A coalition of 27 western conservation groups sent a letter to Rep. Huffman and the members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources advising all to exercise extreme caution on permitting reform in advance of a July 22 hearing titled “Permitting Purgatory: Restoring Common Sense to [National Environmental Policy Act] Reviews.”
“Given Congress’ composition, the signal our legislators sent with the 2025 Reconciliation Bill, and the Trump administration’s virtual lock on policy, permitting reform in this Congress is certain to virtually eliminate public participation and crucial environmental and health protections, opening the door to unchecked public lands exploitation without consideration of impacts to ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.” said Kyle Tisdel, Climate and Energy Program director at the Western Environmental Law Center. “A popular book advancing several myths about environmental protection and permitting has provided cover for those who want to push through widespread rollbacks of laws designed to protect communities and the environment. The history of deregulation in this country demonstrates that the public almost always loses to monied interests who take public resources. Ecological and community values are essential to a thriving, truly abundant world.”
Extreme antiregulatory political forces have attacked NEPA, our nation’s bedrock environmental law, from every conceivable angle for decades. When in power, conservatives have defunded and cut staff at agencies overseeing major project proposals for public lands and pointed to reduced efficiencies in reviews as evidence for deregulatory needs. NEPA experts testified as recently as 2023 that the largest impediment to “common-sense” environmental review is under-resourced agencies: “…the biggest source of delay is a lack of staff and unstable budgets. The most important thing to improve permit processing time is to bolster agency capacity. They must have sufficient staff and staff with relevant expertise,” said Prof. Jamie Pleune at the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law.
Antiregulatory voices also frequently cite NEPA litigation as cause for rolling back this crucial law, but less than a quarter of a percent of annual NEPA decisions end up in court. Likewise, deregulatory interests bemoan the law’s requirement for public participation in major decisions as onerous and disposable. In fact, the opposite is true. Public participation reduces litigation and improves outcomes, as noted in this study.
And 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 in addition to White House Council on Environmental Quality rule updates in 2024.
If anything, it is far more likely that permitting reform now would allow toxic ideas that compromise future needs and opportunities to flourish at the coming generations’ expense. We can improve the speed of permitting, and we already are. We must, because the climate crisis demands a swift and powerful response. But we must not erode community and environmental protections for major projects—especially fossil fuel projects—to achieve this goal.
Contact:
Kyle Tisdel, Western Environmental Law Center, 575-770-7501, gro.w1753215453alnre1753215453tsew@1753215453ledsi1753215453t1753215453
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