USDA to Scale Back NEPA’s Role in Agency Actions

The USDA will adopt new regulations on evaluating the environmental effects of grazing and other agency-approved activities, saying the rules will follow directions from President Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court.  The regulations will guide the agency’s execution of the National Environmental Policy Act.  USDA noted late last month that the rules will be published soon and will take effect immediately.

The regulations are intended to eliminate unnecessarily long and cumbersome environmental reviews, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.  

“President Trump is reforming government to be more responsive to the needs of the American people," Rollins said.  "We have been hamstrung by overly burdensome regulations for decades. USDA is updating and modernizing NEPA so projects critical to the health of our forests and prosperity of rural America are not stymied and delayed for years. So many beneficial and common-sense infrastructure and energy projects have been stymied and delayed in litigation and endless reviews. Overregulation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation."

NEPA Applies To Thousands Of Actions A Year

Signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of their actions, such as funding farmland conservation or permitting logging or grazing on federal lands.  NEPA applies to more than 100,000 federal actions a year and routinely provides the basis for allegations the government has failed to do an adequate environmental review.

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