Trump Administration Acts to ‘Severely Weaken’ a Key Environmental Law

The White House said changes issued under the National Environmental Policy Act would simplify an “overly burdensome process.” Critics accused agencies of gutting the law.

The Trump administration began this week to radically alter how the National Environmental Policy Act is implemented across the federal government, alarming environmentalists. 

Passed in 1970 and often called the “Magna Carta” of U.S. environmental law, NEPA requires agencies to assess the environmental impacts of their actions during the decision-making process. Its scope is broad, covering everything from permitting and federal land management to highway construction. 

Changes to NEPA rules were issued by the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Interior, Defense and Transportation, among others. In a press release, the White House said the president had “delivered on his promise to fix a broken permitting system,” and said the updates would “simplify this overly burdensome process and ensure efficient and timely environmental reviews.” The changes come following years of bipartisan calls for federal permitting reform, especially for energy projects.

But legal experts say the administration’s changes will substantially limit public participation, transparency and accountability. 

Scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on Thursday, the new rules will greatly increase the discretion that each agency has to operate under the law. The changes could also make it harder to successfully challenge agencies’ actions under NEPA in court. And they have narrowed and reduced the requirements that agencies must complete in order to comply with the law. 

Key elements the new rules maintain from previous versions: Agencies can cite emergencies to speed up permitting and choose to exclude some projects from longer environmental review.

The Center for Biological Diversity compared the administration’s reforms to taking a “wrecking ball” to NEPA. 

“The decision to gut the National Environmental Policy Act and cut out the public is a disaster for our national forests, environment, wildlife and people,” said Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the environmental group.

In a statement, the Natural Resources Defense Council said the administration’s revisions to NEPA’s rules “severely weaken” the statute, in part by removing requirements for agencies to weigh climate change and environmental justice in their reviews. 

“These changes will fast-track fossil fuel, mining, and other industrial projects by sidelining science, ignoring climate change, and shutting the public out of the process,” said Christy Goldfuss, NRDC’s executive director. “This is entirely about handing power to fossil fuel and mining interests and shutting the public out of decisions that directly impact their lives. That’s not reform—it’s reckless.”

The administration’s actions were cheered by industry groups like the Western Energy Alliance, which represents oil and gas companies in the West. “The Trump Administration took a major step in removing roadblocks and spurring capital investments in American energy and infrastructure,” said Melissa Simpson, the alliance’s president. “We’re pleased to see the strong message sent by President Trump’s team.”

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokesperson, said the changes were part of a “long overdue interagency effort to reform the environmental review process and modernize outdated NEPA implementation procedures.” 

“These reforms enhance certainty and efficiency and eliminate delays and ambiguity,” she said.

But the sweeping changes to NEPA, combined with a recent Supreme Court ruling on the law, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, are creating an atmosphere of uncertainty, environmentalists said.

“There is no clarity right now on what the law actually is and what the regulations actually are as it relates to who has the authority to promulgate regulations that guide the NEPA process,” said Kyle Roerink, the executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, a grassroots group that works in Nevada and Utah on freshwater issues. The group frequently comments on NEPA reviews on water-intensive projects across the region and along the Colorado River.

The Seven County decision, Roerink said, gives some clarity on what an agency can evaluate during the NEPA process, but limits the scope. “If a water pipeline is built on BLM land, then the BLM doesn’t have to consider that there might be 50,000 new homes built in a given region,” as the Bureau of Land Management only has to evaluate the immediate impacts of the pipeline, and not what may come because of its construction, he said. 

“NEPA challenges are going to be much narrower—and using generalized arguments about global warming, about carbon emissions, those are going to be increasingly difficult to use in a NEPA proceeding if it has no direct correlation with an existing statute,” Roerink said. 

Already, federal agencies have begun speeding up the permitting process, citing President Donald Trump’s declaration of a “national energy emergency.” 

In Utah, the Interior Department approved the opening of a uranium and vanadium mine with a 14-day review process, a decision the Grand Canyon Trust, a regional environmental group, said in public comments could not meet legal requirements under NEPA or other environmental laws and “would put water, wildlife, the air, the surrounding landscape, cultural resources, and the like at risk.” 

“Some agencies have already started down this road under the guise of responding to ‘emergencies,’ but these new procedures are now setting in stone that the public is going to get cut out of the process and reviews are going to be extremely limited,” said Marlyn Twitchell, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. She added that the organization will have to “adjust how we approach our work and look to additional federal and state tools to ensure that public resources and community values are protected.”

Even before these changes, staff at federal agencies struggled to keep up with the amount of work needed to review projects. Pushing to complete them quicker will only exacerbate that problem, while also making projects more susceptible to legal challenges, environmental groups, developers and others have warned.

The agencies’ new rules and guidance could make projects yet more vulnerable to delay. When the system is working well, public input early in the process reduces later legal challenges, NEPA experts said.

“Maybe there is a greater chance that the NEPA process gets hung up in litigation and ultimately slows everything down,” said Erika Kranz, a senior staff attorney in Harvard University’s Environmental and Energy Law Program. “I could see this backfiring.”

Agencies will no longer be required to publish a draft of their environmental reviews before finalization. “That’s a hindrance both to the agency’s ability to have a fulsome understanding of environmental effects, but it also is cutting the public out of the process in a pretty meaningful way,” Kranz said.

At the same time, the nature of many of the agencies’ changes to their regulations means that it will now be more difficult for environmental and community groups to win cases under NEPA. Some agencies rescinded a number of their previous rules and replaced them with weaker “guidance,” which is not generally legally binding. “The agency can go in and change it whenever it wants,” said Hannah Perls, senior staff attorney in Harvard’s Environmental and Energy Law Program.

Prior to the second Trump administration, and for more than 50 years, NEPA required federal agencies to evaluate cumulative impacts on public health and the environment in a way that no other existing law does, Perls said. Without its guardrails, the landscape for major projects like data centers, critical mineral mining and fossil fuel extraction will look very different. 

“NEPA has a really core democratic function in ways that most other environmental statutes don’t. It has been designed to not just facilitate public consultation. A lot of other environmental processes get baked into the NEPA process, like tribal consultation, like Endangered Species Act analyses,” Perls said. “When you take that away, there’s nothing else that provides the same level of transparency and accountability. So it’s not just, ‘Can we participate?’ It’s, ‘Can we even know what’s going on?’”

Cover photo:  An aerial view of the Pinyon Plain Mine operating within the Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument near Grand Canyon, Ariz. Credit: David McNew/Getty Images