Committee Democrats Denounce NEPA Rollbacks at Interior and USDA: “Dangerous,” “Unprecedented,” and “Profoundly Unjust”
Washington, D.C. – House Natural Resources Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee Ranking Member Yassamin Ansari (D-Ariz.), and Indian and Insular Affairs Subcommittee Ranking Member Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) condemned the Trump administration’s attempts to gut one of America’s most important tools to defend public health, protect the environment, and ensure government transparency.
In formal comments to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, Committee Democrats blasted the Departments’ rushed and sweeping rollback of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) — calling it a “dangerous” effort to shut the public out of federal decision-making and greenlight polluting projects behind closed doors.
The lawmakers warned that the agency-by-agency rulemaking will create confusion and legal risk. “Project sponsors… will face conflicting standards, new bureaucratic barriers, and more litigation. These outcomes will ultimately erode trust in the federal process and delay—not accelerate—important projects.”
They also highlighted the rollback of core public protections, including draft Environmental Impact Statements and meaningful comment periods. “Public engagement is both a legal obligation and a proven tool for improving the substance, legitimacy, and durability of federal decisions,” the members wrote. “Abandoning it is a profound, costly and avoidable mistake.”
The lawmakers condemned the agencies’ efforts to eliminate environmental justice, climate, and cumulative impacts from review. “Ignoring these major environmental impacts will not make them disappear. It will merely blind the agency to their consequences,” they wrote. These consequences will be “immediate, compounding, and profoundly unjust” for “low-income communities, Tribal Nations, and historically overburdened communities of color.”
They objected to the administration’s use of an interim final rule without justification. “There is clearly no such emergency present that would justify bypassing the standard, legally required rulemaking process,” they wrote. “Proceeding under these conditions violates both the letter and the spirit of the APA and undermines the legitimacy of the entire rulemaking process.”
Read the full letter to Secretary Burgum.
Read the full letter to Secretary Rollins.
Background
Signed into law in 1970, NEPA is a cornerstone of environmental protection and government transparency, ensuring that federal agencies evaluate the environmental and public health impacts of major projects before moving forward. In February 2025, the Trump administration rescinded the Council on Environmental Quality’s unified NEPA rules, directing agencies to issue their own versions.
On July 3, 2025, Interior and USDA issued separate interim final rules (IFRs) that severely limit public comment, eliminate draft environmental impact statements, and allow agencies to skip analysis of climate change, cumulative impacts, and environmental justice. The public was given just 30 days to comment on each.
This fragmented approach — with each agency adopting its own rules and regulations — is legally risky and will delay, not speed up, project delivery. Data show that permitting times fell under the Biden administration after Congressional Democrats invested over $1 billion in agency capacity through the Inflation Reduction Act. That funding has since been slashed by the Trump administration.
###
Press Contact
Ana Unruh Cohen
(202) 498-3487
Next Article Previous Article