White House Starts Unwinding Environmental Permitting Rules

The White House is moving quickly to undo the rules that clarify how environmental permits are issued for federal projects such as pipelines, highways, and transmission lines.

An interim final rule titled “Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations” submitted Sunday by the Council on Environmental Quality circumvents the typical notice and comment process, meaning it can take effect immediately. Agencies generally only make interim final rules in emergencies. They can still be challenged in court.

But the courts are already tilting in the Trump administration’s favor on rolling back federal environmental permitting regulations.

The US District Court for the District of North Dakota said earlier this month that CEQ doesn’t have legal authority to issue rules. In January, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit declined rehearing in a similar dispute.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office giving CEQ until Feb. 19 to consider rescinding all rules issued under the National Environmental Policy Act and replacing them with nonbinding guidance. After that, the CEQ chair is to assemble a working group to harmonize the revised rules across the agencies.

CEQ under President Joe Biden made two sets of tweaks to the NEPA rules. Included in those changes were new provisions requiring agencies to quantify reasonably foreseeable climate change impacts and embed environmental justice considerations more deeply into their decisions.

Agencies will still have to do NEPA analyses if the rules are scrapped. The Trump administration’s aim is that its guidance under the statute will make permitting happen faster.

But opponents say scrapping the rules will accelerate climate change, jeopardize communities’ water and air quality, splinter the nation’s permitting rules into a hodgepodge of different rules at different agencies, and spark more litigation.