On the first day, Trump took radical executive action to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), revoking the 1977 Executive Order that gave regulatory authority to the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Trump’s new Executive Order also directs CEQ to rescind existing NEPA regulations and issue new guidance that significantly accelerates permitting timelines. In summary, the Trump administration has overturned decades of NEPA regulations and related case law. For everyone who has spent time learning and applying NEPA, this is very bad news. It’s going to be a full-time job for our environmental attorneys to rebuild case law and defend environmental regulations.
–Written by Larry Glass, Northcoast Environmental Center Board Secretary and Public Lands Director