The simple fixes conservatives say could make life cheaper in America

A new conservative policy brief has identified ten specific regulatory and tax mechanisms credited with driving up costs in housing, energy, and consumer goods—and the authors argue most could be dismantled without congressional legislation. The report, circulating among Republican policy shops and cited by several House members, targets zoning restrictions that limit housing supply in major metros, permitting delays in renewable and natural gas projects averaging 7-10 years, and tariff structures on imported goods that economists across the spectrum say inflate prices for household staples. The analysis hinges on a straightforward claim: federal agencies and local governments have discretionary authority to unwind these barriers immediately, regardless of which party controls Congress. Three of the ten fixes require only executive action—changes to permitting timelines, Environmental Protection Agency water quality standards applied to housing developments, and Fish and Wildlife Service habitat reviews that slow energy infrastructure.

The housing component cuts deepest into household budgets. In San Francisco, zoning restrictions have reduced buildable land to roughly 6 percent of city territory, and median home prices exceed $1.3 million. New York City's zoning code contains over 500 use categories and has been rewritten only twice since 1916; a comparable metro area like Houston with fewer restrictions sees median prices around $380,000. The report singles out "Euclidean zoning"—named after a 1926 Supreme Court precedent—as the regulatory architecture that separates residential, commercial, and industrial zones, requiring expensive variances for mixed-use development. Energy permitting delays have become acute: a 2023 Department of Energy analysis found that onshore wind projects faced average approval timelines of 4.5 years before construction, nearly double the European standard. Liquefied natural gas export terminals wait 2-3 years for final permitting after initial application. These delays don't prevent projects; they cascade costs through financing, re-engineering, and regulatory navigation that ultimately reach consumers.

Historically, the regulatory expansion these conservatives target mirrors the 1970s permitting explosion that followed the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA required environmental impact statements for major federal actions, but subsequent decades saw the requirement metastasize into review processes for private development merely using federal permits or crossing federal land. What began as meaningful environmental review became a veto point for virtually any significant infrastructure project. By the 1980s, even conservative administrations found themselves unable to streamline permitting without appearing to sacrifice environmental safeguards—the political cost proved steeper than the economic benefit seemed worth at the time. The current argument is that three decades of inflation and supply constraints have finally made the trade-off visible.

The conservative read here is straightforward and populist: a cadre of unelected bureaucrats and local planning boards have captured the machinery of development approval and are extracting rents from ordinary people through artificial scarcity. A renter in Los Angeles spending 45 percent of gross income on housing isn't doing so because construction is inherently expensive—it's expensive because supply is strangled by process. A family's heating bill isn't high because energy is scarce; it's high because new LNG export terminals take a decade to permit and pipeline capacity hasn't expanded since the 1990s. This framing doesn't require taking a position on climate or environmental protection broadly; it simply asks whether current permitting mechanisms actually serve their stated purpose or have become self-perpetuating bureaucratic archaeology. The stronger version of this argument notes that California's aggressive climate policies have coincided with some of the nation's highest energy costs, suggesting that regulatory zeal and consumer welfare have diverged. Housing advocates across the spectrum—from left-leaning urbanists to market-oriented conservatives—agree zoning reform is necessary; the conservative emphasis is simply that this can happen administratively without waiting for legislative consensus.

The immediate test comes in agency rulemaking cycles. The Department of Interior has signaled it will revisit permitting timelines for renewable energy on federal lands; environmental groups are already mobilizing to block aggressive timelines. Several states, including Florida and Texas, have begun unilateral zoning reforms that remove single-family-only restrictions in residential areas, creating a competitive pressure that could ripple nationally if housing costs remain elevated. Watch for whether the Federal