Hearing after hearing has taken place on Capitol Hill of experts testifying how “broken” the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) has become. Many efforts have been made to streamline the permitting process, but little has changed.
The administration has issued sweeping changes to ease the burdens, including a memorandum directing all agencies to revise their regulations. Officials now have an opportunity to revamp the system, which has become tedious, complex and expensive. It is hoped this time will be different and meaningful changes will emerge.
What began as measures to improve the implementation of infrastructure projects to protect the surrounding environment has evolved into a complicated and burdensome process that often delays or, in some cases, completely derails the project. NEPA’s mandatory environmental impact statements can reach 11,000 pages and cost $80 million, prolonging the timeline by years. How long does the typical environmental impact statement take? Five years.
NEPA has unfortunately been weaponized and abused by the court system, leading many scholars to consider NEPA the most litigated environmental statute. Within a few years of its inception, 400 lawsuits were filed. More than 40 years later, that number exploded to more than 4,000.
Compelled to ensure their NEPA documents are bulletproof, federal agencies expanded the scope of their assessments, often with “unnecessary analysis,” to cover their bases. The result: much-needed projects are delayed.
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Kristen Walker is a policy analyst for the American Consumer Institute, a nonprofit education and research organization. For more information about the Institute, follow us on X @ConsumerPal.