Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Apd Fees topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
BLM official tells House panel APD fees critical after agency processed 6,000 permits in FY2025
Summary
The Bureau of Land Management said reauthorizing application-for-permit-to-drill fees (H.R. 7831) funded staff that helped process about 6,000 APDs in fiscal 2025, and that losing the fee authority would force the agency to rely on uncertain appropriations and likely reduce permitting capacity.
Chairman Stauber and other members of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources pressed Bureau of Land Management officials Wednesday on the importance of reauthorizing fees that pay for oil and gas permit processing. Mitchell Leverett, the BLM’s Eastern States director, told the committee the agency used APD fees to process roughly 6,000 applications for permits to drill in fiscal year 2025 and to hire staff that have reduced average processing times to about 100 days.
“The reauthorization of these fees is critical for us to continue to have permit efficiencies and expedited permitting,” said Mitchell Leverett, the BLM Eastern States director. He testified that the program generated approximately $49 million in fee revenue in the most recent year and that the agency spent about $40 million of that on processing APDs.
Why it matters: The APD fee program, created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and reauthorized with changes in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2015, funds the Permit Processing Improvement Fund that BLM uses to staff high-volume offices. Without the authority to collect these fees, Leverett said, BLM would need to cover permit-processing work through congressional appropriations — an uncertain path that could slow reviews and rebuild backlog.
Committee members from both parties said they supported restoring certainty for permitting timelines. Representative Kennedy, a sponsor of the License to Drill Act (H.R. 7831), argued the fee structure ensures predictable funding for the agency and helps move energy projects forward. Industry witnesses also urged quick reauthorization, saying the fee model matches the users of the permitting system to the cost of running it.
What BLM told the committee: Leverett described operational changes made possible by fee-funded staff, including processing multiple APDs associated with a single right-of-way as one project, and striving for a roughly 100-day target from receipt to decision. When asked how long APDs had taken before these changes, Leverett responded that it was “much more than 100 days,” but did not provide a precise prior average during the hearing.
Limitations and next steps: Members asked the agency for more detailed metrics; Leverett said he would provide line-item counts and additional data for the record. The subcommittee pressed for swift congressional action to avoid the APD fee authority lapsing at the end of fiscal year 2026.
The subcommittee held the hearing record open for written questions and documents; no formal vote occurred during the session.
