For roughly half a century, a little-known body called the White House Council on Environmental Quality has been in charge of overseeing implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, a 1970 statute widely considered the “Magna Carta” of environmental law. Congress passed the law at a time when Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River was on fire and yellow smog blanketed American cities. In an attempt to prevent such calamities, NEPA requires that any big infrastructure project funded or authorized by the federal government must account for its environmental impacts before it’s permitted to go forward. Now, when cities and states build federally funded roads, a developer erects an offshore wind farm, or an oil company creates a new refining unit on the Gulf Coast, NEPA applies. Attempts to cut environmental red tape by removing the need forcould actually worsen bureaucracy.

This sweeping requirement created a need for coordination within the government. Given the number of federal agencies involved and the potential for larger projects to require authorization from multiple departments — a pipeline, for example, might require sign-off from the Department of Transportation, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency — Congress created the Council on Environmental Quality, or CEQ, and housed it within the White House in part to oversee NEPA implementation across the federal government. Since then, CEQ has been a central clearinghouse for interpreting the landmark law. In the years after its creation, the council issued rules that set forth requirements for public comment, defined key terminology, and laid out when projects required extensive analysis. The rules ensured uniformity in how agencies applied the law, and they were left largely untouched for roughly five decades.

Last month, the Trump administration unraveled those rules in an attempt to cut environmental red tape, and with them the council’s central role in implementing NEPA. By issuing a new interim rule, the White House is proposing to rescind CEQ’s guidance and instruct federal agencies to develop their own individual guidelines. The White House’s rule is expected to be finalized in the coming months, at which point every agency, from the Bureau of Land Management to the U.S. Forest Service, will be expected to develop its own standards and processes for determining whether a project complies with NEPA requirements, a process that could take years. Their interpretations could also be challenged in court, creating further uncertainty about what standards now apply for getting nearly any infrastructure project approved by the feds.

Read the full article about environmental red tape and bureaucracy by Naveena Sadasivam at Grist.