Executive Summary

America’s manufacturing might depends on manufacturers’ ability to get shovels in the ground on job-creating projects across the country. Manufacturing investment drives new jobs, economic strength, and U.S. competitiveness—but projects that are delayed or denied thanks to America’s broken permitting process never live up to that promise. That is why there is a strong and growing bipartisan recognition that permitting reform is critical to American economic and national security in the 21st century.

Permitting challenges—a vast and complex web of interconnecting, and often overlapping, statutes and regulations—affect all project types. Projects range from new manufacturing facilities to factory expansion, from shop floor modernization to capital equipment installation, from pipelines to transmission lines, from semiconductor fabs to auto plants, from solar farms to gas plants, and from critical minerals processing to battery production. These challenges have real-world, quantifiable, negative impacts on manufacturing investment. Up to this point, however, consolidated research demonstrating these impacts has been sparse.

This can be attributed to the sheer number of laws and regulations governing permits and the fact that there is no central permit repository in the federal government that can be pulled from. This report addresses this lack of consolidated data, and our findings starkly show what is at stake if policymakers cannot deliver comprehensive permitting reform in 2026.

This joint report by the National Association of Manufacturers, the largest manufacturing trade association in the U.S., and the Foundation for American Innovation, a think tank championing the technology, talent and ideas essential to American prosperity, security and flourishing, documents what manufacturers are experiencing on the ground: the specific statutes that are creating bottlenecks, and the reforms that would alleviate those bottlenecks to fully unleash manufacturing investment, get shovels in the ground, compete on the world stage and deliver for the American people.

To provide a comprehensive view of the impacts of the permitting burden on manufacturers, the NAM and the FAI conducted a joint survey of the NAM’s members Dec. 9, 2025–Jan. 15, 2026 to identify which projects manufacturers are undertaking, which permits they most often require, where delays and uncertainty slow investment, and what reforms industry prioritizes. A joint analysis of the publicly available permitting data and survey data show that permitting delays cost manufacturers at least $7.9 billion every year. As the survey results demonstrate, this significant resource diversion harms manufacturing investment and can hinder companies’ ability to open facilities, launch projects, and create jobs across the country.