One of President Donald Trump’s latest actions to shortcut U.S. environmental laws will likely backfire, causing confusion and chaos and slowing down the process of permitting large oil and gas projects, according to legal experts.  

Over the past few weeks, the Trump Administration has taken aim at the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws that has often been called the “Magna Carta” of environmental law.  
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On Feb. 25, the Trump Administration published an “interim final rule” that seeks to remove regulations implementing NEPA dating back to the Carter Administration. The rule was published by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), an agency within the White House that advises the President and coordinates the government’s actions under the environmental law. Before the council enacted the first unifying NEPA regulations in 1978, agencies had varying approaches to implementing the environmental law.  

John Ruple, a legal research professor at the University of Utah and former general counsel for the CEQ, said Trump’s proposed rule change will most affect developers seeking permits from federal agencies. That includes oil and gas companies who want to build pipelines, lease public lands for drilling, or build terminals to export oil or liquified natural gas (LNG).  

“People need to understand that legal obligation to comply with NEPA did not go away,” Ruple said in an email. “What goes away is uniform direction about how to meet those legal obligations.”    

Trump and Republicans have said they want to cut bureaucratic red tape and speed up permitting for big projects, such as pipelines, fuel export terminals, and electricity transmission lines. In a 2018 hearing before the Republican-controlled House Natural Resource Committee, the committee’s staff accused environmental groups using NEPA as “environmental lawfare.”  

“NEPA was never intended to be a weapon for litigants to force delays and denials on all sorts of activities,” said former committee Chairman Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican.  

But rather than streamlining this process, Trump’s proposed NEPA rule change, along with firing and laying off  thousands of federal employees, will likely only sow confusion and slow the process down, causing delays for the oil and gas industry and other project developers, legal experts said.  
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“It’s kind of a crazy way to run a country, because uncertainty is nobody's friend, and certainly not developers,” said Deborah Sivas, director of the Stanford University Environmental Law Clinic. “It’s just a lot to have to figure out what to do now with fewer people probably doing the work.”  

Trump cannot get rid of NEPA itself without an act of Congress. Nor can Trump undo the decades of court cases laying out how federal agencies must follow the law. That leaves each federal agency to sort out its own process of how it will comply with NEPA, as the CEQ discussed in a memo to federal agencies issued Feb. 19. The memo states that agencies should continue following their own regulations on implementing NEPA (many of which reference the CEQ’s). The Trump Administration could change those agencies’ regulations over time.

“Every federal agency must still comply with NEPA and they must now do so without the benefit of common, government-wide direction,” Ruple said. “Agencies must also take time away from their existing workload to revise their regulations. That isn’t going to get any easier as the Trump Administration goes about reducing the federal workforce.”

Signed into law in 1970, NEPA requires federal agencies to study and consider the environmental consequences of their actions. In many cases, the agency must prepare an environmental assessment, a process that can take months. If that assessment finds that the project’s impacts will be “significant,” it must prepare a more extensive environmental impact statement. The agency must include a public comment period at each step in the process to allow the public and interested parties to weigh in. However, hundreds of agency actions fall under a list of “categorial exclusions,” which do not require an environmental assessment.  

Kristen Boyles, managing attorney at Earthjustice, said that federal agencies in general want to make “the most defensible decisions they can.”  
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“That’s what NEPA lets them do by habit, by forcing the use of best science, by forcing them to look at alternatives, by involving the public and being transparent,” Boyles said.  

Oil and gas projects trigger a NEPA review when they require a federal agency to make a decision or involve federal funding. For example, NEPA applies to a decision to lease federal land or offshore waters for oil and gas drilling, or when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is asked to approve a natural gas- pipeline that crosses state lines. The law also applies to terminals that export LNG and offshore terminals that load oil onto tankers for export. NEPA does not apply to most oil and gas wells drilled on private or state land. It only applies to smaller oil and gas pipelines that do not cross state boundaries if they cross federal land or require a major federal permit because they will affect water bodies or wetlands.  

In response to concerns about NEPA reviews taking too long, Congress in 2023 made the most significant changes to the law since it was enacted in 1970. As part of the Fiscal Responsibility Act that raised the debt ceiling, lawmakers implemented time restrictions – two years for an environmental impact statement and one year for a less stringent environmental assessment.  

They also passed page limits for these documents themselves – 150 pages for an environmental impact statement, or 300 pages for those of “extraordinary complexity.” Environmental assessments now cannot exceed 75 pages. Other changes involved more precise definitions of what kinds of agency decisions trigger a NEPA review and how agencies must cooperate on a joint review.  

With Trump and billionaire Elon Musk now eliminating thousands of federal employees, fewer people will be available to do the studies required by NEPA.  Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Center for Environmental Law, said businesses want “predictability and coherence,” rather than “the kind of chaos that’s being induced now.”  
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“If I’m putting in a pipeline, I want to know what the rule is,” Davis said. “I want to know if it’s consistently applied. If I’ve done a bunch of work, I don’t want to find out next week that it was pointless because now there’s a different rule or no rule.”  

Trump’s rule change will also not stop environmental groups and others from petitioning agencies or suing to force agencies to perform more thorough NEPA reviews.  

Recent examples involve Rio Grande LNG and Texas LNG, two export terminals on the southern tip of Texas. Residents, environmental groups, and the nearby city of Port Isabel sued FERC over its authorization of the terminals.  

First, they argued that FERC’s analysis of the terminals’ greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and impact on low-income and minority communities was deficient, among other issues. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in August 2021 and required FERC to do an additional analysis but did not overturn FERC’s approval of the terminals. FERC did a supplemental analysis and issued an order essentially reapproving the projects (even though they were still technically approved).  

The groups then went back to the D.C. Circuit. In August 2024, the court ruled that FERC failed to adequately address environmental justice and air quality issues in response to the previous court decision and overturned FERC’s approval of the terminals. The issue is now back to FERC, which has another chance to prepare a supplemental environmental impact statement and decide whether to re-authorize the terminals.  

While the litigation delayed FERC’s approval of the projects to require more rigorous study and public input, it did not kill the plans for the terminals. On Feb. 28, NextDecade, the company behind Rio Grande LNG, announced plans for three additional liquefaction units at the proposed terminal, bringing the total to eight, and that it is mulling adding another two.  

“If you win a NEPA case, what you win is remand back to the agency to do better, to do more analysis,” Sivas said. “The only projects they really stop are projects where there was a moment in time where they made economic sense, and then you pass that moment and they don't anymore.”

Lead photo: Cheniere's Corpus Christi LNG facility in Texas, whose authorization required a National Environmental Policy Act review by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Photo by Garth Lenz/Flight SouthWings.