Bill speeds up energy and mining permits with court-hired contractors.
S. 4795 — FREEDOM Act · Filed by Tom Cotton (R-AR) · 1 cosponsor · Introduced Jun 16, 2026 · Referred to committee
Your members of Congress
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What it does
The bill sets tight deadlines for permits. Simple permits take 90 days. Hard ones take 1 year. If agencies miss deadlines, courts hire private contractors to finish reviews. Once projects get all permits, they are hard to revoke. The bill lets companies claim more hardrock mining sites and lease more geothermal land on federal property.
Who it affects
Energy and mining companies get faster permits and more protection once approved. Citizens and the public face faster environmental reviews done by private contractors instead of government agencies.
One thing to notice
Private contractors are paid by the same agencies whose missed deadlines triggered the hire. Once projects are fully permitted, they can only be stopped if there is clear, immediate, and substantiated harm.
From the analysis of the bill text, linked under Primary records below.
Where it stands
1 cosponsor: 1 Democrats.
- Jun 16, 2026 — Introduced · Congress.gov: “Introduced in Senate”
- Jun 16, 2026 — Referred to Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources · Congress.gov: “Read twice and referred to the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources”
Dates and quoted wording are Congress.gov's action record; the timeline shows status changes, not every procedural step.
Money around this bill
5 groups reported lobbying about this bill. They filed 6 reports from Jun 2026 to Jun 2026.
Those reports show $1,570,000 in lobbying spending. Each report lists about 19 bills. So that money was not all for this bill.
More groups named this bill than 78% of bills with any report.
Tom Cotton, who sponsored the bill, received $1,258,206 from PACs for the 2026 election.
- Nature Conservancy — $900,000 in 1 report
- Corporate Energy Buyers Association — $380,000 in 2 reports
- Salt River Project — $250,000 in 1 report
- The Williams Companies, Inc. — $40,000 in 1 report
- Giffords — $0 in 1 report
Lobbying is legal. These reports show who lobbied about this bill, not what changed.
Words to know
- environmental reviews — Studies of how a project affects land, water, air, and wildlife.
- hardrock mining — Digging for metals like gold, copper, and silver in rock.
- lobbying — Trying to influence lawmakers about a bill. Companies and groups pay people to do this.
- PACs — Groups that collect money and give it to candidates for office.
- sponsored — To sponsor a bill is to introduce it in Congress and put your name on it.
How this was measured
Analysis — Quorum's AI read the bill text published by Congress.gov (50,094 characters) on Aug 19, 2026. Section numbers in the findings refer to that text, linked below; transparency and hidden-provision scores are compared against the median of 14,206 analysed bills.
Status and sponsors — Congress.gov's bill record — actions, committee referrals and cosponsors — loaded nightly. The timeline shows status changes, not every procedural action.
Money — Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings whose specific-issue field names this bill for quarters ending Jun 2026 to Jun 2026. A filing's amount is reported whole beside the median number of bills a filing names; it is never divided across them. PAC receipts are FEC-reported contributions to the sponsor's candidate committee in the 2026 cycle.
As of — lobbying records through Jul 20, 2026 · page rendered 2026-09-17.
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