As if 8.5% inflation wasn’t already making it hard for the United States to build the roads, bridges, and pipelines our economy needs to grow, President Biden made it even harder to build that infrastructure today when his Council on Environmental Quality issued new regulations rolling back former President Donald Trump’s efforts to greenlight federal projects faster.
Specifically, the Biden administration ended changes Trump made to the way federal agencies are required to implement the National Environmental Policy Act. Trump’s reforms exempted many infrastructure projects from environmental review and made project approval faster for those that still had to be reviewed.
Before Trump tried to reform NEPA, the average NEPA environmental impact statement delayed federal projects by 4.5 years. The Trump reform was not implemented long enough to measure how fast it sped up the process.
But as even the Washington Post admits, the new Biden NEPA process is designed to make it easier for environmental activists to challenge federal infrastructure projects in court. No doubt they will continue to do so.
“This will increase costs & slow down delivery times for projects funded by the infrastructure bill,” Institute for Progress co-founder Alec Stapp tweeted. “Baffling that they would sabotage their own signature legislation over an environmental process law that’s been exploited by NIMBYs.”
Baffling as it may be, sabotaging his signature bipartisan domestic accomplishment is exactly what Biden did today.
