The Trump Administration is at it again. They’re trying to severely undermine one of our nation’s most important environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Every law, every policy can be improved. But when it comes to creation-care policies we certainly don’t trust the Trump Administration to do it! That’s because in most cases their real motive is to gut environmental policies, allowing private greed to trump public interest.

NEPA was signed into law in 1970 by President Nixon, who stated it was designed to help "America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment." And now through this and other efforts the Trump Administration wants to make America polluted again by rolling us back to when rivers caught fire and you can see, taste, and smell the air pollution. No thanks!

NEPA requires that any federal project go through a review process before construction can begin to determine if there are any significant environmental, economic, social, or health impacts. In many cases this is the only opportunity local communities have to weigh in. 

Today the Trump Administration will release its plan to undermine NEPA. All indications are that they will try to significantly limit the projects that would fall under NEPA and severely restrict the timeframe by which project review can take place as well as the statute of limitations for challenging the findings. Ironically, in many cases this would result in more delay by actually increasing litigation, forcing interested parties to file lawsuits before the highly restrictive statute of limitations time frame runs out.

Overall, this decision is ill advised and will lead to further degradation of God’s creation. We will work to oppose any and all efforts to weaken important environmental protections.