A leader of President-elect Donald Trump’s government-downsizing effort is taking aim at a bedrock environmental law.
The decades-old National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires that federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their decisions, such as permit applications or the green-lighting of major infrastructure projects. NEPA has long come under fire from critics who view the process as overly bureaucratic and cumbersome.
Those critics now include Vivek Ramaswamy, one of the incoming leaders of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Ramaswamy and Elon Musk have said they’ll serve as volunteers advising the DOGE operation, an external commission that aims to reduce the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy.
“If the manpower & cost dedicated to *regulating* new construction were allocated instead to *doing* new construction, we’d have a private infrastructure boom in the U.S. right now,” Ramaswamy posted Monday on the social media site X. “The Empire State Building was completed in just 1 year, while modern infrastructure projects take much longer. A big reason why: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).”
