Does federal permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act need reform?
A policy discussion fifty years after the passage of NEPA.
Fifty years ago, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act into law.
The Act requires the federal government to study the environmental consequences
of new projects before it gives them a permit for construction.
The National Environmental Policy Act (or NEPA) ensured that the government
would do an environmental review before approving infrastructure projects,
such as roads, pipelines, and power-lines.
The government would take a few months to write a brief report describing
and explaining the environmental impact of all the new projects it approved.
Over time, the NEPA review process became much longer.
NEPA requirements can be extremely costly for states, localities, and private citizens
who seek federal funds or permits, and for federal infrastructure projects.
By 2008, the average environmental review took three-and-a-half years and was hundreds of pages in length.
The result: delay of critical infrastructure projects,
including President Obama's shovel-ready infrastructure proposals in the 2009 stimulus.
Both President Bush and President Obama issued executive orders
and signed legislation to speed up NEPA reviews.
But, despite bipartisan reform efforts, these reviews keep getting longer.
By 2016, the average review took over five years.
But since previous efforts to shorten NEPA reviews have failed, how could it be reformed?
Thus far, clarifying procedures and declaring faster timelines haven't
been able to stop the drift toward longer reviews.
Agencies are taking their time to try and survive judicial review.
Federal courts keep demanding longer and longer reviews to comply
with the National Environmental Policy Act.
When a court decides there's a problem with a review, it often invalidates the federal permit,
leaving a project investor to wait for the government to go back and do even more review.
Worried about these federal court reviews, federal agencies often add more to reports — a vicious cycle.
Reforming NEPA to shorten the review process, however, is a complex and hotly debated undertaking.
NEPA coordinates environmental and permitting requirements from a variety of statues,
including the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act.
Faster NEPA reviews could result in additional environmental harm.
And further procedural reforms have not proven effective in the past.
And not every permitting case ends in a lawsuit.
The courts only delay projects that they find didn't comply with
an admittedly complex body of specific regulations.
Updating NEPA could greatly help construction efforts for new infrastructure —
roads and bridges, airports and tunnels, power-lines and wind farms across the United States.
But it's an undertaking that runs high risk of devolving into partisan disagreements.
Perhaps the question should be:
Can America complete rigorous environmental review more quickly?
How can we streamline our major infrastructure projects and add to America's economy
while still also evaluating the environmental consequences of new construction?
Is it time to reform NEPA?
Tell us what you think.
Join the conversation in the comments below.