America’s system of environmental reviews has been choking progress for a half-century. A key culprit: the National Environmental Policy Act, once a seemingly sensible safeguard that has metastasized into a bureaucratic quagmire that can entangle projects for years at great cost. As I write in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised:  

Washington needs to send a powerful substantive and symbolic message that the growth-suffocating Seventies are finally, mercifully over. That the half-century crusade against building anything is over. That the Precautionary Principle is out and the Proactionary Principle is in. Let’s start with the National Environmental Protection Act. Forget about building hyperloops; whether you want to build high-speed rail, clean energy infrastructure (both power plants and transmission lines), new launch facilities for the space economy, or even structures in space, NEPA is a barrier of paperwork raised by government that does little to no good.

The NEPA problem is one the Trump administration is well aware. Last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at reshaping how federal agencies assess environmental impacts. The “Unleashing American Energy” order stripped away the power of the Council on Environmental Quality, an executive agency, to issue binding regulations under NEPA, authority first granted by Jimmy Carter in 1977. The move follows mounting legal doubts about CEQ’s regulatory reach, most notably from the D.C. Circuit Court, which recently questioned whether the body ever had the statutory authority to issue binding rules in the first place.

Now, in a weekend filing, the Trump White House took another step to undo decades of regulatory oversight and overcorrection. The administration’s interim rule would strip away the CEQ’s framework for implementing NEPA. Yet early reports of NEPA’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated, explains NEPA expert Eli Dourado in an X post. He notes that the 1970 law remains intact, leaving federal agencies legally bound to assess environmental impacts of their projects. What changes is the regulatory architecture. Individual agencies must still maintain their own implementing rules, though the CEQ is expected to issue guidance encouraging a lighter touch, he adds.

Dourado: “This is a good approach — it’s the maximum permitting reform possible without an act of Congress. But it would still be best if Congress fully repealed NEPA.”

Short of full repeal, energy regulation expert James Coleman of the University of Minnesota (and a non-resident AEI scholar) recommends limiting the duration of judicial injunctions that can halt infrastructure projects under NEPA. In a recent chat with me, he suggested setting a cap of a few years from when environmental review begins, after which courts would lose their power to stop project construction. (“At some point, judicial injunctions need to stop”) Additionally, a recent study from the Institute for Progress also offers several reforms for pro-growth policymaker consideration.