The federal government is moving ahead with truncating reviews for proposed mines in states like Nevada and Utah, riling environmental and tribal groups and raising questions about possible legal trouble ahead.
In Nevada, for example, the Bureau of Land Management is reviewing Vancouver, British Columbia-based Orla Mining’s South Railroad mine project in Elko County, an open-pit mine that’s expected to affect 8,500 acres, more than half of which is public land.
But unlike past reviews, the agency is skipping a draft environmental impact statement and instead planning on issuing a final EIS and record of decision by spring of 2026. The plan calls for building four open pits, three waste rock facilities, a heap leach facility, a limestone quarry, a dewatering system and other operations.
BLM said the use of limited reviews isn’t isolated to Nevada and was also used when the agency signed off on a copper mine expansion in Utah, a project that’s mired in concerns about water use. “The South Railroad mining project is not unique,” said Kristen Peters, a spokesperson for the agency. “The BLM has issued decisions on other projects without a draft EIS, including the recent Lisbon Valley mine expansion.”
The truncated review aligns with the Trump administration’s broader push to curb regulations and reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a bedrock environmental law enacted in 1970 that requires the government to consider a broad range of environmental impacts for major development projects.
Earlier this year, the Interior Department changed its NEPA procedures for using interim final rules, a rarely used process that skirts the standard notice and comment period. In doing so, Interior reversed requirements for BLM to publish draft EISs for public comment, allowing the agency to simply publish the final version. Draft environmental impact statements are seen as providing the public, government agencies and tribes one of the first chances to weigh in on projects and provide input before a final decision is made.
John Hadder, director of the Great Basin Resource Watch, an environmental group based in Reno, Nevada, said he doesn’t believe the agency’s limited review aligns with NEPA. Hadder is part of a broad coalition — that also includes the Center for Biological Diversity, the Western Shoshone Defense Project and Earthworks — arguing that BLM’s review changes violate both NEPA and the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. They have also expressed concern about the project’s impact on a swath of Nevada that’s been frequented by Indigenous communities since time immemorial and provides critical habitat for mule deer, pronghorn and greater sage grouse.
“South Railroad is a test case,” said Hadder. “If it goes through, then I expect this will be the procedure from now on resulting in a lot of poorly sited projects that will do a lot of avoidable damage.”
Erika Kranz, a managing attorney at Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, said the landscape has shifted now that the Trump administration has scrapped Council on Environmental Quality rules that required agencies to publish draft EISs and take public comment. Some agencies have new rules, guidance or special procedures that take the position that drafts and public comment periods are not always required.
“I think the right way to think of it is that it’s untested, the long-standing requirement to publish a draft EIS and take public comments extended from the CEQ regulations, and we don’t have those anymore,” said Kranz.
A BLM spokesperson said the agency is completing an EIS for the South Railroad mine in accordance with NEPA, the agency’s regulations and applicable policy, and that it conducted public scoping from Aug. 13 to Sept. 18. The spokesperson said a final EIS and ROD are slated to be completed and signed in late spring of 2026.
Andrew Bradbury, Orla Mining’s vice president of investor relations and corporate development, confirmed in an email that BLM will not conduct a draft EIS for the project but said that change is aimed at boosting efficiency, and the public will still have a chance to weigh in.
“The revised process is intended to bring efficiency without compromising the integrity of the environmental analyses,” said Bradbury. “The public remains involved during the public scoping process.”
‘Meaningless paper exercise’
The shortened reviews reflect broader changes afoot across the federal government.
The Trump administration earlier this year moved to scrap nearly 50 years’ worth of regulations and hand over responsibility for implementing NEPA to individual agencies. When Interior changed its rules, Secretary Doug Burgum said the nation’s “broken permitting process has been abused for decades to block affordable, reliable energy production, delay critical infrastructure projects and stunt America’s economy.”
Bradbury said BLM in Nevada requires extensive upfront environmental assessment before issuing a notice of its intent to complete the review. That “frontloaded” process, he said, helps streamline the timeline leading up to a final ROD and required Orla to update almost 20 reports, which were submitted earlier this year.
He added that Orla began engaging with the community before BLM issued the notice in mid-August, which formally started the NEPA preview process and preparation of an EIS, and that outreach continues through community meetings, email updates and coordination with local groups.
Bradbury also noted that the Trump administration has added the gold and silver mine to a long list of “transparency projects” posted to a public dashboard, which states that the project is advancing in response to an executive order President Donald Trump inked in March to boost domestic mining. According to the timeline posted there, the EIS and ROD will be issued next year, more than five years since BLM completed the plan of operations, said Bradbury.
But Mark Squillace, a law professor at the University of Colorado, said that while NEPA does not specifically require a draft EIS, the law does provide that the lead agency prior to making any detailed statement must consult with and obtain the comments of any federal agency that has jurisdiction by law or special expertise on environmental impacts.
CEQ NEPA rules for 47 years have required agencies to prepare a draft EIS and solicit public comments, he noted. When CEQ repealed those rules earlier this year, he said the agency did so without getting public comment on what’s been dubbed the interim final rule, which he said he believes violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
“I fully expect that decision will be challenged in the context of an agency’s issuance of a final EIS without first soliciting public comments on a draft document,” he said.
Squillace added that there’s a “significant ongoing debate” that he supports around the need to streamline agency decisionmaking processes, including NEPA reviews, but that shouldn’t lead to gutting basic requirements of the nation’s laws.
“Moreover, the NEPA public comment process provides the public with the opportunity to comment on the consultation obligations under the Endangered Species Act and the National Historic Preservation Act (protects cultural resources) because those laws do not separately provide opportunities for public comment,” he said. “I fear that NEPA reviews will become a meaningless paper exercise if we cut the public out of the environmental review process.”
Fermina Stevens, executive director of the Western Shoshone Defense Project, echoed those comments and criticized the truncated review process for the South Railroad mine project. The Western Shoshone Defense Project is a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the culture and traditions of the Shoshone nation, which consists of nine tribes and has treaty territory across 26 million acres spanning parts of Nevada, Utah, Idaho and California.
Stevens also said it’s unclear if the narrowed public comment period from mid-August to September would allow enough time for federal scientists — if they’re being used — to analyze what’s happening on the ground, from animal habitat to water use and cultural research.
“If the BLM is doing what they should be doing and protecting some of these public lands for future generations, then they should have scientists involved and the public should be involved, if they’re public lands,” Stevens said.
