Trump weakens law in order to speed up federal permitting process

WASHINGTON >> President Donald Trump on Wednesday unilaterally weakened one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws, the National Environmental Policy Act, limiting public review of federal infrastructure projects to speed up the permitting of freeways, power plants and pipelines.

In doing so, the Trump administration claimed it will save hundreds of millions of dollars over almost a decade by significantly reducing the amount of time allowed to complete reviews of major infrastructure projects.

The president announced the final changes to the rule at the UPS Hapeville Airport Hub in Atlanta, making the case that “mountains and mountains of red tape” and lengthy permit processes have held up major infrastructure projects across the country, including a lane expansion to the perpetually clogged Interstate 75 in Georgia.

“All of that ends today,” he said. “We’re doing something very dramatic.”

Revising the 50-year-old law through regulatory reinterpretation is one of the biggest deregulatory actions of the Trump administration, which to date has moved to rollback 100 rules protecting clean air and water, and others that aim to reduce the threat of human-caused climate change.

Because the action is coming so late in Trump’s term, it elevates the stakes in the November elections. Under federal regulatory law, a Democratic president and Congress could eradicate the NEPA rollback with simple majority votes on Capitol Hill and the president’s signature.

Republican lawmakers, the oil and gas industry, construction companies, homebuilders and other businesses have long said the federal permitting process takes too long, and accused environmentalists of using the law to tie up projects they oppose.

“This will modernize and rationalize the permitting process so that we can get these projects built at a state and local level,” said Martin Durbin, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Global Energy Institute. The final rule, he said, “is a big step forward and it’s about our nation maintaining its global competitiveness.”

The final rule sets new hard deadlines of between one and two years to complete environmental studies, according to two people who have seen the document but were not authorized to speak about it publicly.

The rule will also allow agencies to develop categories of activities that do not require an environmental assessment at all.

And in one of the most bitterly contested provisions, the rule would free federal agencies from having to consider the impacts of infrastructure projects on climate change. It does so by eliminating the need for agencies to analyze a project’s indirect or “cumulative” effects on the environment and specifying they are only required to analyze “reasonably foreseeable” impacts.