LICENSE TO DRILL ACT

On 2026-09-30, Senator Michael F. Bennet (D-CO) delivered a floor speech titled "LICENSE TO DRILL ACT" in the Senate.

LICENSE TO DRILL ACT

Congressional Record, Volume 172 Issue 155 (Wednesday, September 30, 2026) [Congressional Record Volume 172, Number 155 (Wednesday, September 30, 2026)] [Senate] [Pages S5226-S5231] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [ www.gpo.gov ] LICENSE TO DRILL ACT The bill (H.R. 7831) to amend the Mineral Leasing Act to extend the period of time during which the Secretary of the Interior is required to collect a fee for each new application for a permit to drill, and for other purposes, was ordered to a third reading, was read the third time, and passed. Mr. LEE. Madam President, earlier today, I joined Senators Capito, Heinrich, and Whitehouse in introducing comprehensive, bipartisan permitting reform. That agreement is the product of many, many months of negotiations and years of work to address a problem Congress has talked about for far too long: It takes too much time and too much money to build things in this country, and that problem is becoming more urgent by the day. America's energy needs are growing rapidly. We need more energy, and we need it now. That means producing more energy. It means building more infrastructure, and it means making sure that Federal Agencies responsible for reviewing permits actually have the resources to process those permits in a timely manner. Madam President, that brings me to the first bill that I just asked the Senate to consider today and that we just passed through the Senate today, the License to Drill Act. The Bureau of Land Management currently charges a processing fee for each new application for a permit to drill on Federal lands. Those fees help fund the people and resources that process those permits, but that authority expires tonight at 12 midnight. The License to Drill Act extends it through fiscal year 2037 and directs those fees to the Bureau of Land Management Permit Processing Improvement Fund. The idea is straightforward: The money collected from permit applications should help process permit applications. That is, after all, how we keep things moving. That is how we get a lot of these things done. So if we expect American energy producers to [[Page S5227]] navigate the Federal permitting process, as they must and as we must expect them to do, the Federal Government should have the capacity to give them that answer. The bill we just passed advances the ball in precisely that direction. Look, permits should not simply disappear into some bureaucratic black hole. As we confront rapidly growing energy demand--the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time and the stakes for which are unbelievably high--unnecessary delays in bringing new American energy production online carry real consequences. This bill, also, did not appear on the floor out of nowhere. It went through the committee process. The Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the Senate, which I chair, examined it and advanced it unanimously. The same is true of the two other measures that I just brought before the Senate and passed this evening. H.R. 6380, the Chiricahua National Park Act, would redesignate Arizona's Chiricahua National Monument as Chiricahua National Park. The legislation has already passed the House. It was considered by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and it was favorably advanced by the committee. With this, this bill is on its way to the President's desk for signature. H.R. 837 conveys the Pleasant Valley Ranger District Administrative Site in Arizona to Gila County. That legislation has also passed the House and gone through the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. In its having now passed the Senate, it will be on its way to the President's desk for signature. These measures all have certain things in common. They have been examined, they have gone through the committee process, and they are prepared now for the Senate to act, which the Senate has now done, for which I am very grateful. That work has been done here. In a moment, when we are working on a much larger task--on the large and intimidating but also incredibly important task of comprehensively reforming America's permitting system--this is a commonsense set of proposals deserving to pass today. I am so grateful that they have passed. I am grateful to my colleagues on the committee and to my Senate colleagues for helping to make that happen. I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Colorado. Mr. BENNET. Madam President, first, I would like to say that my colleague from Utah was out here a minute ago. We often disagree on many things, but every now and then, we agree on something. I just want to say how grateful I am that the Senate, today, passed by unanimous consent a bill that we have been working on for years and years and years, with the community around Crystal Reservoir, to make sure that that can be transferred from the Forest Service to the people of Ouray, who desperately, desperately need it. I am grateful that we were able to get this done, and we will continue to work on this together to make sure we get it passed in the House of Representatives. So it is a bright light in an otherwise not so bright day legislatively around here in the U.S. Senate. Trump Administration Madam President, I wanted to come to the floor because today may be the end of the opportunity to talk on the Senate floor for this session of the Senate before we recess for the coming elections. I wish that there was a lot of stuff that we had addressed together. The American people are struggling with costs and this economy in a way that they have never struggled before, and that is not an exaggeration. It is true in rural Colorado and in urban Colorado. It is true in Republican parts of the State and in Democratic parts of the State. It doesn't matter. People--no matter how hard they work--feel like they can't get ahead and their kids can't live better lives than the lives that they are leading; that no matter how hard they work, it is becoming harder and harder and, in some ways, impossible-- impossible--to live a middle class life anymore. For the kids who are graduating from high school right now in America and for the kids who are graduating from college in America, it feels like the American dream is further and further and further out of reach because it is. It is. I see the pages who are sitting here on this floor today. They are the first generation of Americans since forever-- I don't want to depress you tonight, but I guess I can tell you the truth so you can help fix it. They are the first generation of Americans who are likely to earn less than their parents earned if we don't change it. We are living in a world where people who are 30--a lot older than the pages who are here today--on average, are going to earn less than their parents earned. We are living in a time when 1 percent of the American people own 50 percent of the value of the stock market, and the bottom 50 percent of the American people own 1 percent of the value of the stock market. If you have not been somebody in the United States who owns assets--who owns real estate, who owns stocks and bonds--it has been a tough 15 years or 20 years. It has actually been tough going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, to be honest, when these trickle-down policies started. Ronald Reagan was certainly a purveyor of these. You know, he put in place a lot of the tax cuts and other things that were kind of the beginning of trickle-down economics. I don't think even he could have foreseen what the Trump administration would have done to pursue the kind of trickle-down economics that they have pursued. It has been like a raging forest fire that has gone across the United States of America at a time when our inequality is growing; at a time when Reagan could never have imagined, I don't think, the wealth inequality that we now have in this country, the lack of economic mobility we have in what I still refer to as the ``land of opportunity'' because, in the end, I am relentlessly hopeful about where this country is headed. But the reality is--the reality is--unless you are at the very top of this economy for decades, you have not done well and your kids have done worse. That is the opposite of the American dream. I am sorry to say this to the pages that are here, but there was a time in American history--when I was your age, for example--when we took it as a given that each generation was going to benefit from the work of the previous generation, and the greatest gift we could give the next generation was more prosperity than our generation had. My daughters are now in their midtwenties--actually, to be honest, the youngest is in her early twenties--but my daughters are now in their midtwenties, and they are really serious about the question, which I am not going to repeat on this floor because I would be thrown out for using ``W-T.'' That is their view, though. That is their view because they know a lot about history. They know what the transition was from one generation to the next. They know what the solemn responsibility of every American generation was. And now they find themselves and their whole generation finds themselves completely ignored by this Congress, completely ignored by the President of the United States. He could care less about their future. I used to be a superintendent of schools in Denver before I came here. I was in business before that. I have had kind of a checkered career on the way to the U.S. Senate. And I can tell you, I can assure you that President Trump does not see the families of the kids I used to work for in the Denver public schools, who are working two and three jobs just to feed their children, who are working two and three jobs just to keep a roof over their heads, just to pay the rent in this economy, this savage economy they are facing. I am sorry to say this to the pages as well. The Trump administration is breaking new records every week. Gas prices are up 42 pe

Referenced legislation: HR837, HR6380, HR7831