Part of the 2015 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act), the FAST-41 process seeks to improve speed, predictability, and transparency in the federal environmental review and land-use permitting process for large infrastructure projects. Initially developed for transportation infrastructure, FAST-41 was expanded by a March 2025 executive order to cover critical minerals, like lithium, uranium, copper, potash, gold and other elements needed for renewable energy, defense and artificial intelligence technologies.
Increasingly viewed as a matter of economic and national security, the effort to bring permitting reform to critical mineral operations aims to grow the domestic supply chain.
This is good news for mining firms, but will this reform really increase projects’ speed-to-market?
We turned to SWCA Environmental Consultants’ Mining Director, Andrew Harley, and Planning Director, Donna Morey, for answers.
Q: Tell us about FAST-41. What does it do?
A: The FAST-41 process was only recently extended to mining, but it has been around for a decade, so we have a lot of experience with it. It’s a formal process for coordinating federal environmental reviews and land use permitting.
The federal review process—especially for mines—can be cumbersome. It involves a morass of permits from half a dozen different agencies (or more), and each has their own processes and…
