Alaska says some permits now clear in under a week — as the reforms behind that speed draw both praise and alarm

Some Alaska permits now clear in less than a week, Acting Natural Resources Commissioner John Crowther told resource industry executives in Anchorage on Monday.

"We have some of our cycle times literally down to less than a week," Crowther said at a Resource Development Council breakfast forum. "We have some of them down to, you know, 32 days, and 30 of that is a public notice period."

Crowther appeared alongside Environmental Conservation Commissioner Randy Bates and the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The three described two levers reshaping state permitting: a memorandum of understanding with the federal Permitting Council, and Gov. Mike Dunleavy's Administrative Order 360.

Alaska signed the MOU in August 2025, the first statewide agreement between the federal Permitting Council and any state. It lets the state recommend projects for the Federal Permitting Dashboard, which tracks timelines for energy, mining, transportation, broadband and manufacturing projects under the FAST-41 program. The overhaul carries added weight in Alaska, where roughly 60% of land is federal. Crowther said the agreement changed what the state can ask federal reviewers: "Why hasn't this particular person reviewed this? What's the hangup here? We have a lot of ability to get in and participate now." Bates said the coordination needs to outlast the current federal administration and "withstand the swing of the next administration's pendulum."

The Fish and Game commissioner said the biggest constraint sits on the federal side: state agencies often cannot tell what they are permitting until the federal environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act is finished and a preferred alternative identified. It is hard to issue a Title 16 permit for a stream crossing, he said, before the location of that crossing is known.

Administrative Order 360 requires executive branch agencies to cut regulatory requirements 15% by the end of 2026 and 25% by the end of 2027. Bates called it "an opportunity for us to make regulatory changes outside the venue of statute in the legislature," while adding that DEC's job is to permit in a manner both expedient and protective of human health and the environment. He described one change already in use: "It's an overnight permit. It's called permit by rule," where an applicant toggles online that they need coverage and are cleared to proceed.

The reforms have critics, and the fish-habitat and conservation stakes are the reason. Administrative Order 360 directs agencies to build in a provision for automatic approval of a permit if the state misses its own review deadline — a mechanism conservation groups including Cook Inletkeeper have called a loophole that could let projects through without full review. Critics also note the order sets its 15% and 25% cut targets without specifying what would be eliminated, and argue that compressing timelines risks shortchanging the environmental and public-input scrutiny that permitting exists to provide. The forum, hosted by an industry group, included no such critics; the administration's account went unchallenged in the room.

Bates and the Fish and Game commissioner urged industry to tell the agencies which regulations should change, with Bates and Deputy Commissioner Kieneman reviewing the submissions. No public comment deadline was announced at the forum.