Rewrite the environmental review rules and ban cumulative impact analysis
What the document says“The President should instruct the CEQ to rewrite its regulations implementing NEPA along the lines of the historic 2020 effort and restoring its key provisions such as banning the use of cumulative impact analysis.”
The National Environmental Policy Act requires environmental review before major federal actions. The chapter says the President should have the Council on Environmental Quality rewrite its rules along the lines of the 2020 revision, restoring the ban on cumulative impact analysis, and should frame the new rules to limit the scope for judicial review of agency environmental analysis and the remedies available.
What the document actually says“The President should instruct the CEQ to rewrite its regulations implementing NEPA along the lines of the historic 2020 effort and restoring its key provisions such as banning the use of cumulative impact analysis.”
The president should have this office rewrite the rules on environmental checks. It should go back to the 2020 version. That version banned adding up effects over time.
Big projects must be checked for harm to the environment first. One rule made agencies add up harm from many sources together. The book wants that rule dropped. It also wants courts to have less say.
Removal of National Environmental Policy Act Implementing Regulations
2025-02-25 · 90 FR 10610
The Council on Environmental Quality acted on its National Environmental Policy Act regulations, as the proposal asks, and did so at the President's instruction: Executive Order 14154 directed the Chairman to issue guidance and propose rescinding the regulations, and this interim final rule removes 40 CFR parts 1500 through 1508 from the Code of Federal Regulations. The fit breaks down on how. The passage asks for a rewrite along the lines of the 2020 revision, restoring provisions such as the ban on weighing cumulative impacts; the rule writes no new provisions at all, so that requirement disappears with the rest of the regulations rather than being replaced by a rule banning it, and the substantive text moves to agency-level procedures issued separately by the Interior, Energy and Agriculture Departments and others. The rule also does not address the two further things the passage asks the new regulations to do, limiting the scope of judicial review of an agency's environmental review and limiting the remedies available.
The council wiped out its own environment rules, as the President had told it to. The chapter asked for a rewrite that would ban one kind of study. Nothing new was written, so that ban was not written either. Each agency now sets its own steps instead.