Trump White House Sets Sights On One Of Green Lobby’s Favorite Laws

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.