USDA is rolling back the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations it uses to implement agency action. The move comes following the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s (CEQ) decision to rescind its NEPA implementation regulations.
“USDA is making common sense reforms to ensure the NEPA process does not cause unnecessary delays or stands in the way of American free enterprise,” USDA said. “This move institutes reasonable considerations for environmental impacts and streamlines operations.”
The department said the reform will allow the agency to deliver critical services for ranchers, farmers, loggers and rural communities and correct the decades of harm caused by cumbersome NEPA reviews.
USDA is issuing one set of department-wide NEPA regulations by rescinding seven agency-specific regulations, which the agency says will reduce regulations by 66%. This will allow USDA officials to concentrate resources on projects the public needs while honoring land stewardship, the agency said.
Implementing procedures will be withdrawn from the following seven agencies: Agricultural Research Service, Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, Farm Service Agency, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Service, Rural Development and U.S. Forest Service.
“We have been hamstrung by overly burdensome regulations for decades,” said USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins. “So many beneficial and common-sense infrastructure and energy projects have been stymied and delayed in litigation and endless reviews. Overregulation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation.”
President Donald Trump’s executive order on Unleashing American Energy, signed at the start of his term, prompted the CEQ to rescind its NEPA-implementing regulations, with USDA following suit with its interim final rule.
“Conducting a standard rulemaking process would impede USDA’s planning and decision-making for longer than necessary and would be impracticable and contrary to the public interest,” the agency said in the rule. “For these reasons, USDA is using the interim final rule process.”
New NEPA procedures
The department said its new NEPA-implementing procedures are a more faithful implementation of the statute as amended in 2023 than its old procedures.
The new procedures implement deadlines and page limits for environmental assessments (EAs) and environmental impact statements (EIS). They also incorporate Congress’ direction regarding establishing, adopting and implementing categorical exclusions.
The new rules provide procedures governing project sponsor-prepared for an EA and an EIS and the requirements for what an agency must address in an EIS. In addition, the rules incorporate Congress’ requirement that public notice and solicitation of comment be provided when issuing a notice of intent to prepare an EIS.
“All of these are crucial features of Congress’s policy design and its purpose in the 2023 amendments that NEPA review be more efficient and certain,” USDA said.
In addition, the new rules follow Trump’s executive order and reflect the Supreme Court’s statement that NEPA is a purely procedural statue, USDA continued. “The Department is conscious of the Supreme Court’s admonition that NEPA review has grown out of all proportion to its origins of a ‘modest procedural requirement,’ creating, ‘under the guise of just a little more process,’ delay upon delay, so much so that the process seems to ‘border on the Kafkaesque,’” USDA wrote.
For the seven withdrawn agency-specific implementing procedures, references to CEQ’s rescinded NEPA-implementing regulations were removed. Agency-developed terms, such as those associated with agency-developed forms and other document types, have been generalized to allow consistent NEPA applications. Agencies will be authorized to issue agency-specific procedures through technical and program guidance that aligns with NEPA and USDA, the department said.
The interim final rule went into effect on July 3. Comments may be submitted until July 30 at regulations.gov by searching for docket ID USDA-2025-0008. — Anna Miller Fortozo, WLJ managing editor
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