The White House announced this week it’s restoring environmental regulations scaled back during the Trump administration.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump moved to roll back provisions in the Nixon-era National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in an effort to cut red tape and make it easier to complete infrastructure projects.
“The United States can’t compete and prosper if a bureaucratic system holds us back from building what we need,” Trump said at the time, calling the federal approval process “outrageously slow and burdensome.”
The Biden administration on Tuesday finalized a rule restoring the requirement that federal agencies rigorously evaluate all environmental impacts of their decisions, including big construction projects such as highways, pipelines, and oil wells.