Charlie Copeland is the director of the Center for Economic & Fiscal Policy at the Caesar Rodney Institute.
Delaware’s economy is sending a warning signal that policymakers cannot afford to ignore. In December 2025, the state’s unemployment rate hit 5.2% — well above the national rate of 4.4% and up from 3.6% just 12 months earlier. The number of unemployed Delawareans surged 45% year over year, the largest increase since the COVID-19 lockdowns of early 2021.
But even the headline number understates the problem. Delaware’s labor force participation rate has fallen to 59.4%, meaning that more than 4 in 10 working-age residents are not working and not even looking. Nationally, that figure is 62.5%. If Delaware’s workforce participated at the same rate as the rest of the country, the effective unemployment rate would be closer to 10% — roughly 27,000 additional Delawareans who have simply given up.
Against that backdrop, permitting reform is not an abstraction. It will determine whether Delaware can build the infrastructure, energy systems and housing it needs to reverse this slide — or whether the state continues to lose ground, while the country moves forward.
Delaware’s own leaders have begun to acknowledge the problem. In February, Gov. Matt Meyer signed Executive Order 18, creating the “Delaware Permitting Accelerator” to coordinate agency reviews and fast-track housing, energy and infrastructure projects. The order states plainly that state permitting timelines have “often stretched 18-24 months or longer, increasing project costs, discouraging private investment, constraining housing supply, and slowing delivery of essential infrastructure.”
The pressures behind that order are real. Delaware imports roughly three-fifths of its electricity from out-of-state suppliers, having retired significant generation capacity over the past two decades. The state’s Affordable Housing Production Task Force found a shortage of 45,000 housing units, with construction costs in Sussex County approaching $475,000 for a basic single-family home — beyond what working families can afford. Among the task force’s central recommendations: Streamline the permitting process.
Executive Order 18 is a positive step, but it is not a substitute for structural reform. An executive order can be revoked by a later governor, so it should be enacted into law by the General Assembly. Additionally, Delaware should advocate for federal permitting reform. No matter how much Delaware streamlines its own processes, major infrastructure — power generation, transmission, broadband and any project touching federal land, waterways or funding — must still go through a federal review system that has become a source of litigation and indefinite delays.
The central problem is the National Environmental Policy Act. Signed in 1970, NEPA was designed to inform federal decision-making, not to provide endless opportunities for obstruction. Today, it does exactly that. Roughly 30% of projects undergoing a full environmental impact statement face litigation, and energy and infrastructure projects routinely spend four-and-a-half years or more in the federal permitting process. McKinsey & Company estimates that projects currently stuck in federal review represent enough generating capacity to power 38 million to 54 million American households.
Delaware cannot wait. The state has no nuclear generation, and its last coal plant closed in 2025. Legislators from both parties have begun studying small modular reactors and other alternatives — but any new generation project of meaningful scale requires federal permits, federal environmental review and federal interconnection approvals that can take the better part of a decade. Delaware can pass all the energy legislation it wants; if the federal system cannot process the applications, shovels do not go into the ground.
The case for reform has moved beyond argument. The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the bipartisan SPEED Act. Through reconciliation, Congress has begun setting enforceable timelines — an environmental assessment within 180 days and a full impact statement within one year. Polling by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that Americans support streamlining the permitting process by a margin of 61%-13%. This is not a close call.
For Delaware, the stakes are 27,000 working-age residents who have dropped out of the labor force, 45,000 housing units the state cannot build fast enough and three-fifths of our electricity imported because we lack the capacity to power our own economy. Every month a project sits in review is a month when a home is not built and when a Delawarean who could be working is not.
Reader reactions, pro or con, are welcomed at civiltalk@iniusa.org.
