Trump Administration Guts 50-Year-Old Environmental Review Law, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Federal Agencies Were Required To Study A Project's Damage Before Approving It

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration this week completed a four-year effort to overhaul the National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that for half a century had required the federal government to study the environmental damage of a major project before that project was built, resolving a long-standing concern that highways, pipelines, and drilling leases were being examined for harm in advance.

The law, signed by President Nixon and long regarded as a foundational piece of American environmental policy, obligated agencies to produce environmental impact statements assessing the consequences of their decisions. Under the administration's rewritten regulations, fewer projects would trigger such a review, the resulting documents would be subject to page limits and a two-year deadline, and agencies were instructed that they no longer needed to weigh the "cumulative" effects of a project, the category under which the contribution of pipelines and highways to climate change had traditionally been assessed.

Officials characterized the change as a long-overdue modernization. "For fifty years, agencies have been required to sit down and write out everything that could go wrong before breaking ground, which is an enormous amount of paperwork," said one source within the administration, who noted that a study documenting a project's harm had a tendency to delay the project. "Now the analysis and the construction can proceed on a much more comparable timeline."

The President, who as both a real estate developer and a candidate had spent decades describing environmental review as the principal obstacle to American building, hailed the result as a victory for infrastructure. Administration officials emphasized that nothing in the new rule prevented an agency from considering a project's environmental impact. It simply removed the requirement that it do so, along with the deadline by which it would otherwise have had to finish.

Supporters of the overhaul noted that the categories of harm now exempt from mandatory study, including the indirect and cumulative warming effects of fossil fuel infrastructure, were precisely the categories that had proven most difficult to address, and that a process which never generated a finding could not generate an inconvenient one.

At press time, a federally funded highway was being approved through a floodplain whose tendency to flood would now be discovered by the people who lived there.