In exchange for lifting the debt ceiling for two years, President Biden traded away permanent changes to the National Environmental Policy Act. These are the first comprehensive changes in NEPA’s 50-year history, weakening the foundational environmental review and public input processes used by federal agencies for nearly every type of federal project.
Without evaluating the harm from these rollbacks to our nation’s environmental laws, some in Congress are already planning to undermine NEPA further.
The changes in the Fiscal Responsibility Act, signed in June, allowed regulated industries to self-servingly prepare their own environmental reviews and expanded the use of categorical exclusions that exempt countless projects from public scrutiny. They also set arbitrary page and time limits for the NEPA process, potentially undermining efforts to address environmental injustice that continues to harm communities across the nation.
Yet, in making the deal with Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Republicans, the White House falsely claimed that weakening these key environmental safeguards would “harness government efficiencies to accelerate construction projects across the country” without undermining NEPA. Republican Rep. August Pfluger of Texas put it more clearly when he boasted, “The headline here is that fossil fuels win and the greenies lose.”
Time will tell whether gutting NEPA will truly improve agency decision-making and accelerate project approvals or whether it will exacerbate environmental injustice and leave more communities behind.
But if these changes were so great, why did Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) say more changes to NEPA would be one of the Senate’s priorities for the rest of the year?
If this is such good policy, why not give it more time to show results? If it’s bad policy, why did so many Democrats vote for it?
If gutting NEPA was one of the key demands of House Republicans in their hostage-taking strategy over the debt ceiling, why should Democrats expect a different outcome in future negotiations over funding the government or other must-pass legislation?
We’d expect Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to continue pushing for further weakening of NEPA, because he’s so closely tied to the fossil fuel industry. But it’s baffling that so many other Democrats continue to accept Manchin and Republican talking points that more so-called “permitting reform” is so desperately needed.
Last week, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced it would delay production at its factory in Arizona until 2025 because of a shortfall of skilled workers. Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of Senate and House members led by Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) want to add their bill to the National Defense Authorization Act to exempt semiconductor manufacturing from NEPA.
At some point, one would hope, a rational law-making body would evaluate the consequences of its own legislation before piling on more legislation.
The “look before you leap” approach embodied within NEPA has served our nation well for five decades. Congress should evaluate the changes to NEPA in the Fiscal Responsibility Act before taking another wrecking ball to the law.
It is a tragedy that Schumer and other powerful members of Congress continue to waste time trying to solve problems that don’t exist, while ignoring the largest barrier to achieving a renewable energy future — the fossil-fuel industry’s dominance over our political process.
Brett Hartl is the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity.