The typical American probably has never read an “environmental impact statement,” but these documents have nonetheless become a traditional example of bureaucratic red tape, the kind of thing that stops a big project over some animal you’ve never heard of. There’s a good reason for this: The things are ridiculous, and they’re one of the reasons it takes so long to build infrastructure in this country.
And the Trump administration has proposed a rule that could cut them down to size.
EISs are part of the process that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), enacted in 1970, requires federal agencies to undergo when deciding whether to go through with a big project they’re involved with, such as a bridge or pipeline. (The substantive environmental rules come from other statutes, such as the Clean Air Act.) These reports were intended to be accurate and helpful summaries of how the projects would affect the environment, but things got out of hand. Today, on average, an impact statement runs over 600 pages and the process takes half a decade. And there are often lawsuits after the fact, which the statements’ drafters anticipate by padding the documents with legalese.
It's not just some crazy right-wing talking point that this is unreasonable. As the administration’s proposal documents, past administrations stretching back decades have decried the situation and taken some steps to speed things up. Jimmy Carter issued an executive order requiring EISs to be “concise, clear, and to the point.” A study in the Clinton administration highlighted “the length of NEPA processes, the extensive detail of NEPA analyses, and the sometimes confusing overlay of other laws and regulations.” There has been a constant flow of guidance documents, handbooks, and the like urging officials to keep it brief. But the core regulations implementing NEPA haven’t been changed in about 40 years.
So the administration’s proposed rule attempts once again to impose some common sense. There will be a “presumptive” time limit of two years for the federal government to complete an impact statement (and one year for the more cursory “environmental assessment”), with a 300-page limit on the document itself (75 pages for assessments). More projects will be deemed small enough to escape review. And when multiple agencies are involved in a review, the rule will clarify who’s in charge and require closer cooperation.
On the more controversial side, the environmental “effects” that NEPA requires agencies to consider will be limited to those that are “reasonably foreseeable and have a reasonably close causal relationship to the proposed action or alternatives”; they will not include the “cumulative” effects of infrastructure on climate change, though a Trump official told the New York Times that the rule wouldn’t outright forbid consideration of greenhouse gases. This puts the NEPA process in its proper place: We certainly do need to take steps to fight climate change, but at the same time, it makes little sense to have federal agencies making wild guesses about the global harms of each individual transit and energy project. If you want to discourage carbon emissions in a systematic way, have Congress impose a carbon tax or regulate emission levels directly, rather than having the executive branch swat down infrastructure improvements on a case-by-case basis. And if Congress does want to take the latter approach for some reason, it should say that explicitly, rather than counting on the executive bureaucracy to read speculative climate-change concerns into a law passed half a century ago.
It has gotten so bad that national publications are paying attention. Of course, the enviro groups are opposed to streamlining. See The Trump administration’s plans for less public input, more pipelines
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