Secretary of Energy Chris Wright this week announced Department of Energy plans to end what he calls “permitting paralysis” under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Wright announced the changes, which are in line with a prior executive order by President Donald Trump, in a July 2 press release. DOE published an interim final rule rescinding all NEPA regulations and published new NEPA guidance procedures for DOE.
“President Trump promised to break the permitting logjam, and he is delivering,” Wright said in the release. A full version of the interim final rule was published in the July 1 Federal Register.
In the press release, DOE said this was part of a “government-wide effort to restore common sense to permitting.”
“These reforms replace outdated rules with clear deadlines, restore agency authority, and put us back on the path to energy dominance, job creation, and commonsense action, ” Wright said. “Build, baby, build!”
“This overhaul restores NEPA to the role originally envisioned by Congress—informing agency decision makers, not needlessly obstructing the development of critical infrastructure,” Deputy Secretary of Energy James Danly said in the same release.
The changes stem from Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order on “Unleashing American Energy.”
Among other things, the changes would cut the maximum Environmental Assessment through Environmental Impact Statement report completion time limitations from three years to two years. The changes would give the lead agency more clout and calls for development of a single environmental document, according to the press release.
DOE said in the press release that regulators should rely upon “verified scientific studies that already exist and not contemplating wildly unfathomable scenarios that they do not have legal authority to address.”
