Protecting NEPA – The Environmental Magna Carta

The SPEED Act:

Congress is pursuing a bill called the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act (H.R. 4776). This deceptively titled bill was crafted solely to hamstring the nation’s bedrock environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act.

The bill, accounting for last-minute proposed changes that make it far worse, adds sweeping new exemptions, restricts input from experts in other agencies, and puts private interests in the driver’s seat of environmental reviews, disregarding the federal government’s role to protect the public interest. More than 100 groups signed a letter opposing the SPEED Act, alongside another letter from western organizations condemning the bill’s total capitulation to extractive industries.

The bill’s attack on NEPA is built on the myth that this bedrock environmental law slows project approval. In fact, new evidence-based research concludes:

• Permitting delays are not caused by NEPA but, instead, by insufficient agency capacity, compliance requirements imposed by other laws, and external factors, such as delays attributable to permit applicants.
• The median time to complete a comprehensive Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) fell steeply from 3.6 years in 2019 to 2.2 years in 2024.
• Comprehensive EISs comprise a small and falling fraction of agency environmental reviews. For example, between 2010 and 2021, the principal public lands management agencies–the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management–prepared far fewer EIS (85% and 74% less, respectively).
• Relative to utility-scale renewable energy projects constructed between 2010 and 2021, the vast majority–96.1% of wind projects and 96.8% of solar projects–employed streamlined environmental review procedures or avoided federal oversight entirely with very few projects–only 2.8% of wind projects and 0.7% of solar projects–challenged in federal court.

Congress, with the SPEED Act, isn’t interested in true reform that revitalizes bedrock environmental laws in service of climate action and protection of the West’s public lands, wildlife and waters, and communities. They are, instead, recklessly careening off the road, drunk on bad facts and worse ideas and bullied by the fossil fuel and Big Tech industries’ money and influence.

Democrats must not—especially with the Trump administration in power for three more years—surrender America’s bedrock community and environmental protections to the fossil fuel and extractive industries, intent on looting public resources for profit without regard for the consequences to people, their communities, and our world. The SPEED Act would create new uncertainty and complication without improving decision making. In fact, we believe it would exacerbate the climate crisis and the fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, and oppressive heat that have already killed so many Americans and so severely damaged our homes, public lands, and economy.

Deregulation interests have peddled myths that NEPA is impeding construction of roads, housing, and other infrastructure, yet data shows the law leads to better decisions and ultimately better projects. Instead of taking a reasoned approach to identifying and addressing specific permitting needs, this SPEED Act would open the door to plundering our nation’s resources on public lands and dramatically cut back the public’s ability to be heard during project development or to seek redress for violations of law in court.

The SPEED Act sponsors bemoan NEPA’s “cumbersome and lengthy process,” which experts agree is rooted in chronic underfunding and under-staffing federal agencies—a problem created by Congress and the Trump White House. The sponsors complain that NEPA “is currently the most litigated environmental statute,” but the fact is less than a quarter of a percent of NEPA decisions end up in court annually.

Congress has passed numerous updates to NEPA that are meaningfully reducing permitting times, such as FAST-41, the Inflation Reduction Act, the Fiscal Responsibility Act, and others. Before eviscerating our nation’s bedrock environmental law, we should allow these changes to play out. The prior administration also made substantial improvements to permitting that accelerated permitting timelines and respected, rather than undermined, the public interest abandoned by the current administration that should serve as a starting point for any congressional action.

Significantly, by defining the law as purely procedural, the bill guts NEPA’s central purpose to ensure that all federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their actions. For 50 years the law has directed agencies to consider environmental consequences of proposed actions, engaging the public and communities in that process to ensure that “to the fullest extent possible,” they “look before they leap” and make well-informed decisions that encourage balance between human beings and the environment for present and future generations.

The bill also limits the types of projects subject to environmental review and eliminates an agency’s ability to consider the combined impacts of other projects, meaning environmental reviews will no longer adequately inform the public. In addition, it takes away standard judicial remedies by eliminating courts’ ability to set aside agency actions that violate NEPA, eliminating the incentive for agencies to comply with the law. Moreover, projects would be able to proceed while any violations are corrected—tantamount to “bulldoze first, consider impacts later.”

We can improve the speed of permitting, and we already are. We must, because the climate and biodiversity crises demand swift and powerful responses. But we must not erode community and environmental protections to achieve this goal.

The Forest Service NEPA Rollback:

The NEPA rollback proposed by the U.S. Forest Service to overhaul its environmental analysis procedures under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which will dramatically curtail the role the public and science play in land management decisions on 193 million acres of national forest lands across the country. This page is dedicated to making information available to the public about this extremely concerning action.

These changes would create loopholes to increase the pace and scale of resource extraction, including logging and mining, all while limiting the scope of public awareness and input on proposed projects. The Forest Service has proposed several new categorical exclusions that would allow the agency to move project planning behind closed doors by cutting the public out of the decision-making process.

The goal of NEPA is to foster better decisions to protect, restore, and enhance our environment and is based on three key principles: 1) transparency; 2) informed decision making; and 3) giving the public a voice. This is achieved through two key tools: public comment and requiring the Forest Service to “look before it leaps” by preparing a detailed environmental analysis. This analysis provides agency decision makers, the public, and outside experts with relevant information and requires agencies to take a “hard look” at the potential environmental consequences of a proposed project before making a decision and taking action.  Other laws provide for administrative review of these decisions, which gives the public another chance to weigh in on decisions affecting national forestlands.

The Forest Service’s proposed rule undermines these basic tenets by increasing the number and scope of “categorical exclusions” – or very cursory review of project effects – for nearly every type of land management action. The proposed rule exempts those decisions from public comment, and only requires public notice; and such categorical exclusions are already exempt from administrative review.

Cutting the public out of public lands management is a recipe for increased controversy and disagreement, and will not lead to efficient implementation of science-based projects on the ground. Unsurprisingly, the rollback faces overwhelming public opposition, with 94 percent of public comments against.

The White House NEPA Rollback:

In July 2020, the Trump administration finalized its proposal to gut core components of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a crucial safeguard for communities’ clean air, clean water, and health, as well as imperiled species and wild lands. Environmental justice and conservation advocates including WELC have responded to the rollback with legal action.

The rollback is the culmination of a relentless, multiyear assault on NEPA’s protections for workers, local communities, and the natural environment. It would open the door for the government to exempt pipelines, large-scale logging operations, waste incinerators, smog-spewing highways, and countless other federal actions from environmental review or sharply limit local communities’ ability to participate in the environmental decision-making process.

The administration’s disregard for NEPA flies in the face of decades of bipartisan consensus on the law. Passed almost unanimously by Congress and signed into law by President Nixon in 1970, it was the product of years of determined activism from people who wanted a greater say in decisions affecting their homes, health, and environment.

We have sued the administration over this illegal subversion of the will of Congress.