President Donald Trump has been working steadily, if not always effectively, toward making the United States a country that builds things again. However, he needs Congress to make this a permanent improvement by passing legislation that reforms the permitting process. The House Natural Resources Committee stepped up and began this task last week when it released its contribution to Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” which contains much-needed reform to the National Environmental Policy Act.
This February, about a month after Trump was sworn into office, the White House Council on Environmental Quality rescinded the regulatory framework that federal agencies use when implementing NEPA. The short five-page bill, first passed in 1970, has inflicted billions of dollars in costs and decades of delay on infrastructure projects across the country without any measurable environmental benefit.
By rescinding the CEQ’s regulations, Trump empowered each federal agency to write new NEPA compliance guidelines. Agencies can now require that environmental reviews take months instead of years. But even if internal agency rules on NEPA compliance are streamlined, it doesn’t take away its power to inflict project delays and costs. That is because NEPA’s real power comes from its citizen suit provision, which allows anyone to hobble any infrastructure project that involves the federal government by suing in federal court.
The House Natural Resources Committee reconciliation legislation solves this problem by allowing “project sponsors” to pay a fee, 125% of the anticipated cost of the NEPA environmental review, to escape judicial review of the environmental assessment entirely. In other words, as long as developers are willing to pay a premium for an environmental review that the law already requires them to pay for, environmental activists will no longer be able to challenge the soundness of that review in court. Such reviews typically cost around $5 million.
One might ask why the House Natural Resources Committee didn’t simply repeal NEPA’s citizen suit provision instead of slapping developers with a new fee for building infrastructure projects. The answer probably lies in the Senate’s arcane reconciliation rules. The reconciliation process allows the Senate to pass legislation with a bare majority of 50 votes (plus Vice President JD Vance’s tiebreaker), instead of the normal 60 required to end a filibuster.
However, all elements must have a direct budgetary effect to qualify as a reconciliation bill. Outright repeal of NEPA’s citizen suit provision wouldn’t pass this test, but if federal agencies collect millions of dollars in fees for each NEPA review they do, and if each federal agency is performing thousands of NEPA reviews every year, that adds up to real revenue.
Even better, developers will not find the new NEPA fee burdensome — quite the opposite. Under current law, they spend billions of dollars annually fighting environmental activists in court. This legislation transfers the money developers were spending on lawyers to fight NEPA to taxpayers. Now, taxpayers will get cheaper, more efficiently built infrastructure, and the deficit will be trimmed. The only losers will be left-wing activists and their lawyers.
It is important to note that the legislation does nothing to change the separate permitting processes in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Unlike NEPA, these laws regulate pollutants released into the environment. They have been highly effective in making the environment healthier without inflicting endless litigation and delay on developers. Nothing in this law changes those systems.
The House Natural Resources Committee NEPA language still has a long way to go. It first has to survive committee markup, a vote on the House floor, and a vote in the Senate before it can go to Trump’s desk.
If Trump and House Republicans can pass this NEPA reform, it will be a legacy-defining accomplishment.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
