Data Sources

• Federal Permitting Dashboard — Project metadata and milestone timelines published by FPISC under FAST-41 (Title 41 of the FAST Act).
• Recommended Performance Schedules — Target durations for environmental reviews and federal authorizations published by FPISC.
• EIA Form 860 (optional) — Planned and existing generation capacity for energy-sector project context.

Duration Calculation

For each project milestone, we compute:

• Planned days = planned_end − planned_start
• Actual days = coalesce(actual_end, planned_end) − coalesce(actual_start, planned_start)
• Overrun days = actual_days − planned_days
• Excess days = max(0, overrun_days) — only counts delays, not early completions

Peer Benchmarking

Projects are grouped by sector and authorization_type. Within each peer group the 25th-percentile actual duration is the frontier — the level that 25% of peers already achieve. The gap between a project’s actual duration and the frontier is the recoverable delay.

Schedule Benchmarking

Each authorization type is matched to the FPISC recommended duration. Schedule overrun = actual_days − recommended_days.

Delay Attribution

Excess days are attributed to the (agency, authorization_type) pair responsible for each milestone. Aggregating across projects yields the agency-stage bottleneck score = total_excess_days × pct_delayed.

Scoring

• Project overrun score = total_excess_days × n_delayed_stages
• Agency bottleneck score = total_excess_days × pct_delayed

Counterfactual Scenarios

For each agency-authorization pair we estimate the total calendar days that would be saved if every project’s milestone duration were reduced to the frontier (peer or schedule). This is a gross estimate— it does not account for dependencies between milestones or resource constraints.

Limitations

• Only FAST-41 covered projects are included; many federal permits are outside this dataset.
• Milestone dates may be self-reported and subject to lag.
• Peer groups assume sector-level comparability; project complexity varies.
• Counterfactual savings assume independent milestones (no critical-path modeling).