Note: I reached out beforehand to the mods, and got their permission to make this post. Normally, recruitment posts are off-limits. They gave me a clear set of requirements they would want from so that this is not a low-effort “recruitment post”. If you are not happy with the effort of this post, leave a comment on what you would have liked to see
TL;DR: A forum where people can discuss NEPA reform is important for enabling local-level advocacy groups to apply pressure to state/federal institutions. Such forums do not exist, so I created r/ReformNEPA to get something off the ground.
Reform of NEPA (National Enviromental Policy Act) is something that is increasingly being discussed. Trump was responsible for updating the Council on Enviromental Quality (the procedure-setting agency for NEPA) in order to lessen the regulatory burden imposed by NEPA. Biden was responsible for rolling back all of Trump’s changes. The debt ceiling deal recently passed made minor changes to NEPA.
So what is NEPA? Brian Potter and Eli Dourado provide a detailed analysis of NEPA and its effects. In short, NEPA was originally a short piece of federal legislation passed in 1970. The bill announced that it:
… is the continuing policy of the Federal Government, in cooperation with State and local governments, and other concerned public and private organizations, to use all practicable means and measures, including financial and technical assistance, in a manner calculated to foster and promote the general welfare, to create and maintain conditions under which man and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans.
and required federal agencies to act in line with this policy. However, the courts found that such broad language was unenforceable, and thus, NEPA ceased to be a substantive piece of legislation. However, the following line with the statute was found to be enforceable:
The Congress authorizes and directs that, to the fullest extent possible: All agencies of the Federal Government shall include in every major Federal action significantly affecting the quality of the human environment a detailed statement by the responsible official on the environmental impact of the proposed action, any adverse environmental effects which cannot be avoided should the proposal be implemented, etc.
This ‘detailed statement’ became the Enviromental Impact Statement (EIS) that all agencies are required to produce for any action that is expected to have a significant effect on the environment. The length of a EIS has repeatedly grown. The Department of Energy has found that the length of their EIS has doubled over the past 20 years, with lengths increasing from an average of 1,100 pages to 2,500 over the period from 1994 to 2016. The time to complete an EIS grew from 26 month to 40 month. Producing an EIS is also expensive, with the Department of Energy spending 94 million dollars on just 3 EIS! The average cost varies per department, but the U.S. Forest Service spent 40% of its total work budget on enviromental planning and assessment documents. As action cannot proceed until an EIS is produced, the long period of delay introduced by the requirement to produce an EIS (or an enviromental assessment statement, or a categorical exclusion, or a finding of no significance; see Brian Potter’s that I linked in the beginning) severely limits the effectiveness of federal and state agencies. Noteably, San Francisco spent over one million dollars and 2.5 years on the EIS required in order to build new bike lanes.
Note that due to the enforcement of the courts the statute is now completely procedural. NEPA does not require agencies to consider the impact that their actions can have on the environment; they must only show that they know about it.
NEPA is an increasingly burdensome regulations because it allows bad actors a ‘heckler’s veto’. When an agency introduces releases a EIS for a particular project, it can be sued by advocacy groups who opposes the project by finding a consideration that was not considered in the EIS. This can lead to years of delay as agencies must wait for case to navigate the court system, and as they further expand their EIS. This is a known strategy used by activists. Additionally, as the costs of producing an EIS is often borne not by the agency but by the sponsor (for example, the FAA approving SpaceX’s orbital launch program at Boca Chica), NEPA imposes a heavy and direct cost on businesses that interact with federal agencies.
I believe NEPA reform is essential to ending ballooning American construction costs, government ineffectiveness, and constant delays. The issue is that after the passage of NEPA, states proceeded to pass their own version of NEPA. This means reforming NEPA will require constant pressure on the Federal and State level. As to most people, this is an obscure piece of legislation with little bearing on their daily lives, it is difficult to imagine where the political pressure to change will come from.
My theory is that to reform NEPA, the dynamics of the YIMBY movement must be reproduced. The YIMBY movement got enough people interested in a topic as obscure as ‘zoning reform’ to successfully apply pressure in California to start getting things done. These are a minority of people who can form local activist groups, show up to town halls, apply pressure on their representatives, and comment during public feedback periods in order to push the legislation in their direction. Thus, despite not becoming a culture war issue that has the attention of a lot of people, progress is still being made. I was looking around for something similar to /r/YIMBY or the YIMBY alliances but there is nothing. It seems that discussion of reforming NEPA remains at the level of a minority of interested policy makers and substackers. Thus, I created r/ReformNEPA. I’m hoping it will get the conversation off the ground and give people who are interested in reforming NEPA a place to meet, discuss, and coordinate, eventually leading to the creation of local action groups, websites with appropriate resources, etc. Please join and contribute if it is something you are interested in! I am looking for mods, and for people interested in organizing and creating resources to make progress on this important issue.
Since this is the motte, I am interested in what your perspective is on this. Is NEPA such a burden as I believe it is? Is my theory on how NEPA reform needs to be achieved wrong?
Edit: also wanted to add this link which has more details about the cost, length of time required, and delays: The Case for Abolishing NEPA
Despite good intentions, NEPA is one of the primary reasons why it’s so hard to build anything in America. There are three main types of NEPA review—Categorical Exclusions (CEs), Environmental Assessments (EAs), and Environmental Impact Statements (EISs). Environmental Impact Statements are the most stringent category of those three. In 2020, the White House Council on Environmental Quality estimated that the average EIS took 4.5 years to complete and ran more than 660 pages long. This is likely an underestimate as the 4.5 years figure is the time from the “Notice of Intent” filing to the “Record of Decision” ruling, and work typically begins before the Notice of Intent. The American Action Forum estimated an average time of 5.8 years for infrastructure projects to gain NEPA approval. The problem is also getting worse over time, with average NEPA review times estimated to be increasing 39 days per year.
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