White House Moves to Soften Project Permitting Rules at Agencies

The Trump administration is moving to reshape the way individual agencies handle environmental permitting, according to a White House document reviewed by Bloomberg Law.

The guidance, dated April 8, matters because the White House recently scrapped a set of rules that tightly prescribe how agencies should make permitting decisions, telling them which factors they have to consider, how to write documents, and a wide range of other procedural requirements.

But many federal agencies have, over time, formally adopted those now-defunct rules into their own procedures, meaning the demise of the Council of Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) regulations wouldn’t have much real-world ...