Karen Feridun
1,000 signatures reached
To: President Donald Trump
President Trump, Don't Gut Our Bedrock Environmental Law
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is referred to as the Magna Carta of environmental law. In the process of stripping the executive branch's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) of its authority to implement NEPA, you have directed it to provide guidance to agencies as they develop their own implementation processes. That guidance tells agencies they do not have to consider the cumulative impacts of a proposed project, instructs them not to consider environmental justice, and gives them the ability to determine whether a proposal warrants a review and, by extension, an opportunity for the public to weigh in on projects that may impact them directly. Don't gut our bedrock environmental law.
Why is this important?
Donald Trump’s current attempt to gut bedrock environmental law may take away your ability to have a voice in decisions made by federal agencies. The National Environmental Policy Act has been implemented by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) since 1977. His Executive Order, Unleashing American Energy, strips the CEQ of its authority, putting implementation in the hands of each federal agency. He directed CEQ to provide guidance to the agencies that tells them they should not consider a proposed project’s cumulative environmental impacts or matters of environmental justice. The agencies can also make the call on whether a project undergoes an environmental review and how detailed that review will be. It is the environmental review process that provides the public a formal opportunity to comment.
CEQ is managing the process of its own dismantling and has opened its Interim Final Rule to the public for comment until March 27. Please sign our petition and, if you can, take the additional step of submitting a comment. The government counts petitions as one comment, so we're asking people to submit comments to help us show the broad support for protecting our bedrock environmental law. We’ve created an EZ form to make it simple for you to comment. Write opening and closing sentences and select points to add to your comment from the list we provide. We’ll format your comment as a PDF and submit it to Regs.gov. We’ll also keep a copy of your comment and its tracking number. We do NOT use your information to add you to our mailing list. If you prefer, you can submit your comment directly to Regs.gov. Please share a copy of the comment and tracking number with us or keep them on file.
Background
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1970, is often referred to as the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. In 1977, Jimmy Carter issued an executive order directing the executive branch’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to develop regulations for its implementation.
President Trump’s Day 1 executive order, Unleashing American Energy, eviscerates NEPA by stripping CEQ of its authority and by further ordering the Council to propose rescinding all of the regulations it developed and providing guidance to federal agencies on how they can implement NEPA themselves.
The executive order continues regulations implemented “must expedite permitting approvals and meet deadlines established in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (Public Law 118-5)” and “must prioritize efficiency and certainty over any other objectives, including those of activist groups, that do not align with the policy goals set forth in section 2 of this order or that could otherwise add delays and ambiguity to the permitting process.” (The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 chipped away at NEPA in amendments to the unrelated bill, like setting arbitrary page limits on environmental reviews.)
Trump cannot repeal NEPA without Congress, so he’s doing the next best thing (in his view). He’s removing its teeth.