At Hearing, Subcommittee RM Huffman Blasts Republican Attacks on NEPA, Likens to Trump’s Project 2025
WASHINGTON – At today’s House Natural Resources Committee hearing on Chair Bruce Westerman’s (R-Ark.) new legislation to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), H.J. Res. 168 (Graves of LA), and H.R. 6129 (Rep. Yakym), Water, Wildlife and Fisheries Subcommittee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) delivered the following opening statement.
Subcommittee Ranking Member Huffman Opening Statement (as delivered)
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And welcome to our witnesses. Mr. Beard, it’s especially good to see you again today.
As we find ourselves mercifully inching toward the end of the 118th Congress, I see we also find ourselves, unmercifully, right back where Team Extreme started this congress — scapegoating environmental laws and trying to advance an extreme deregulation agenda for polluting industries.
The very first piece of legislation brought before the full committee in this Congress was the curiously named BUILDER Act, courtesy of our friend from Louisiana, Mr. Graves.
I say curiously because it wasn’t about building anything, certainly not the infrastructure or clean energy resources that we need for the future. The bill was more interested in tearing down NEPA to the studs.
If my Republican colleagues were interested in building the clean energy projects that we need, one of these bills before us would do something, anything to address the transmission issues holding these projects back. Team Extreme has been conspicuously uninterested in electrical grid reform for this entire congress. They want oil and gas.
They would also have voted for the more than one billion dollars in funding that my Democratic colleagues and I secured in the Inflation Reduction Act to expedite permitting to boost capacities in federal agencies’ environmental review offices, one of the top reasons for energy project delays.
Now, just last month, the White House explained how effective this billion-dollar investment has already been. In a short period of time, the funding has reduced the average time that it takes to complete an Environmental Impact Statement by six months. Under the Trump administration, environmental reviews were sloppy and slow. Under the Biden administration, they’re being done right, and they’re being done much faster.
We can look at the Department of Energy specifically. The results are really remarkable there. Times have been cut in half for environmental reviews by the Department of Energy.
At the Department of Transportation, they’ve been cut by a third.
At the Department of Commerce, Secretary Raimondo recently explained that environmental reviews are no longer the bottleneck for chip manufacturing projects in this country.
So, for my Republican colleagues who complain endlessly about the speed of environmental reviews but voted against this very effective permitting reform that Democrats enacted — you’re welcome. And if you want to work with us on speeding things up even more, let’s go.
But that’s not what the BUILDER Act is all about. That’s not what H.R. 1, the Polluters Over People Act, is all about. And it’s not what these bills before us today are about. These bills attempt to dismantle NEPA.
Big Oil and other corporate polluters don’t want faster reviews. They want impunity. They want to do what they want, when they want, how they want, no matter how it affects the environment, public health, or disadvantaged communities. They want to kill NEPA through the death of a thousand cuts.
And they have had some success. Let’s remember that ousted Speaker McCarthy already secured NEPA cuts when he held the whole country hostage with a wholly manufactured debt ceiling crisis last May. He got some cuts to NEPA. But never satisfied, Team Extreme is back taking aim again, proposing some of the most dangerous cuts that we’ve seen so far, straight out of the pages of Trump’s Project 2025.
On the other side of the Hill, Senators Manchin and Barrasso have recently introduced a so-called permitting reform bill that includes an awful lot of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, drastically shortens the statute of limitations for challenging unlawful permitting decisions, including those under NEPA, from six years to 150 days.
That means communities who are impacted have less than five months to determine whether they need to challenge a project. That’s virtually impossible in many cases.
But it wasn’t draconian enough for Team Extreme here in the House. The Chairman’s Discussion Draft shortens that statute of limitation even further to 120 days.
But of course, the Chairman’s bill isn’t the only one on the docket. The other exaltation of the Project 2025 agenda is Congressman Grave’s resolution to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Biden-Harris administration NEPA regulations. These new regulations incorporate suggestions from nearly 100 Members of Congress, helping ensure climate change and environmental justice are part of the federal decision-making process. That is a reasonable and reality-based policy that does not sit well with Team Extreme.
So, let’s turn our hymnals to page 533 of Project 2025, where we find quite clearly that it calls for these new regulations to be eliminated because they don’t align with the right-wing agenda to whittle down NEPA to a stump.
Not just extreme and dangerous, this stuff that we’re dealing with — that we’ve dealt with this entire congress — is sad. More than 50 years ago, President Nixon signed NEPA into law, passed with overwhelming bipartisan support. Somewhere between now and then, polluters seized the agenda, and NEPA became Republican enemy number one. There used to be Republican environmentalists in Congress, lots of them, and good ones. And now we have this agenda from Team Extreme.
Real, meaningful permitting reform is already happening. With the funding from the IRA, and executive actions from the Biden-Harris administration, we are shortening timelines; we are building clean energy infrastructure while creating hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs.
We don’t need to gut NEPA. We don’t need this even uglier stepchild of the Manchin-Barrasso bill. And we certainly don’t need any more previews of Project 2025.
I yield back.
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