Big Picture
When Governor Josh Shapiro took office in 2023, Pennsylvania had a reputation few governors would want: a state where projects went to wait.
By late 2023, the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) counted a backlog of more than 2,400 permit applications. Applicants often couldn’t tell where their permit stood, how long it would take, or whom to call.
Shapiro made fixing that a signature agenda item.
In his first month, he ordered every state agency to catalog its permits and commit to a processing deadline. Over the next three years, his administration and a divided legislature added a money-back guarantee, a paid third-party review option, a concierge program for major projects, and statutory deadlines after which some environmental permits are approved automatically.
“Government at the speed of business” became a slogan, then a record, and eventually a national brand. DEP says the backlog hit zero in October 2025, and the administration says average processing time fell from 53 days in 2022 to 38 days in 2025. Then, in August 2026, Shapiro pulled data centers, the most visible projects his reforms had courted, out of his own Fast Track program.
Pennsylvania has shown that Democratic leadership can make the permitting bureaucracy measurably faster. It has also shown that faster was never the only thing people wanted from it.
Pennsylvania’s Permitting Problem Was Really Three Problems
It’s worth being precise about what was broken, because each of Shapiro’s reforms targeted a different failure.
The first was volume. Applications piled up faster than DEP could review them, and nothing forced the department to prioritize.
The second was uncertainty. Agencies had no public timelines. An applicant waiting four months had no way to know whether that was normal, slow, or stuck.
The third was coordination. A major project needing permits from DEP, PennDOT, and local authorities had no single point of contact and no one responsible for moving the whole package.
A reform aimed at one of these problems won’t necessarily solve the others. That distinction turns out to matter a great deal.
What Did Pennsylvania Actually Build?
The reforms came in four layers.
PAyback (2023): Executive Order 2023-07 directed every agency to document each permit type, its legal basis, its fee, and a target processing time, and to publish them. If an agency misses its own target without an extension, the applicant gets the fee back.
SPEED (2024–25): The Streamlining Permits for Economic Expansion and Development (SPEED) program lets applicants pay a DEP-approved outside professional (an engineer, surveyor, or environmental scientist meeting licensing and conflict-of-interest standards) to conduct the first technical review of eligible permits. DEP still issues the final decision. The applicant pays both the state fee and the reviewer.
PA Permit Fast Track (2024): Executive Order 2024-04 created a program, run by the new Office of Transformation and Opportunity, to coordinate review of major economic-development and infrastructure projects. Developers can ask to join, but the administration decides which projects get in. Participants get a coordinated permitting timetable, a public dashboard, and a single point of contact across agencies.
Deemed approval (2025): The 2025–26 budget, Act 45, expanded SPEED to more permit categories. It also set statutory clocks: 30 days for certain air-quality permits and 60 days for stormwater and groundwater permits. After that, a permit is automatically approved if DEP hasn’t acted or sought an extension.
This is not deregulation in the usual sense. The environmental standards largely stayed the same. What changed was the clock, the visibility, and who does the first read.
So, Is It Working?
Measured against the three problems above (volume, uncertainty, coordination), the record is strongest where the reforms were least glamorous. One asterisk also applies throughout: nearly every number comes from the administration itself, and none has been independently audited.
Volume: largely solved, by the state’s account. DEP says the backlog is gone, and the administration says average processing time fell from 53 days to 38. It reports similar gains elsewhere: business filings that averaged 14 days now take one, and new-teacher certification waits fell by about 10 weeks.
Uncertainty: better, but unproven. Published targets and statutory clocks now tell applicants what to expect. But since 2023 the state has issued just five PAyback refunds out of more than 40 million applications. Either agencies almost never miss their deadlines, or the deadlines were set loosely enough that almost nothing counts as late. Until the state shows how its targets compare with past processing times, there’s no way to know which.
