At its February 2026 meeting, the E-Enterprise for the Environment Leadership Council (EELC) continued to advance the national conversation on streamlining permitting and related technologies. Members heard from federal partners about integrating AI applications, modernizing permit programs, and opportunities for interagency coordination.
The EELC welcomed a presenter from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), who shared key takeaways from CEQ’s Permitting Technology Action Plan and its data standard for federal agencies. The data standard is intended to enable interoperability and automatic data exchange across agencies, eventually allowing applicants to initiate projects through a single portal and avoid duplicative submissions. CEQ has partnered with several agencies to pilot tools, including a public Categorical Exclusion Explorer. To advance modern, efficient permitting, CEQ continues to engage with local, State, and Tribal partners on best-in-class tools and will host a Summer 2026 expo, highlighting top-tier technology.
In another session, a Department of Energy (DOE) representative discussed PermitAI —a tool designed to accelerate and improve National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews. NEPA reviews provide the public with an opportunity to better understand the environmental impacts of proposed projects in their communities. DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) uses specialized large language models to analyze, summarize, and categorize documentation from across agencies—a process that typically takes years—reducing it to minutes. Through AI-powered applications such as SearchNEPA, EngageNEPA, and CommentNEPA, federal staff have one-stop data platforms which help increase efficiencies and support more informed decision-making. PermitAI’s beta tools use AI to summarize and categorize public comments for Environmental Impact Statements, Requests for Information, and regulatory comment periods, while keeping human subject-matter experts in the loop for verification.
As EELC members start to explore how AI can be used in their programs, they focused their discussions on quality control, data preparation, procurement considerations, and integration with existing systems. In keeping with the EELC spirit to share knowledge, the PermitAI team offered to continue discussing use cases and lessons learned with members interested in developing or procuring their own permit systems.
