I joined Thomas Hochman and Pavan Venkatakrishnan on Right of Way, alongside Yogin Kothari, to talk through the energy title of the One Big Beautiful Bill, foreign entity of concern rules, and what all of it means for permitting reform.
Donovan: To understand this bill, even zooming up out of the energy title, you have to understand the dynamics within the Republican coalition right now, which is transitional. This is not yesterday’s party. It is not the 2017 Republican Party that gave you the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, even though the core of what this ultimately did was extending those legacy policies.
There’s a “Willie Sutton” issue of how do you offset the things that they wanted to do. There were only so many pools of cash to go after… IRA was a ripe target, especially given the fact that every time you went back and had JCT run the numbers, the cost ballooned. So it went from being a $300 billion tax title in 2022 to a trillion dollars, depending on who you ask, in 2025.
On FEOC, I think there was a misstep by industry seeing this as, “oh, well this is unworkable.” That was a feature, not a bug to the people that wrote it. That was very deliberate… So I think it’s here to stay, and — particularly for stakeholders, for companies and industries — you need to embrace this. Embrace it to the extent that it fits your model, and you can find yourself skating where the puck’s going rather than trying to play catch-up.