The Justice Department’s swift elimination of Trump-era environmental policies sets a fresh tone for the agency under the Biden administration.
“That’s a clear signal that there is a new sheriff in town,” Williams Mullen attorney Carrick C. Brooke-Davidson said after the Environment and Natural Resources Division’s top lawyer withdrew a slate of memos issued by Trump appointees.
The withdrawal, first reported Thursday by Bloomberg Law, scraps restrictions on certain types of mitigation measures and popular settlement tools called supplemental environmental projects, or SEPs. Jean E. Williams, a career official currently leading ENRD, said the Trump-era policies were “inconsistent with longstanding ...