Coordination: the weakest link. Fast Track, the most heavily branded reform, was built for this problem. But a September 2026 analysis by the conservative outlet Broad + Liberty, republished by PoliticsPA, found nothing in the executive order that lets a Fast Track project finish ahead of a comparable project outside it. The administration cites wins, like a Lackawanna County project it says saved 18 months, but what the program guarantees is coordination, not acceleration.
Key Policy Takeaway — The Boring Parts Did the Work
If Pennsylvania’s reforms delivered, the credit belongs to the least glamorous pieces: published deadlines, backlog triage, and statutory clocks.
A target posted publicly creates internal pressure. A deemed-approval deadline creates legal pressure. Clearing a backlog frees staff to work on new applications instead of old ones.
The flagship program and the effective machinery aren’t the same thing. States copying Pennsylvania should prioritize copying the machinery.
The Strongest Critique Is About Who Gets the Fast Lane
The most serious objection to Pennsylvania’s reforms isn’t that they made government faster. It’s that speed became something the state handed out, and not always by rules the public could see.
Some applicants can buy it. SPEED gives applicants who can afford an outside reviewer a faster first review. Environmental groups, including PennFuture, warn that DEP staff will feel pressure to defer to a paid recommendation rather than re-examine it. DEP calls the program “staff augmentation,” extra capacity rather than weaker review. Whether that holds depends on how often DEP reviewers actually push back, and no public data shows how often they do.
One applicant got it privately. Internal emails reported by Heatmap News show that in April 2025, Shapiro’s office offered Amazon “exclusive early access” to SPEED. The offer came two months before SPEED opened to the public, and before Amazon announced a $20 billion data-center investment that Shapiro called the largest private investment in state history. The memo was marked as subject to a nondisclosure agreement. Whether that access sped up a single permit matters less than the signal: reforms sold on transparency gave their most powerful applicant a side door.
The public absorbs the risk when the clock runs out. Deemed approval works when DEP is staffed to meet its deadlines. If it isn’t, because of a budget squeeze, a hiring freeze, or a flood of applications, the default outcome is approval without full review. That trade-off may be defensible. It should be made openly.
And communities got a say last. Data centers are where these critiques converge. By July 2026, 74% of Pennsylvania voters opposed an AI data center in their own community, including 82% of Democrats, according to Quinnipiac. In August, Shapiro pulled every data-center project out of Fast Track, banned nondisclosure agreements with developers, and barred DEP from issuing permits without local approval. Because Fast Track never guaranteed faster permits, the move was largely symbolic. But the symbolism was the point: the fight was never about permitting efficiency. It was about who gets a say before the process starts.
The Blueprint for Other States
Pennsylvania’s experience offers four lessons.
Start with deadlines and publication. Public target times, backlog triage, and statutory clocks are the unglamorous core of permitting reform. They’re also the part most likely to be doing the work.
Make the guarantee verifiable. A money-back guarantee that pays out five times in three years proves nothing on its own. Publish the historical baseline behind each target, and let an auditor, a university, or the legislature’s fiscal office check the results.
Build the fast lane in the open. If a state offers expedited coordination, admission criteria should be public, access should be open, and there should be no side doors or nondisclosure agreements. The Amazon emails did more damage to the reforms’ credibility than any processing statistic could repair.
Separate speed from consent. Permitting reform answers “how fast?” It doesn’t answer “should this be built here?” States that don’t settle the second question upstream, through siting standards, community-benefit rules, and local input, will find it resurfacing as a revolt against the first.
Bottom Line
Pennsylvania has built something Democrats should want to copy.
A faster, more transparent permitting system isn’t a concession to business. It’s a precondition for building the housing, transmission, and clean energy that a progressive agenda depends on.
But speed is a means, not a mandate. The data-center fight revealed what the efficiency agenda had skipped: whether communities had been asked, and whether every applicant was playing by the same rules.
Pennsylvania learned that a state can process a permit in 38 days and still not have permission. Other states should copy its deadlines, and build their fast lanes in public.