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Yesterday, President Trump signed sweeping guidance aimed at dramatically weakening the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), often called the "Magna Carta" of American environmental laws. Originally signed by president Richard Nixon in 1970, NEPA requires government agencies to consider the environmental impact of major energy and infrastructure projects and, perhaps most critically, provides a venue for local communities to have input on projects that impact them.
While President Trump's guidance does not change the law itself, it directs agencies to significaantly weaken how they implement NEPA. The directive allows agencies to ignore climate change when approving projects, opens the door for extractive industries to have more input when reviewing their own projects, and makes it more difficult and complex for local communities and citizens to comment on projects impacting them.
Dramatically reinterpreting a half century-old law and overturning decades of legal precedent will likely subject new projects to increased legal scrutiny. "It's going to backfire and blow up in their face," said Western Environmental Law Center staff attorney Susan Jane Brown. "The stated purpose and need of this regulatory overhaul was to streamline and increase efficiency and regulatory certainty, and none of those things are going to come from this rule."
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BLM’s backwards approach to rulemaking is not acceptable. It cannot propose a rule based on a factual conclusion, provide no evidence for the same, and then, when confronted with the glaring inadequacy, attempt to backfill the record without public comment.”
