Secretary Rollins rolls back overly burdensome environmental regulations to unleash American innovation

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke L. Rollins today announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is revising National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations to reduce unnecessary red tape that is killing jobs and raising prices for Americans. This reform allows the Department to efficiently deliver the critical services and funds America’s ranchers, farmers, loggers, and rural communities rely on and corrects the harms caused by decades of unnecessarily lengthy, cumbersome NEPA reviews.

“President Trump is reforming government to be more responsive to the needs of the American people. We have been hamstrung by overly burdensome regulations for decades. USDA is updating and modernizing NEPA so projects critical to the health of our forests and prosperity of rural America are not stymied and delayed for years. So many beneficial and common-sense infrastructure and energy projects have been stymied and delayed in litigation and endless reviews. Overregulation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation,” said Secretary Rollins.

USDA is making common sense reforms to ensure the NEPA process does not cause unnecessary delays or stands in the way of American free enterprise. This move institutes reasonable considerations for environmental impacts and streamlines operations.

USDA is issuing one set of department-wide NEPA regulations by rescinding seven agency-specific regulations, resulting in a 66% reduction in regulations. This will allow USDA officials to concentrate resources on projects the public needs while also ensuring we honor the Department’s legacy of land stewardship.

The move by USDA comes in response to President Trump’s executive order on Unleashing American Energy that led to the Council on Environmental Quality’s rescinding its NEPA implementing regulations, which created a pathway for USDA to reform its own NEPA regulations.

A pre-publication version of USDA’s interim final rule will be made available the afternoon of June 30. This version will be replaced with a link to the official publication of the interim final rule in the Federal Register at such time publication occurs.