Today, environmental groups delivered a letter signed by 26 conservation organizations to members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources condemning the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act (H.R. 4776) in advance of today’s hearing on the bill. The SPEED Act, strongly supported by the fossil fuel industry, would eviscerate the country’s foremost environmental law and eliminate the public’s right to judicial review of federal environmental decisions. The bill would effectively give the richest and most polluting industry in America carte blanche to exploit public resources and pollute communities whenever and wherever it wants. It would do nothing to support clean, affordable, and needed renewable energy that Congress used to justify significant changes to speed National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) reviews only two years ago.
The SPEED Act would cynically gut NEPA, the nation’s bedrock environmental law, and would impose breathtaking restrictions on the public’s right to judicial review of agency decisions. Among many other things, the bill proposes to:
- Sharply limit the type of actions that require environmental review and narrow the scope of reviews, paving the way for unaccountable decision-making
- Allow agencies to ignore new scientific or technical research when preparing a review and thereby risking ill-advised decisions that harm the public interest, and
- Impose excessive barriers to judicial review of improper agency decisions and constrain the remedies available to courts such that power is shifted to developers over the public interest.
“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,” said Marlyn Twitchell, senior attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center. “The provisions in the SPEED Act are so extreme, with no benefit for renewable energy, it defies logic and reason that any Democrat would consider supporting this industry assault on the public. Under no circumstances should anyone concerned with climate or public lands entertain the idea of opening the floodgates of fossil fuel development during the Trump administration. Given the administration’s war on renewable energy projects, this bill would do little but SPEED 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. Congress must protect the public interest. It must not surrender the health and safety of our communities and the nation’s natural heritage to private industry.”
Background:
Deregulation interests have created numerous 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 bill 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. Today’s letter builds on a prior letter submitted to Congress this summer and signed by 27 organizations advising extreme caution on NEPA rollbacks such as this.
The SPEED Act sponsors’ press release bemoans 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 would gut 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 would limit the types of projects subject to environmental review and eliminate 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 would take 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.
Contacts:
Erik Schlenker-Goodrich, Western Environmental Law Center, 575-751-0351, gro.w1757720945alnre1757720945tsew@1757720945gskir1757720945e1757720945
Marlyn Twitchell, Western Environmental Law Center, 541-485-2471, ext. 144, gro.w1757720945alnre1757720945tsew@1757720945llehc1757720945tiwt1757720945
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