Fossil fuel projects are sprinting through the permitting process under President Donald Trump, but it’s unclear whether that will lead to a bumper crop of pipelines, mines and oil wells.
The Trump administration has slashed environmental impact reviews, revoked federal rules that long guided agencies in conducting those reviews and told permitting agencies to use their emergency powers to bypass environmental rules.
Those tactics still face major legal tests, as environmental groups begin to file lawsuits. But in the meantime, fossil fuel projects are moving through the process more quickly. A recent analysis from ClearView Energy Partners found a sharp drop last year in the time it took the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to process pipeline applications.
“We’re absolutely moving faster,” said Alex Herrgott, who led the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council during Trump’s first term. “Nobody wants to be on the hook for slowing down a project. It’s a pro-development, ‘build-baby-build’ mentality that has changed the culture.”
Overall, though, the picture for permitting is mixed.
Expectations that Trump’s more contentious interventions would backfire haven’t come true, in part because the Supreme Court has extended legal cover.
But the most consequential moves in federal energy projects have been the administration’s legal gymnastics to block wind projects. In turn, those moves stalled bipartisan progress on a permitting overhaul in Congress for more than two months before negotiations recently resumed. Trump’s tactics may have also laid out a road map for a future Democratic administration to hinder fossil fuel projects.
It’s too early for any of the new policies to have delivered ribbon-cuttings for major energy projects. Likewise, the court challenges launched by environmental groups are just getting started.
“We really are early days in this process,” said Brandon Tuck, a partner in the Houston law office of Vinson & Elkins who shepherds big energy projects. “You haven’t seen the real curve yet.”
Trump’s changes are well underway and have already cut the multiyear “environmental impact statement” process at the Interior Department down to “28 days at most,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.
“President Trump has rapidly accomplished historic executive reforms to streamline and modernize America’s permitting process,” Rogers said.
Sky isn’t falling?
Trump has made increasing domestic production of fossil fuels a top priority of his second term, pushing the motto of “energy dominance.” He declared an “energy emergency” on his first day in office, even though the country was already producing more oil and gas under his predecessor than any country, ever.
From there, Trump and his appointees set about upending the conventional understanding of how energy and environmental policy works, brushing aside warnings about environmental damage.
Early on, Tuck said, there were concerns that such moves could unleash chaos and harm projects. That hasn’t happened, he said, because agencies don’t want their approvals overturned any more than developers do.
“It certainly isn’t turning out to be that the sky is falling on NEPA,” he said, referring to the National Environmental Policy Act. “Compliance hasn’t really panned out that way.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced a plan to cut completion time for environmental impact statements, which usually take about two years, down to no more than a month. Interior recently codified its NEPA changes in a final rule.
In May, the Interior Department signed off on an environmental assessment, a less comprehensive analysis, after 14 days of review.
And at EPA, Trump administration officials have proposed restrictions on the power of states to block construction of pipelines, dams and other infrastructure. That proposal will have to wind through the regulatory process, but administration officials say the changes would also make it faster and cheaper to build projects.
The federal government hasn’t released enough solid data to know whether the overall permitting process is moving faster, said Ted Boling, a partner at law firm Perkins Coie who spent decades as a career official working on permitting at Interior and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
“It’s a very opaque area,” Boling said. “It’s hard to get a handle on it.”
But energy project developers are telling Herrgott that their projects are reaching point where an agency issues a draft environmental impact statement stage about 30 to 50 percent faster.
NEPA, the country’s bedrock environmental law, requires an environmental impact statement for many major projects with implications for federal environmental laws. They are detailed studies of how the project will affect the environment. Often, a draft statement is completed and released to inform the public about those effects and allow people to provide input.
Herrgott now heads The Permitting Institute, a nonprofit he founded in 2021 that helps member companies with permitting and advocates for improvements in the process.
The acceleration isn’t from skipping legally mandated steps, he said. It’s from shifting agencies away from a culture of risk aversion and weeding out unnecessary delays.
‘No longer practiced’
There has long been an informal process after a company files an application, Herrgott said, that bogs down the process.
Before it can be “deemed complete” and the public NEPA process begins, he said, companies must complete a list of tasks that are not mandated by law but take months to complete. The tasks include outlining what would happen if the project is not built, less damaging alternatives and other studies.
