President Donald Trump's infrastructure plan would trigger one of the most significant regulation rollbacks in decades, benefiting not just roads and bridges, but businesses ranging from coal mines to homebuilders to factories.

The blueprint the White House released this week would eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to veto the Army Corps of Engineers’ wetlands permits, a power that the EPA wielded during the Obama administration to block a controversial mountaintop coal mine in West Virginia. Industrial facilities like coal plants and steel factories could get 15-year Clean Water Act pollution permits — up from five years — that would be automatically renewed. For some infrastructure permits, the deadline for opponents to file legal challenges would shrink from six years to 150 days.


The proposed revisions to some of the nation’s bedrock environmental regulations are drawing heavy criticism from congressional Democrats — including in the Senate, where Republicans would need at least nine extra votes to enact Trump’s plan. Environmental groups say the ambition of the plan’s deregulation push contrasts with the relatively meager amount of federal money the White House is proposing to contribute toward the $1.5 trillion total.

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"This isn't an infrastructure package," said Melissa Samet, an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation. “This is an all-out attack on longstanding environmental protections that have done a lot of good for this country.”

Republicans and business groups have long complained that the federal government’s often cumbersome permitting process, governed by laws Congress enacted decades ago, creates unnecessary delays for projects. “We built the Empire State Building in just one year,” Trump said in his State of the Union address last month. “Is it not a disgrace that it can now take 10 years just to get a permit approved for a simple road?”

Supporters of Trump’s plan are happy the White House is pushing for changes.

"We're very pleased with the permitting provisions," said Ross Eisenberg, a vice president at the National Association of Manufacturers. "Even some of them being signed law would be a major improvement. We don't want to blow up the process. We just want it to go faster."

Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said he hopes Democrats will come around.

"You're never going to win over every obstructing Democrat, but they've got to realize that projects have been slowed down in their states," Barrasso said.

But Democrats say the nation’s real infrastructure problem is money — and the Trump proposal calls for just $200 billion in federal investments over the next decade for needs including roads, bridges, airports, water plants, veterans’ hospitals and rural broadband service. And they questioned whether Trump’s aim is really just to make regulatory reviews more efficient.

"The president's contentions are not to streamline a process, but to compromise needed environmental and public health issues," Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) told reporters.

Some kind of environmental streamlining has been a part of most of the major infrastructure measures Congress has passed in recent years. Provisions in the 2012 highway bill and a 2014 water bill aimed to get agencies to coordinate their permit reviews more efficiently and impose consequences for delays.

Supporters of those changes included then-Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), an environmental stalwart, who argued that the streamlining amounted to common sense despite the opposition of some environmentalists. Many of those provisions have yet to take effect, however.

Trump’s infrastructure proposal would go much further, setting strict deadlines for reviews and curtailing EPA's say over projects.

For instance, Trump has touted the proposal's two-year limit for agencies to issue final permitting decisions, including a strict 21-month limit on analyses done under the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970, one of the nation’s foundational environmental laws.

The law requires federal agencies to make a public estimate of the environmental impacts when the federal government spends money or makes a permitting decision, although nothing in the law requires agencies to limit environmental damage. Repeated environmental studies under NEPA were one factor that contributed to the Obama administration’s nearly seven-year review of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a project Trump has pushed to revive this year.

Under Trump’s proposal, agencies would be required to complete environmental reviews in no more than 21 months. Anyone seeking to challenges the permits would have just 150 days to sue, instead of the current six years.

Industry groups argue the act’s long statute of limitations for permit challenges leaves a cloud of uncertainty over projects. But Samet, the National Wildlife Federation attorney, said 150 days runs by quickly when challengers have to track down documents that regularly run hundreds of pages, decipher them, find experts to analyze the data, hire lawyers and scrounge up the money to cover legal costs.

The result, she said: "Bad projects will move forward. There'll be nothing to stop them."

Trump’s plan would also deliver on a long-sought Republican goal of curbing EPA's authority under the Clean Water Act's wetlands program — a change that would have sweeping effects not just for infrastructure projects but for nearly any kind of development.

The blueprint would remove EPA's authority to oversee the Army Corps of Engineers’ determinations about which streams and wetlands are subject to Clean Water Act protections. And it would take away the EPA's ability to veto dredge-and-fill permits that it decides would cause undue harm to the environment.

EPA has used that veto authority only 13 times since the Clean Water Act was enacted, including with its 2012 reversal of a Army Corps permit for the Mingo Logan mountaintop coal mine in West Virginia — a decision that angered the coal industry’s supporters in Congress. Most of the other occasions when it used that power came during Republican administrations.

Trump’s proposal would also extend pollution discharge permits under the Clean Water Act from five years to 15, and allow them to be automatically renewed as long as "water quality needs do not require more stringent permit limits." Those changes that would apply not only to municipal wastewater treatment plants but also to industrial facilities.

The plan also calls for eliminating a section of the Clean Air Act that requires EPA to review, comment on and rate other agencies' environmental impact statements.

While the proposal may allow construction on projects to get started faster, it might end up creating bigger problems in the end, argued Kym Hunter, an attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center. She said a narrower NEPA review wouldn't just keep potential environmental problems from coming to light, but it would also keep the public in the dark about whether a project would live up to its promises.

"NEPA is about taking that hard look," Hunter argued. "When it was promulgated in 1970, the idea was if you think about what you are doing you're likely to make a better decision. This [Trump proposal] would just encourage agencies to rush forward without being thoughtful, without being careful."

Trump’s plan also attempts to limit the ability of courts to halt work on projects while lawsuits proceed. But that could backfire too, Hunter said, if it keeps courts from halting an ill-conceived project until after a government body has started spending money and taking on debt.

Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, didn't dismiss the idea of making updates to the decade-old laws. But if the administration’s goal is to weaken environmental regulations, he said, "we're not going to get very far."