The White House Council on Environmental Quality has finalized a regulation that restores basic project environmental review practices that were in place prior to changes made during the Trump administration. The rule is the first of two that will have the Biden administration’s stamp on how such reviews are done under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for major federal construction projects.
The 70-year old NEPA law requires agencies to evaluate all relevant potential environmental impacts before issuing a permit for project construction. Historically, that has meant not only the consideration of direct impacts, but also indirect and cumulative impacts. In 2021, the Trump administration finalized a rule that narrowed the range of impacts that required evaluation to only those that “directly” affected a project.