Late last week, the Trump administration issued a plan to streamline and modernize the technology undergirding environmental review and permit processes required for infrastructure projects like roads, bridges and power plants.
The governmentwide plan is a continuation of Biden-era recommendations to improve the often-lengthy process of issuing permits under the landmark National Environmental Policy Act.
How this plays out in the context of the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and its push to rollback NEPA remains to be seen. But the effort to speed up permitting is relevant for the administration’s push to “drill more, map more, mine more and build more,” as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stated in April, when the White House charged the Council on Environmental Quality with making the plan.
“The Trump Administration is working tirelessly to implement innovation-driven environmental review and permitting reforms to eliminate needless delays that cripple the growth of the U.S. economy, replacing outdated technology with efficient, speedier solutions,” CEQ Chief of Staff Katherine Scarlett said in a statement.
The new strategy includes automating work, moving from paper to digital and ultimately working towards a more integrated, interoperable system with up-to-date status and timeline data for projects.
Currently, different federal agencies involved in permitting operate their own often-outdated, disconnected technology and datasets, even as permitting is often a multi-agency process.
“It’s still tons of stuff that’s done by emailing around PDFs or Word documents,” one government employee previously told Nextgov/FCW.
Agencies have 90 days to adopt and begin implementing an initial data and tech standard issued alongside the plan last week. CEQ’s Permitting Innovation Center, established in April, will be prototyping new tools with agencies and vendors. On Thursday, it debuted an online database of existing categorical exclusions.
Eric Beightel — the former director of the Federal Permitting Council during the Biden administration — told Nextgov/FCW that the plan is “long overdue to help our disparate federal systems communicate with each other, improving interoperability and providing the framework for data standardization.”
“I’m concerned, however, that the loss of staff and the funding reductions expected for agencies will hinder the ability of the agencies to fulfill the ambitious goals of this effort,” he noted, especially when agencies have to choose between this and other mission-critical work. Where and how agencies will fund this work is another open question.
“We’ve hemorrhaged the largest volume of permitting and NEPA talent over these two [Trump] administrations that I’ve ever seen in my career in the federal government,” Ryan Hathaway, director of climate and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government and a longtime NEPA expert, told Nextgov/FCW. Hathaway worked on environmental justice for CEQ until earlier this year.
“There are only a scarce few who have the experience and know-how on how to do this,” said Hathaway. And those permitting employees that are left are likely already under pressure to get their work done more quickly, he added.
The tech talent likely necessary to put Trump’s plan into action also hasn’t been spared. The White House said that the General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Service will help with the work, but the GSA office within TTS that helped author the Biden-era report on NEPA technology was shuttered earlier this year.
Big picture, these technology efforts are likely a part of the administration’s broader efforts to speed up oil and gas production. How and if the coming tech modernization benefits other projects like clean energy depends on implementation, Hathaway and others said.
Since re-taking office, the Trump administration has also clawed back CEQ regulations on NEPA. It issued an internal final removing CEQ’s NEPA implementation regulations in February, leaving agencies to follow their own agency guidance. That followed a recent court ruling that CEQ doesn’t have the authority to issue governmentwide NEPA regulations in the first place.
Republicans aren’t the only ones with permitting frustrations — those that want clean energy projects to be built more quickly also have an interest in speeding up permitting, although some environmental groups oppose permitting reforms that could weaken NEPA or benefit the fossil fuel industry.
“It is a framework for all types of activities,” Jessie Mahr, director of technology at the nonprofit Environmental Policy Innovation Center, said of the new plan. She called the latest strategy a “phenomenally good thing,” but acknowledged that “it remains to be seen with the regulatory rollbacks and staffing, what is going to make it through quicker or slower.”
