Don’t Let “Permitting Reform” Help the Trump Administration Further It’s Deregulatory Fever Dream

By: Stephen Schima, Earthjustice Action Senior Legislative Representative 

We can all agree that fighting climate change and mitigating its worst impacts requires us to think creatively, harness the power of American innovation, and quickly build the clean energy infrastructure of the future. But some in Congress are saying that to do so, we need to throw out bedrock environmental laws that have played an important role in protecting our clean air, clean water, and public health. They’ve introduced the Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act to do just that. 

This happens while the Trump Administration does everything in its power to roll out the red carpet for polluting industries. It’s disastrous “Department of Government Efficiency” gutted the staff and budgets of various federal agencies involved in permitting decisions. The White House Council on Environmental Quality rescinded its standardized federal National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations in favor of a patchwork of inconsistent regulations across federal agencies. White House officials have bragged about a “white glove concierge service” for fossil fuel companies while arbitrarily cancelling wind and solar projects or encumbering them with absurd requirements for approval. On top of this, the Trump Administration regularly disregards the law, callously tossing out environmental protections while rubber-stamping polluting projects without meaningfully examining their impacts.

And Congress is helping these efforts. The astonishingly reckless and irresponsible SPEED Act would further gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), an environmental statute that ensures federal agencies engage with those impacted by a project, disclose a projects potential impacts, and explain their decision-making. Industry-friendly Republicans—and even some well-meaning Democrats rightfully concerned about fighting climate change—have incorrectly pinpointed NEPA as the barrier to building things. They think that by removing requirements, like meaningful engagement with impacted communities and the ability to hold the government accountable in court, we can unleash a building boom.  

The issue? It’s not true. Numerous studies have demonstrated NEPA is not the barrier to building large projects—whether clean energy or fossil fuel. So what’s behind this latest push? Profits.  

Polluting industries have long complained that complying with environmental laws that protect the air we breathe and the water we drink hurts their bottom lines. They view “permitting reform” as an opportunity to further a deregulatory agenda that will increase the profits of polluting industries at the expense of our clean water, clean air, and health.  

Here’s how the SPEED Act would hurt the public’s ability to protect our communities and health and hold polluters accountable:

1. Puts Private Profits over the Public Interest: The SPEED Act allows project sponsors—not federal agencies, local governments, or impacted communities—to determine what’s in the public interest. The bill bans a federal agency from amending a project’s authorization without the project sponsor’s agreement, even if it’s in the interest of health or safety. Worse yet, the bill also prohibits federal agencies from even petitioning a court for vacatur or remand of a permitting decision, even if it is in the public’s interest, unless the project sponsor agrees.
2. Limits Access to the Courts: The SPEED Act would require courts to expedite cases involving permitting decisions—forcing federal courts to issue a final judgement within 180 days. In practice, this means these cases receive a golden ticket to the front of the line on a court’s docket—pushing back decisions in other critical cases involving matters like voting rights, reproductive rights, human trafficking, criminal justice, and others. It ignores the reality that our courts are already significantly overburdened, with 17 federal districts already operating under judicial emergencies due to vacancies and excessive workloads. Egregiously putting permitting decisions above all others would exacerbate our already overburdened courts and put corporate profits over the ability of others to seek justice in the courts on other issues.
3. Gives the Trump Administration a powerful tool to lock-in its most egregious permitting decisions: The SPEED Act would weaken what few requirements federal agencies must comply with in permitting decisions while making it increasingly difficult to hold them accountable in court—potentially locking-in some of its worst permitting decisions for decades to come. Whether drilling in the Arctic Refuge or off the coast of California, the reckless actions of this administration would be incredibly difficult to challenge or change. 
4. Dramatically Limits Scope and Applicability of NEPA: If a large-scale project uses taxpayer dollars or on federal land, and could release more toxic pollution into your air or water, the government has a responsibility to tell you. Courts created a narrow ‘functional equivalence’ exception that exempts certain projects when another review process adequately analyzes a project’s impacts. The SPEED Act would recklessly and vaguely broaden this exception, exempting major projects from reviews with few standards to ensure compliance with NEPA. It also exempts federal loans, loan guarantees, and other forms of financial assistance from NEPA compliance. This creates more loopholes for polluters to avoid disclosing a project’s negative impacts, meaning you could pay with your health in the future. If projects are using taxpayer funds, they should have to comply with NEPA and ensure they are in the public interest.
5. Requires Agencies to Ignore Science: It’s impossible to determine a project’s impacts on air quality, water quality, and endangered species without utilizing the best available science. The SPEED Act treats new findings and science as an afterthought, relieving federal agencies of their responsibility to conduct new research. It would codify parts of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent Seven County decision and likely result in failing to study the reasonably foreseeable upstream and downstream impacts of a proposed project. Wildly enough, it also would bar federal agencies from correcting errors unless mandated by a court. 

While Members of Congress tell us we need permitting reform to unleash a building bonanza, who actually benefits from this deregulatory push? If we weaken protections that have safeguarded our air, water, public health, and ecosystems for over fifty years, can we seriously trust industry to protect these cornerstones of life out of respect for the common good?  

History tells us we cannot. While some of the richest companies in the world complain about costly “red tape” and compliance with “burdensome standards,” these standards are why so many of us can trust the drinking water coming out of our tap, breathe clean air free from carcinogens and toxic substances, and know that when dirty industries pollute our communities, we can hold them accountable in court. 

There are solutions that exist that don’t require us to sacrifice environmental protections in the process. We have proposed, supported, and helped pass legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act, which in addition to making historic investments in clean energy infrastructure, also made historic investments in improving the permitting process. We advocated for bills and policies that led to historic reductions in permitting timelines and have the receipts to prove it.  

And there is more legislation out there that would help. Bills like the Cheap Energy Act and the A. Donald McEachin Environmental Justice for All Act that will help us build out an abundant supply of clean energy without sacrificing our hard-fought victories in securing a clean and healthy environment for all of us. However, if the SPEED Act passes, the only things in abundance will be more dirty projects, polluted air and water, and chronic illnesses disproportionately impacting communities of color and those of low-income. That’s not a future any of us want or deserve.