Bulldozing Infrastructure Planning and the Environment Through Trump’s Executive Order 13807

Abstract

This Article assesses the regressive and otherwise harmful effects of Executive Order 13807 — the Trump Administration’s core initiative to alter federal infrastructure development — on sound planning, the environment, and democratic decision making. The primary components of this initiative include:

(1) a Cross-Agency Priority policy, which requires agencies to complete environmental reviews and provide authorization decisions within an average of two years after publishing a notice of intent (NOI) to prepare an environmental impact statement (EIS) under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA);

(2) a One Federal Decision policy, which, among other things, requires federal agencies to publish all authorization decisions for major infrastructure projects in a single document; and

(3) significant increases in the role of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and lead construction agencies throughout infrastructure permitting and environmental review.

Taken together, these aggressive changes seek to drastically cut the time and resources spent planning for and assessing major infrastructure projects — without any credible evidence justifying such changes. Unfortunately, the Trump Administration pays little, if any, attention to how these changes impact the effectiveness — or even the cost-effectiveness — of environmental review and permitting decisions. They also offer no support for the reallocation of authority. In fact, this initiative purports to make review cheaper and faster without providing the resources agencies say they need to be more efficient and effective. Agencies are instead simply measured by how quickly they approve projects through OMB performance assessments that entirely disregard the efficacy of agency review. To make matters worse, the Trump Administration disregards the lessons of past infrastructure development and recent progress toward regulatory streamlining.

EO 13807 appears calculated both to hasten review processes and to reduce the quality of that review. As such, the Trump Administration’s initiative, which it is now attempting to codify in proposed regulations modifying NEPA, are not only likely to cause unnecessary environmental harm, but also reduce the quality of U.S. infrastructure. The Article concludes by offering other reasonably available measures that would much more effectively improve the efficiency and quality of government planning, promote public health and conservation, and advance sorely needed infrastructure development.

Keywords: environmental planning, infrastructure permitting, National Environmental Policy Act, Trump, Council on Environmental Quality, Office of Management and Budget