It’s not that such studies shouldn’t be done, Herrgott said. But they should be done during the public NEPA process after an announcement in the Federal Register that the agency will be preparing an environmental impact statement. He called it a “starting block loophole” because it masks the true duration of the process.
“It’s where projects quietly lose momentum and capital,” he said. “This informal agency practice is no longer practiced in Trump 2.”
The Trump administration is also ordering agencies to conduct their different reviews at the same time, instead of one after the other.
For example, Herrgott said, when a project affects salmon, often two different agencies must review the effects, because salmon is both a river fish and an ocean fish. It makes sense, he said, to do them together.
“That just saved the project eight months,” Herrgott said. “That’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about that did not happen before.”
Within a year and a half, he expects the time between application and a federal construction authorization will shrink by 20 to 40 percent.
“As projects that began permitting break ground over the next two years, you will see a system finally shaking off paralysis over decision — 40 years of delay won’t disappear overnight,” Herrgott said.
ClearView’s analysis of FERC data found a sharp drop in time between the completion of NEPA documents by agency staff FERC staff and commission approval orders on natural gas pipelines.
Under former President Joe Biden, it was 178 days, and under Trump, through Dec. 19, 2025, it was 102, a decrease of more than 40 percent.
“That timeline is now going faster, but they’re not short-cutting the environmental reviews,” said Amy Andryszak, CEO of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America, which represents operators of natural gas transmission pipelines. “It’s after the reviews are done.”
Asked about the acceleration, FERC forwarded a statement from Chair Laura Swett saying she is “incredibly proud” of what the agency has done to reduce review times. FERC is considered an independent agency, but three members are Republicans, and Trump appointed Swett. Also, Trump has asserted that the White House should control all major actions by independent agencies that regulate the economy, including FERC.
The contrast is less stark, however, when compared to the Obama administration and Trump’s first term.
The numbers show the process took longer during Trump’s first term than from March 2010 to the end of Obama’s first term. The length of the process then jumped substantially under Biden.
‘Cutting the public out’
But Trump officials are often skipping big steps in the traditional NEPA process, even if those steps are not mandated under the language of the law.
The main example is that agencies aren’t seeking input from people that will be affected by projects, and the public at large. Generally referred to as “public comment,” it’s a longstanding practice not specifically required under NEPA.
Environmental groups say the change is already damaging the climate, water quality and other environmental values.
“I think cutting the public out of these processes and rushing it is going to mean that we’re going to end up with more environmentally destructive decision making,” Brandon Jones-Cobb, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, said in an interview.
He’s one of the lawyers on a lawsuit filed by the center and the Sierra Club in December that laid out a list of nine mining and oil and gas projects in which Interior completed environmental reviews without public comment or participation.
While speeding the process on the front end, the lack of public comment could hurt projects later in the process — particularly if the projects get challenged in court, said Boling, the former career official at CEQ, which manages the federal government’s environmental review process under NEPA.
Some may consider seeking public comment to be a burden, Boling said, but it also allows developers and agencies to learn about environmental concerns and other problems. Addressing such issues is still required by NEPA, he noted. So if agencies miss an issue and fail to address it, a judge can block or delay a project.
“I think they’re going to be flying blind in court,” Boling said. “It’s open to whatever attack the plaintiffs want to level at it: ‘You didn’t think of that, you didn’t address this.'”
The Supreme Court, though, has provided important protection for the Trump administration’s approach.
In May 2025, the high court ruled unanimously in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County that NEPA mandates only that agencies study the impacts of proposed projects themselves — not the effects of future or related projects.
That reined in the reach of NEPA and established that even a deficient environmental impact statement might not justify a judge casting aside a federal approval.
That was good news to companies like those who build and operate gas pipelines, who have complained for years that NEPA and other environmental rules have created preposterous obstacles to their plans.
“The Seven County decision was huge because it is making the environmental review process go much more quickly,” INGAA’s Andryszak said.
She said that FERC — which decides whether interstate gas pipelines can be built — “is saying we only have to look at what’s within our jurisdiction.”
And opponents who might have been inclined to attack Trump’s rules, Vinson & Elkins’ Tuck said, have had to be more careful and more picky because of the Seven County ruling.
“It doesn’t surprise me that they are being more scrutinizing and thoughtful about what projects they might swing at,” he said.
Still, Boling said, the ruling doesn’t completely protect agencies and their decisions from lawsuits. A lot will depend, he said, on a judge’s perception of how well an agency has found and addressed potential problems.
