Agencies are rewriting their National Environmental Policy Act regulations, potentially muting public input and curtailing environmental reviews for everything from new railroads to oil wells.
The broad changes, enacted by at least four agencies, will narrow the scope of environmental analyses, cut down on public comment periods and speed up environmental permitting. At the Interior Department, the changes include cutting close to one-sixth of the regulations implementing NEPA — and switching most of the remaining rules to less-stringent guidelines.
Mark Squillace, who worked at Interior during the Clinton administration, called the changes “outrageous.”
“What they’re basically doing is wiping out all of these requirements wholesale,” Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in an interview. “The public is being cut out of the process for commenting on major kinds of decisions.”
