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NEPA overhaul should cut red tape, not corners
Rep. Lisa Finley-DeVille
Mandaree
January 20, 2025, President Trump initiated an overhaul of the National Environmental Protection Act through Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy." The order specifically directed the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to provide new NEPA guidance, propose rescinding its regulations, and coordinate agencies as they rewrote their own NEPA procedures. NEPA is the only measure for the general public to give direct input on federal projects that impact our lands, that’s why it’s being treated as a threat, but NEPA was never designed to stop development.
It was designed to make the federal government stop and ask basic questions before approving projects that could permanently alter land, water, wildlife, communities and cultural resources:
What are the impacts?
What alternatives exist?
Who bears the consequences?
What happens if we get it wrong?
What’s happening now, under the Executive Order, is not the repeal of NEPA. It is the dismantling of the framework that has governed how federal agencies carry out NEPA (environmental) reviews for decades.
In January 2026, the Council on Environmental Quality rescinded its government-wide NEPA regulations. Federal agencies are now rewriting their own procedures, with the administration pushing faster reviews, broader use of categorical exclusions (opening sites for development) and fewer procedural requirements. The Department of the Interior, for example, rescinded more than 80% of its previous NEPA regulations under Doug Burgum.
The administration calls this permitting reform and argues that it will reduce unnecessary delays, lower costs and allow energy, mining, infrastructure, data centers and other projects to move forward faster.
There is nothing inherently wrong with improving the efficiency of the permitting process. The problem is what happens when "efficiency" becomes a justification for removing meaningful environmental review. And faster review and less review are not necessarily the same thing.
The real question is what happens when the process designed to identify problems, alternatives and consequences is narrowed.
For industry, the changes can mean greater certainty, shorter timelines and fewer procedural hurdles.
For communities, it can mean fewer opportunities to force those same questions into the decision-making process.
And for Tribal Nations, the stakes can be particularly significant when federal projects affect our lands, water, air, treaty resources, places of cultural significance to our people.
Someone still lives with the consequences of these decisions. Mandaree has lived with them since 2009.
There are legitimate ways to make permitting work better: use better technology, eliminate duplication, establish clear timelines, coordinate agencies, and give project proponents greater certainty about what is required and when decisions will be made.
But cutting red tape is not the same thing as cutting corners.
The question is not how quickly we can get to yes. The question is whether decision-makers have enough information to understand what that yes will mean for the people who have to live with it.
We should not measure success by how much environmental review we can remove. We should measure it by whether the decisions being made today account for the people and places that will live with them tomorrow.
Development and environmental protection do not have to be opposing interests. The choice is not between building nothing and reviewing everything forever. The choice is whether we are capable of building a system that moves responsible projects forward while still requiring decision-makers to understand what they are approving and how it will impact our future generations.