Permitting has quietly become one of the biggest drags on America’s ability to build things fast enough to matter. Energy projects, data centers, roads, bridges, critical minerals: nearly everything we’re trying to rebuild runs through a system that was designed for a different era. NuAxis is deeply invested in this story because good customer experience for permitting applicants, and for the citizens waiting on those projects, has to be part of the fix.
I got to see this play out firsthand while moderating a recent GovCX Collective panel with Jeff Brooks, Partner at Adams and Reese; Nancy Morgan, former U.S. Intelligence Community Chief Data Officer; and Jason Marceau, Head of Product Solutions at data². Based on what came out of that conversation, here are five things anyone working on permitting reform needs to keep front of mind.
1. The Clock Is the Real Competition
Jason opened with a number that’s hard to shake: it takes seven to twelve years to permit a major interstate transmission line in the U.S. China builds comparable infrastructure in two to four years and has added more high-voltage transmission in the last fifteen years than the U.S. has built in its entire history.
That’s not a story about too much red tape. It’s a story about who wins the next decade. Jeff put a human face on it too: a small-town mayor fined $11 million for draining a courthouse pond, three bald cypress trees setting off a chain reaction of reviews from the Army Corps of Engineers, the EPA, and Fish and Wildlife Service. Nobody on that panel thinks environmental protection is the problem. The problem is a system built for a different century now grinding projects to a halt.
2. Data Is Only as Good as the Guardrails Around It
Permitting agencies are sitting on decades of valuable data: locations, timelines, applicants, conditions, compliance records. Most of it never reaches the people who need it most.
Nancy, drawing on a career built around exactly this kind of problem, made clear that unlocking the data is only half the job. It also has to be authoritative, timely, and carefully governed. She calls it the “mosaic effect”: individually harmless data points can add up to something far more sensitive once combined. Adversarial exploitation, privacy risk, and bias baked into old datasets are real costs, and they deserve the same attention as the upside.
Jason framed the fix as a shift in mindset: stop asking “how do I move this application through the workflow faster” and start asking “what does the whole ecosystem look like.” Map the permits, the regulations, the stakeholders, and the jurisdictions, and patterns show up fast. Eight of fifteen permits on one project might require the exact same environmental review of the exact same parcel of land. Bundle it. Reuse it. Stop asking applicants to start from zero every time.
3. The Customer Isn’t Who You Think
This is the one I pushed hardest on: what does customer-centric permitting actually look like? The honest answer starts with a harder question. Who is the customer?
It’s the applicant. It’s the regulator. But as Jason put it, the American public is the real end customer. When a data center can’t get permitted, it doesn’t vanish, it moves to another state, and the jobs and investment go with it. Most people never see that connection until it’s too late.
Nancy brought up an old Harvard Business Review idea, “Staple Yourself to an Order”: follow the experience from the moment someone thinks “I need a permit” all the way through approval and beyond. Too many systems are built for the approver, not the person submitting, or built for the submitter in ways that starve the approver of what they need to move fast.
Getting it right looks like plain language, upfront flags for missing information instead of silent stalls, real-time status the way you’d track a package, one front door even if fifteen things are happening behind it, and real equity, because a tribal government or a first-time small business owner navigates this system very differently than a Fortune 500 legal team.
4. It’s Not a Technology Problem, It’s a Will Problem
Nancy said the thing worth repeating: the obstacles to modernizing permitting aren’t technical. They’re governance, funding, and political will.
The tools already exist. AI can triage public comments and flag where applications quietly die. Digital twins can model a project site and predict environmental impact before a permit is even filed. Drones can assess remote locations without putting anyone in harm’s way. Shared data standards can let information move across agencies instead of getting stuck in silos.
None of it works without people willing to use it. Jeff’s example: one OMB official single-handedly delayed a post-Katrina flood protection project in New Orleans by two and a half years. That’s not a story about one bad actor. It’s a story about a system with no accountability check on any single node in the chain. The encouraging part: this administration says it genuinely wants to hear where the friction is, and what would actually help.
5. The Permit Isn’t the Finish Line
A permit approval isn’t an ending, it’s the start of a compliance, inspection, and renewal cycle that generates its own data. Fed back into the front end of the process, that data makes every future permit smarter, faster, and easier to defend. We’ve seen it work in pockets. The job now is making it the rule instead of the exception.
6. The Framework Matters
Jason described how data² approaches AI for permitting: constrain the model to verified, structured knowledge instead of letting it roam free. That’s exactly the right instinct for a domain this consequential.
You don’t get trustworthy outputs without trustworthy inputs, and you don’t get trustworthy inputs without deliberate, iterative design. Skip that step and you’ve just automated the guesswork.
7. Consistency Is Underrated
Whether it’s comment periods, approval timelines, or the rules an applicant is held to, unpredictability is its own form of friction. Two applicants doing the same thing shouldn’t get two different experiences depending on who reviews their file or which office they happen to land in.
Reducing that unpredictability, through technology, through policy, through clearer ownership, is one of the highest-leverage changes available. It doesn’t require new authority or new funding. It just requires deciding to do it.
At the GovCX Collective, we convene conversations like this because the stakes are too high not to. Rebuilding America’s infrastructure and competing on the world stage both run through fixing permitting, and fixing permitting takes exactly the kind of cross-sector, data-informed, customer-first thinking this panel brought to the table. We’ll keep pulling this thread, and we hope you’ll join us. Contact us to learn more about how NuAxis helps agencies modernize permitting through data and design.
