This post was originally published on Legal Planet. Republished with permission.
President Donald Trump has taken some dramatic steps in the name of improving use of NEPA, the statute governing environmental reviews of projects. The goal is to speed up the permitting process and make it more efficient. The reality is that his efforts will create chaos and uncertainty, with the likely effect of slowing things down.
The first Trump action was an effort to completely restructure the way the government implements NEPA. Jimmy Carter empowered a White House office, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), to issue binding regulations that tell agencies how to implement NEPA. For decades, those regulations provided uniformity across the federal government in implementing NEPA. They also received deference from the courts. Trump overturned Carter’s order, making the CEQ rules into advisory guidelines, and directed each agency to create its own NEPA regulations. CEQ is supposed to oversee that process.
The upshot is that that we have gone from an orderly process that was respected by the courts to dozens of proceedings at individual agencies. The agencies are losing staff due to DOGE and have many other things on their plates, so this is likely to be a protracted process. In the meantime, there will be no binding rules, and there’s no guarantee that the agencies will end up with the same procedures. That will be a particular problem for the many projects that involve multiple agencies.
The second Trump action was to declare an energy emergency and direct agencies to speed up their permitting. The Army Corps of Engineers, which issues permits for projects involving navigable waterways, promptly said it was fast-tracking hundreds of projects under its own emergency regulation. This is unlikely to work.
The reason is that the Corps’ emergency regulation is very limited — it involves genuine emergencies due to disasters or other situations involving urgent threats to people or property. Trump’s emergency has nothing to do with that — it’s basically about what he says as a need to expand use of fossil fuels to improve the electricity grid. So, courts are likely to reverse permits that the Corps tries to issue under Trump’s emergency declaration.
Even putting that procedural problem aside, the Corps’ regulation allows a speedier process but it doesn’t change the standards that NEPA requires for environmental impact statements. In other words, the agency will have to produce impact statements of equal quality but faster (and with less public input). That increases the odds that a court will later find flaws in the impact statement and tell the Corps to redo its work. Again, more delays.
It’s not surprising that the Trump crew liked these two initiatives. Both seemed to hold the prospect of fast-tracking environmental reviews, allowing a faster expansion of fossil fuel production. If they had thought things through, however, they might have realized that these actions were as likely to slow as to accelerate the permitting process. Much as they undoubtedly hate NEPA — after all, the middle two letters stand for “Environmental Policy” — putting some effort into making the process work would have been more productive than these efforts to short-circuit the process.
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Daniel Farber | May 20, 2025
President Donald Trump has taken some dramatic steps in the name of improving use of NEPA, the statute governing environmental reviews of projects. The goal is to speed up the permitting process and make it more efficient. The reality is that his efforts will create chaos and uncertainty, with the likely effect of slowing things down.
Federico Holm | May 19, 2025
Since our last update (May 12), we have seen some movement regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. The pace has remained high, with outlets like The Hill and Banking Dive reporting that President Trump has signed multiple resolutions into law. Oddly, no official sources (like the White House’s website or congress.gov) reflect these developments.
Federico Holm | May 12, 2025
Since our last update (May 6), we have seen some movement regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. The pace in the Senate remained high, and we have seen lawmakers try to maximize their output before the CRA cutoff date.
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 7, 2025
In two previous posts, we discussed the major findings of the Project 2025 tracker we created along with our partners at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to implement its recommendations over its first 100 days. We also began offering some insights into making sense of these findings and how to interpret them. The basic finding was that the administration has fulfilled more than a quarter of Project 2025’s recommended executive actions affecting domestic policy. This raises a natural follow-up question: Is that a lot? In this post, we continue to provide analytical tools for answering that question.
Federico Holm | May 6, 2025
Since our last update (April 28), we have seen some important developments regarding Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolutions. In the past week, we have seen legislators take up new resolutions for a vote, address the controversial issue of the California Clean Air Act waivers, and send new resolutions to the president to be signed into law. Things seem to be accelerating in Congress (and especially in the Senate), as legislators are approaching the CRA cutoff date.
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 6, 2025
In the first part of this series, we introduced the major findings of the tracker we built with our colleagues at Governing for Impact for monitoring the Trump administration’s progress in implementing Project 2025’s comprehensive policy blueprint, Mandate for Leadership. Specifically, we found that over its first 100 days, the administration pursued or completed 28 percent of the more than 530 recommended domestic policy executive actions that we included in our tracker. The post went on to provide context for these findings by tracing Project 2025’s circuitous route from obscure presidential transition report to controversial playbook for the Trump administration. Here, we provide further context for our findings by examining some factors that shed light on how significant this progress really is.
Federico Holm, James Goodwin | May 5, 2025
The extent of harm that the Trump administration inflicted over its first 100 days was nothing short of breathtaking. That it accomplished much of this by transforming our regulatory system into a tool of authoritarian rule speaks to the influence that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 has had on this agenda, despite Trump’s half-hearted attempts to disavow the playbook on the campaign trail.
Robert L. Glicksman | May 1, 2025
Many risks to public health, safety, and the environment are insufficiently understood. Indeed, what some scholars have referred to as “ignorance of mechanism” may be the defining characteristic of many of the nation’s most pressing environmental problems. The U.S. Congress has understood the significance of this uncertainty ever since the birth of modern environmental law in the United States around 1970.
James Goodwin | April 30, 2025
A helpful way to think about the “Mandate for Leadership”—the radical policy blueprint laid out as part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—is as a kind of “political time capsule” reflecting the world as conservatives saw it in April 2023, when the document was first published. Bearing this in mind is important, because that world was very different from the one 19 months later, when President Donald Trump secured his reelection—or even the one on his second Inauguration Day, nearly two years after the mandate was released.