President Trump is proposing a major overhaul of federal environmental permitting, responding to business complaints of lengthy bureaucratic delays they say have bogged down vital infrastructure projects such as roads and energy pipelines.
The president is planning to make an announcement regarding the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, at 11 a.m. Thursday, according to Trump administration officials. They described the update as significant, with one calling it a deregulatory effort “designed to streamline and shorten review times.”
The administration sees the move as a broad-based effort to modernize rules that have gone largely untouched for more than 40 years, according to another senior administration official.
But the pending action has raised fears among infrastructure experts and environmentalists that the changes will hamper efforts to slow climate change and adapt to it. They say the federal review can serve as a break on environmentally unsound projects.
Under the proposal, federal environmental review will no longer be required for projects that don’t have significant federal government funding or involvement, an element that was earlier reported by the Washington Post.
For projects that do have to go through the NEPA review process, the proposal aims to put hard limits on how long those reviews can take, clarify what environmental effects agencies have to plan for and what future changes to the environment permit reviews will have to consider in advance.
Environmentalists say the proposal is especially troubling as the effects of climate change are becoming more pronounced and that these rules need to be strengthened, not weakened, as society increasingly has to adapt to climate change.
But the president on several occasions has criticized the environmental permitting process as a bureaucratic barrier to economic development. Many lawmakers and economists agree that America needs to fix a backlog of infrastructure needs, which the administration has pegged at roughly $1 trillion.
In recent months, the administration has turned its attention to addressing several bedrock environmental laws and changes it can make to them to help jump-start development. A plan to overhaul NEPA would be the latest in a series of moves that have also tried to limit the reach of the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, especially in how much those laws force consideration of risks associated with climate change.
Energy companies and manufacturers in particular have complained that NEPA, in recent decades, has become a tool for environmentalists to block progress. Since its last update, major roads and pipeline projects have become harder to complete and a drilling boom has led to an expansion of oil-and-gas drilling nationwide. Industrial interests have asked for a modernization to improve efficiency and consistency in permitting across federal agencies.
“The administration’s modernization of NEPA removes bureaucratic barriers that were stifling construction of key infrastructure projects needed for U.S. producers to deliver energy in a safe and environmentally protective way,” said Anne Bradbury, chief executive of the American Exploration & Production Council, a trade group for some of the country’s largest independent oil-and-gas companies.
Environmental groups have been concerned that an attempt to streamline NEPA permitting will ultimately degrade its ability to protect the environment. They have already been critical of a decision the Environmental Protection Agency made in 2018 to eliminate letter grades that often came as guidance in the process. These types of changes can make NEPA reviews less helpful to the public and weaken a process that is supposed to prevent oil spills and other environmental accidents, environmentalists said.
“Forcing federal agencies to ignore environmental threats is a disgraceful abdication of our responsibility to protect the planet for future generations,” Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement this week anticipating the overhaul. He called it a “gift to the fossil-fuel industry.”