Aug 1, 2025
National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) Changes
Our National Forests are at risk due to the gutting of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Interim final rule rescinding regulations in response to President Trump’s Executive Order 14154, Unleashing American Energy.
The comment period for opposing the latest attack on our public lands is August 4, 2025 by 11:59 P.M. Please comment and oppose the removal of NEPA regulations!
Submit your comments at regulations.gov (https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/USDA-2025-0008-0001) by Monday, August 04 to oppose changes in public lands policy that will eliminate public comment on land management, early warning about dangerous policies and actions, and severely weaken environmental and Endangered Species protections.
On July 3, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, along with a host of federal agencies, made sweeping changes to agency-specific National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations. NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of their proposed actions prior to making decisions. The changes took immediate effect, so the NEPA process that organizations and public lands stakeholders have relied on for decades is now gone.
There have been a lot of changes and attacks on NEPA in the past months. Here is some context for this latest chapter. In the past, Forest Service decision making has been subject to two sets of regulations—the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ)regulations, which applied to all agencies, and the U.S. Forest Service’s own regulations. Late last year, the D.C. Circuit ruled that CEQ doesn’t have the power to issue binding regulations. The Trump administration promptly seized on this ruling as a justification to rescind the full suite of CEQ regulations. However, the U.S. Forest Service’s own NEPA regulations stayed in effect. Since those regulations were stronger than CEQ’s to begin with, groups working with the U.S. Forest Service were not immediately affected by these changes.
Now, the U.S. Forest Service’s regulations have been rescinded too. They have been replaced by a new set of regulations that apply to the entire Department of Agriculture, which are much weaker. Through these new regulations, the U.S. Forest Service has cut out its early warning system, called the Schedule of Proposed Actions (SOPA), which we rely on to learn about harmful projects; it has eliminated early opportunities for public participation under the scoping process, minimized the public’s opportunity to comment on refined and near final proposals, and gutted the agency’s obligations to substantively consider the environmental effects of its actions in the first place, including by drastically expanding the amount and availability of categorical exclusions. A categorical exclusion (CE) is a class of actions that a Federal agency has determined, after review by CEQ, do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment and for which, therefore, neither an environmental assessment nor an environmental impact statement is normally required.
Although projects already in progress are likely to continue moving forward under the old rules, new projects are no longer bound by them. In practice, this means that we can no longer expect the agency to inform the public about harmful projects before they happen. We also can no longer rely on the public comment process to persuade the agency to improve its projects. These regulations are both a blatant attack on public processes, agency transparency, and environmental integrity.
SUBMIT COMMENTS
Tips For Submitting Effective Comments:
Read and understand the regulatory document you are commenting on
Feel free to reach out to the agency with questions
Be concise but support your claims
Base your justification on sound reasoning, scientific evidence, and/or how you will be impacted
Address trade-offs and opposing views in your comment
There is no minimum or maximum length for an effective comment
The comment process is not a vote – one well-supported comment is often more influential than a thousand form letters