The US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced earlier this week that USDA is revising the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. The Department, in a press release, states that this will “reduce unnecessary red tape that is killing jobs and raising prices for Americans.”
The department is issuing one set of department-wide NEPA regulations, rescinding seven agency-specific regulations allowing USDA officials to concentrate resources on projects. This change in regulations was prompted by the Council on Environmental Quality rescinding their NEPA implementing regulations in response to President Trump’s executive order on Unleashing American Energy.
Secretary Rollins said; “President Trump is reforming government to be more responsive to the needs of the American people. We have been hamstrung by overly burdensome regulations for decades. USDA is updating and modernizing NEPA so projects critical to the health of our forests and prosperity of rural America are not stymied and delayed for years. So many beneficial and common-sense infrastructure and energy projects have been stymied and delayed in litigation and endless reviews. Overregulation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation.”
Dale Sandlin with Southeast AgNet