Federal Permitting Staff Reduced, Says NTIA Permitting Chief Jill Springer

Retirements since the start of the Trump administration could impact permit reviews, said Jill Springer, the top permitting official at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. The agency has been working to streamline the federal permitting process for participants in its $42.45 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program. “This is a thing that I am worried about,” she said. “Since January many of the federal permitting agencies have lost a lot of staff, and they’re trying to reapportion people and figure that out.” She said agency capacity and preparation were an important part of efforts to streamline permitting processes, something multiple agencies are working on. “We can have all these great changes that have happened,” she said, “but if they’re either not getting communicated down to the people who are actually pushing the paper, or worse yet, if there’s not somebody there to be processing that, then we have different problems that maybe we didn’t pay enough attention to.”