The Trump White House is taking aim at the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of the most important federal environmental laws on the books.
On Saturday, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) quietly posted notice of “Pending EO 12866 Regulatory Review” — officially titled “Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations” — on an Office of Management and Budget website. The notice indicates that the Trump White House is on the precipice of walking back every CEQ NEPA regulation issued going back to 1977, though the forthcoming regulation’s specific contours are not yet known to the public.
NEPA — which requires agencies to consider environmental impacts of things like infrastructure projects and permitting — became law in 1970, and former President Jimmy Carter subsequently bolstered it with a 1977 executive order that deputized CEQ to come up with regulations governing the law’s implementation. The implementation regulations have been altered several times over the following decades, but President Donald Trump’s day-one “Unleashing American Energy” executive order instructs CEQ to put forward a proposal to nix years of NEPA regulations and instead give federal agencies nonbinding guidance for how to assess environmental impacts.
Additionally, the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in November 2024 that CEQ does not have legal authority to issue binding NEPA regulations after all, potentially giving the Trump White House some legal basis to permanently take a big chunk out of the law. Ironically, that ruling came in a case initially filed by an environmentalist group that originally sued the federal government alleging that it did not adequately consider the environmental impacts caused by flights over national parks in the San Francisco area.
NEPA has been a favorite tool of environmental groups suing to block disfavored infrastructure projects, in many cases related to oil and gas development, for decades; even if the lawsuits are unsuccessful, they often cause long delays and increase costs for developers, according to analysis conducted by the Breakthrough Institute.
“It’s fair to say that the folks who wrote NEPA did not expect it to end up being what it has become. They didn’t expect it to be the enormous procedural burden on development that it has become over the last 50 years,” Thomas Hochman, director of infrastructure policy at the Foundation for American Innovation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“We’re seeing the realization of President Trump’s executive order with CEQ proposing to rescind all of the NEPA regulations,” Hochman added. “So, what that leaves us with is the law itself, and CEQ now will have a very important role in developing new guidance based on the actual language of the statutory text. The law still exists. It still has to be complied with, but the new guidance can be significantly less burdensome than the regulations have been for the last 47 years.”
The Trump CEQ is advancing its forthcoming NEPA rule as an “interim final rule,” meaning that the action can take effect quickly and does not require the standard public comment period first, according to Westlaw. Hochman noted that there are likely pros and cons for the Trump CEQ in deciding to take the “interim final rule” route, but legal experts are not in agreement as to whether the CEQ’s choice will expose it to successful legal challenge from activist groups and other Trump administration opponents.
“Every federal agency has NEPA rules on the books which must be followed unless and until they are changed through normal rulemaking process,” Pat Parenteau, an emeritus professor at the Vermont Law and Graduate School, told E&E News. “Environmental groups will have a field day in court blocking actions that do not comply, and there is a huge body of favorable NEPA case law that does not depend on the CEQ rules.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment or for more details about the parameters of the rule.
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