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Proposed revisions to a landmark environmental law could severely limit the public’s ability to provide input on major infrastructure projects that affect the environment, including public lands.

The Trump administration in early January proposed major revisions to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which since 1970 has outlined an environmental review process for federal projects like pipelines and highways. The goal, as with many of the administration’s proposed regulatory changes, is to aid economic expansion—in this case, by speeding up and streamlining environmental evaluation.

The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)—the federal agency that enforces NEPA—proposed the revisions, which could alter everything from the public’s ability to comment on proposed projects to the ways in which agencies review environmental impact.

“America’s most critical infrastructure projects have been tied up and bogged down by an outrageously slow and burdensome federal approval process,” President Trump said Jan. 9, adding that the process wastes money, stalls projects and denies people jobs.

President Nixon signed NEPA—often considered the “Magna Carta of federal environmental laws”—as one of the first national policies for the environment. The administration created it in response to threats to clean air and water, said Brad Brooks, acting senior director of agency policy and planning at The Wilderness Society.

“It protects the things we need as a human species to survive, period,” he said. NEPA is different from other environmental laws because it has such a wide reach: It applies to most federal agencies across the political spectrum. Revisions will impact projects, permits and land management changes overseen by those agencies.

Adam Cramer, founding executive director of the Outdoor Alliance, said the revisions will significantly impact recreationists because—like for everyone else—it will become more difficult for them to comment on proposed projects that affect public places like trails, forests and parks.

“Given how much outdoor recreation takes place on public lands … this isn’t an abstraction for people who care about the outdoors,” Cramer said.

Under the proposed changes, people would have to provide comments that are far more detailed than what is mandated under the current law. For instance, an agency could disregard a comment if it voices a general concern not supported by data and methodologies, Brooks said. To have it considered, the individual would have to provide information about the environmental, economic and employment impacts.

CEQ spokesperson Daniel Schneider said in email to the Co-op Journal that the changes are meant to “promote meaningful public comment.” He said federal agencies will be encouraged to solicit public input earlier in the process and use new technologies like social media to make evaluating proposals more efficient.

But Brooks said the changes would still make commenting tougher for the average person who doesn’t have a law or science background, largely due to the amount of information they’d have to provide to support their comment. “The way (NEPA) is right now … you don’t have to be a lawyer to participate in the process,” he said.

The revisions also could result in fewer comment periods overall. CEQ is proposing that agencies conduct fewer environmental impact statements (EIS) in favor of more environmental assessments. The latter—typically reserved for projects where it’s unclear whether there will be a major environmental impact—requires a 30-day comment period compared to the 60 to 90 days mandated for an EIS. An EIS is required for large projects, such as a major energy plant or pipeline, where an environmental impact is certain.

“The new rules would dramatically reduce the number of projects that have a comment period, and if they do have a comment period, the agencies now have the discretion to truncate that period,” Brooks said.

Additionally, the revisions could allow agencies to impose a bond on an individual or organization if an agency has to delay a project in order to consider its environmental impact. “Think about the people who have the financial means to post a bond for some of these big projects,” Brooks said. “Who can afford to do that?”

Agencies within the Department of Interior who stand to benefit from the revisions support the changes.

“The purpose of NEPA is noble; its application, however, has gone off the rails,” David Bernhardt, Department of Interior secretary, said in a January news release. “The action by the (CEQ) is the first step in bringing common sense to a process that has needlessly paralyzed decision-making.”

The Bureau of Land Management, which is an agency within Interior, and the Department of Transportation, declined to provide a comment specific to their agency.

The revisions will place new limits on EIS’s. The existing law requires agencies to hire a third party to assess potential impact to the environment, but the revisions could make it possible for an agency to do its own assessment, creating a conflict of interest.

The administration also proposes that the assessments be capped at no more than 75 pages and take no longer than two years to create. On average across all federal agencies, these statements are about 600 pages and take about 4.5 years to create. However, less than 1 percent of projects each year require this level of assessment.

Cramer said the revisions short-circuit the public’s ability to engage with federal projects. Though it’s likely there will be litigation, Cramer said the best thing people can do right now is comment on the proposed NEPA revisions. They have until March 10.