Trump Revives Keystone XL And Dakota Access Pipelines On Day Four, Concludes Sioux Drinking Water Insufficient Reason To Deny Two Donor-Backed Oil Companies The Right To Cross It

WASHINGTON. President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday signed a pair of presidential memoranda directing federal agencies to revive the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines, two infrastructure projects whose previous denials had constituted a long-standing irritation to the energy firms that had drawn up the routes.

The memoranda direct the State Department to reconsider the cross-border permit for Keystone XL, which the Obama administration had rejected in 2015 after concluding it offered minimal domestic energy benefit while complicating U.S. climate commitments, and direct the Army Corps of Engineers to expedite the final easement for the Dakota Access pipeline, which had been held up while officials weighed concerns from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe that the pipeline's path under Lake Oahe threatened the tribe's primary source of drinking water.

"From now on, we're going to start making pipelines in the United States," said Trump, who through mid-2016 had reportedly held stock in Energy Transfer Partners, the operator of the Dakota Access pipeline, and whose 2016 campaign had accepted contributions from that company's chief executive. "We will build our own pipelines, we will build our own pipes, like we used to in the old days."

Asked whether the reversal addressed any of the substantive environmental, tribal, or treaty-based objections the previous administration had spent years studying, a senior administration official clarified that the studying itself had been the problem, explaining that the federal government's habit of finding out what an infrastructure project might do, before approving the project, was the principal obstacle to American greatness.

White House officials further confirmed that the President had signed the orders without consulting the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, the Yankton Sioux Tribe, or any other party whose objections to the route would, under prior practice, have triggered consultation obligations under the National Historic Preservation Act and the federal trust responsibility, neither of which the President mentioned.

At press time, federal authorities at Standing Rock were preparing to clear the remaining water protectors from protest camps using pepper spray, water cannons in subfreezing temperatures, and rubber bullets, in what officials described as a routine response to a routine objection from a tribe whose treaty rights had merely become inconvenient to two oil pipelines backed by two donors known personally to the sitting president.