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Posted on 07/01/2026 5:07:24 AM PDT by Red Badger
President Trump promised on Day One to end the permitting nightmare that buries American projects for years. One year later, the numbers are in.
The White House published a release on June 30, 2026 marking the milestone, and the scale of the overhaul is bigger than most people realized. The release says more than 60 agencies and departments have now reformed, or are in the process of reforming, their procedures after CEQ reviewed thousands of pages of rules and related materials.
The core problem is a law called NEPA. For decades, the White House argues, the review process was used to delay federal permits and stall American growth, letting activists and lawyers drag projects through endless paperwork.
President Trump moved on his first day through Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy.”
One year ago today, the major permitting agencies updated their NEPA procedures. That list includes USDA, Commerce, Interior, Energy, FERC, Transportation, and the Army through the Army Corps of Engineers, the agencies that the White House says account for most NEPA litigation and shape the country’s energy and infrastructure agenda.
Those agencies handle the vast majority of NEPA litigation and touch nearly every energy and infrastructure decision in the country.
Here is the headline number. The White House says more than 60 agencies and departments have now reformed or are reforming their procedures.
USDA and Interior have already finalized their policies. The administration estimates those reforms alone will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Since the start of the administration, 195 categorical exclusions have been adopted. Those are the tools that let routine, low-impact work move forward without a full multi-year review.
Interior’s emergency NEPA procedures can now clear domestic energy and critical mineral projects in under 28 days.
The drilling approvals show how far the shift has moved. BLM has approved over 6,100 Applications for Permits to Drill, more than in any fiscal year in the past 15 years.
The administration says it has approved 63.7 percent more Federal and Indian drilling permits than the prior administration over the same stretch of the presidency.
On coal, the White House points to 76 coal-related permits and 13.1 million more acres of federal land opened for leasing.
Geothermal is up too. The first year and a half offered 748,000 acres of geothermal resources, more than the entire prior administration offered.
One detail is important because critics will try to blur it. NEPA still exists, and environmental laws still apply.
The point is to put deadlines and limits on a system that had become open-ended paralysis.
The EPA shows what that looks like at the agency level. On June 24, 2026, EPA proposed reforms it says would make reviews faster, clearer, and more predictable without lowering environmental standards.
The proposal sets firm page limits, including a 150-page cap for a normal Environmental Impact Statement and 300 pages for actions of extraordinary complexity.
EPA also says the rule would require the agency to finish an EIS within two years, sharpen the scope of NEPA analysis to the proposed action and its reasonably foreseeable effects, and simplify categorical exclusions so routine, low-risk work is not forced through duplicative reviews.
The agency says the proposal aligns EPA with reforms underway at USDA, Commerce, Interior, Energy, Defense, Transportation, FERC, and the Army Corps.
Interior finalized its own reforms on February 23, 2026, calling the overhaul a return to NEPA as a focused procedural law rather than a maze that delays decisions for years.
The department rescinded more than 80 percent of its prior NEPA regulations and moved most procedures into a streamlined departmental handbook.
Interior said the reforms are expected to reduce delays and costs across public lands, including energy development, critical minerals, livestock grazing approvals, infrastructure, wildfire mitigation, water projects, and conservation work.
Interior was direct that the changes do not eliminate environmental review, and that NEPA remains in full effect. The department says it will still consider environmental impacts, coordinate with tribes, states, local governments, and partners, and comply with applicable environmental laws.
The legal footing runs through the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which removed CEQ’s NEPA regulations after EO 14154 and published final action in January 2026.
The energy agencies got moving early. On June 30, 2025, the Department of Energy announced updated NEPA procedures built around clear deadlines, better lead-agency coordination, page limits, and more use of categorical exclusions.
This is the America First agenda showing up in permits, job sites, utility bills, and rural counties.
Energy, housing, AI infrastructure, critical minerals, the defense supply chain, and rural projects no longer have to sit frozen for years while Washington paperwork piles up.
The environmental laws are still on the books. The difference now is that the country is allowed to build again.
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“Interior”.
Go Doug!
in case you didn’t see it in the article:
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What is the National Environmental Policy Act?
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law on January 1, 1970. NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions. The range of actions covered by NEPA is broad and includes:
making decisions on permit applications,
adopting federal land management actions, and
constructing highways and other publicly-owned facilities.
https://www.epa.gov/nepa/what-national-environmental-policy-act
Biden and his band of idiots were using NEPA to essentially shut down the petroleum industry by delaying and delaying and slow walking any and all paperwork.............
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4062556/posts
“The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) was signed into law on January 1, 1970.”
Yet ANOTHER Nixon ‘gift’ to the country. It still blows my mind that the Left took Nixon out, given what a Useful Idiot he was for them.
You’re too hard on Nixon. Nixon was a “me too” Republican in those days, as were almost all Republicans. “me too” Republican is defined to be we will do FDR’s socialism more efficiently and economically. They thought the public wanted that. It for the most part did. “Big government” won WWII. Won’t it win other things if we make it big enough and try hard enough?
Another thing to consider regarding the NEPA Act is, Nixon was reacting to what the public wanted. (Nixon was a politician why wouldn’t he react that way?) A public that was constantly bombarded with “we’re destroying the earth” environmental propaganda. Think of all the TV shows, breathless news reports back then “confirming” such things.
I hear you, but sometimes it’s better to lead than follow. As to Republicans back then, there was at least one Republican willing to lead and stand up to this crap...but he was tied up running California.
Why do articles in June 2026 still report that Lithium shortage is holding back technology advancement?
And why is there a Lithium shortage? Apparently because the legal process is long and arcane before the extraction and filtering process can proceed.
The same with Rare Earth minerals, which apparently require an even more heavy duty legal process than Lithium.
Nixon wasn’t perfect but he wasn’t a filthy commie or percept... try to remember what we’re dealing with today.
FUNNY—_THERE SEEMS TO BE NO PARALYSIS AGAINST DATA CENTERS
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