Fixing America's Surface Transportation Act

Yeah.

GridX also led to the creation of something called a Grid Security Emergency Authority that Congress passed and the FAST Act way back in 2015.

These were all based on lessons learned that came out of GridX.

And now we're also seeing investments in things like resilient communications, which is a common finding.

Yeah, it's like that scene in, like, "The Matrix Reloaded" where he goes into that special room with the architect, and the architect is like, "This is the sixth time we've, you know, failed at passing permitting reform, and we're getting terribly efficient at it." That's kind of how it feels working on this issue.

The, the real SparkNotes version is there were a lot of efforts, like every five years in the highway transportation bills that slowly ramped up over about two decades, and until twenty fifteen didn't do all that much when they enacted the FAST Act, which created this big permitting dashboard that exists at the federal level and some judicial review protections.

Then fast-forward to the modern day, there were three real kind of recent era efforts.

There was the effort that took place that was the kind of Joe Manchin, Chuck Schumer negotiated permitting deal that tried to be attached to NDAA in twenty twenty two but failed on a deadlocked vote forty-seven to forty-seven in December of that year and didn't go further.

So, I mean, the conflicting information, you know, the confusion has been a problem for a long time.

Obviously, Congress saw that in the FAST Act when they required a lot of that data to come down from SMS, the safety measurement system.

And, you know, that was supposed to be a quick fix.

You know, we participated in those meetings with the National Academy of Sciences and the University of Maryland.