicans currently control the White House and Congress, however, Maloy said it’s going to take bipartisan support to fix the issue.
Rep. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, (right) and Jeffrey Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, talk during a summit on federal regulations held at the Utah Capitol in Salt Lake City on Aug. 15, 2025. (Katie McKellar/Utah News Dispatch)
“It has to be bipartisan, because administrations change,” she said. “Both sides of Congress swing back and forth. And in order to stop this pendulum and not have the pettiness of, ‘We’re going to roll that back just because it came from the other side,’ we’re going to have to have both sides bought in. And I think there’s reason to hope for that too.”
This year’s version of Maloy’s FREE Act advanced out of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in May, with a 23-19 vote. Though none of the Democrats on that voted in favor of her bill, “they didn’t try to stop it,” she said.
“Those are the things we’re up against, where nobody actually disagreed with the bill, in fact they’re really excited about it,” Maloy said, “but because of how party politics work” Democrats voted against it, and now she’s having a hard time finding a Democratic co-sponsor because of those no votes in committee.
Still, she said she’s hopeful there will eventually be bipartisan support, since people from both sides are becoming frustrated with how long permitting processes can take, whether it’s for a mining project, a bridge or a solar farm.
Jeffrey Rosen, currently a nonresident senior fellow at the right-of-center think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, spoke at Maloy’s summit. He previously worked for President Donald Trump’s first administration as acting attorney general and deputy attorney general, as well as deputy U.S. secretary of transportation.
Rosen gave an overview of past attempts at streamlining federal regulations spanning decades, but he said there’s plenty of “unfinished work” for Congress to do.
“The reality is the problem of permitting delays continues to need more work to be done, even though … we’ve spent 25 years trying to address this,” he said, applauding Maloy for her efforts. “It’s a subject that doesn’t seem glamorous or easy to understand, and yet it plays such a huge role in our country as to what gets built, what gets mined, how power is supplied and delivered, and lots of other crucial components of our economy and quality of life.”
