Nearly a month ago on June 4th, President Trump quietly signed an executive order that waived long-standing environmental review policies to expedite federal approval for development projects across the US. The administration justified this order by declaring that the United States is in an economic emergency brought on by COVID-19.
By declaring an economic emergency, the President is given the power to allow projects that might have significant environmental impact to move forward without observing the usual environmental reviews enforced by laws like the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In his justification, President Trump stated that “Unnecessary regulatory delays will deny our citizens opportunities for jobs and economic security, keeping millions of Americans out of work and hindering our economic recovery from the national emergency.”
Laws like NEPA not only require developers to consider the environmental impact of a project, but also allow those living in or around the project area to speak out about how the project might impact their community. In 2019, NEPA provisions allowed Hawaiians to protest and eventually halt the building of a telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, a mountain considered sacred to many native Hawaiians. Public discourse and environmental reviews are essential to maintaining natural spaces across the United States, and while the executive order may speed up project timelines for developers, it fails to protect the United States’ beloved landscape.
Once up and running, the projects will still have to comply with laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, but the process of getting the location and scope of projects approved will have been temporarily erased by the order.
Some critics argued that the order was issued during a time of great social unrest in order to somewhat mask the order from public opposition. While other presidents have used emergency action to bypass environmental regulations before (like President Obama did in 2014), no president has ordered such sweeping deregulation, which naturally has garnered much criticism.
On June 4th, the administration gave agencies 30 days to provide report of the projects that are going to be expedited. As that 30 days comes to its end, environmentalists and political analysis’s estimate that the number of expedited projects will be high.
Due to how sweeping and immediate the order is, it is very likely that President Trump’s directive will end up being contested in court. Until then, activists have taken to signing petitions, calling their representatives, and hoping that there won’t be too much damage done to the environment before the order can be reversed.
CIMA Law Group Blog 