WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today announced that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is revising National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations to reduce unnecessary red tape that is harming jobs and increasing prices for Americans. This reform enables the Department to efficiently deliver the critical services and funds that America’s ranchers, farmers, loggers, and rural communities rely on, and corrects the harms caused by decades of unnecessarily lengthy and cumbersome NEPA reviews.
“President Trump is reforming government to be more responsive to the needs of the American people. Overly burdensome regulations have hamstrung us for decades. USDA is updating and modernizing NEPA so projects critical to the health of our forests and the prosperity of rural America are not stymied and delayed for years. Many beneficial and common-sense infrastructure and energy projects have been stymied and delayed due to litigation and endless reviews. Overregulation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation,” said Secretary Rollins.
The USDA is implementing common-sense reforms to ensure the NEPA process does not cause unnecessary delays or hinder American free enterprise. This move institutes reasonable considerations for environmental impacts and streamlines operations.
The USDA is issuing a single set of department-wide NEPA regulations by rescinding seven agency-specific regulations, resulting in a 66% reduction in regulations. This will enable USDA officials to focus resources on projects that the public needs, while also ensuring that we honor the Department’s legacy of land stewardship.
The move by the USDA comes in response to President Trump’s executive order on Unleashing American Energy that led to the Council on Environmental Quality’s rescinding its NEPA implementing regulations, which created a pathway for the USDA to reform its own NEPA regulations.
A pre-publication version of USDA’s interim final rule will be made available the afternoon of June 30th. This version will be replaced with a link to the official publication of the interim final rule in the Federal Register at such time publication occurs.
