The Department of Defense announced Monday it has updated its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) procedures to accelerate infrastructure and military construction projects. The move is part of a broader deregulatory push under President Donald Trump’s administration aimed at curbing project delays and reducing federal review costs.

According to the agency, the new procedures are designed to streamline environmental reviews, which often pose time and budget challenges for construction within the defense industrial base.

The revisions bring the DoD’s NEPA process in line with amendments included in Trump’s Unleashing American Energy executive order, the BUILDER Act provisions from the 2023 debt ceiling agreement, and the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the department said.

In a related release, the White House emphasized that the updates are meant to ensure “that burdensome Federal environmental reviews cannot be weaponized to stall the growth of the American economy or halt energy infrastructure construction.”

Other federal agencies—including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Departments of Energy, Agriculture, Interior, Transportation, and Commerce—are also revising their NEPA procedures to stay in line with the new directives.

Among the reforms:

• Strict deadlines and page limits will now apply to environmental reviews.
• Clarification that NEPA only applies to actions where a federal agency has sufficient discretion to weigh environmental impacts.
• Simplified procedures to create and adopt categorical exclusions across agencies to avoid redundant analysis.

The latest policy shift is just one of several Trump administration moves to overhaul the federal permitting process since the president’s return to office.

On his first day in office in January 2025, Trump signed executive orders that curtailed the White House’s NEPA rulemaking authority and declared a national energy emergency. That action enabled expedited permits for fossil fuel and renewable energy projects, including oil, gas, nuclear, hydropower, and mining operations.

In April, Trump issued a directive requiring federal agencies to digitize their permitting workflows. That memo tasked the Council on Environmental Quality with producing a Permitting Technology Action Plan aimed at eliminating paper applications and speeding up review timelines.

These efforts are designed to break what the administration sees as bureaucratic bottlenecks standing in the way of national energy independence, defense readiness, and economic growth.

Critics of the reforms argue that the accelerated review process could undermine environmental safeguards, while supporters say it’s a necessary fix for a system plagued by delays.

For now, the DoD and other agencies are moving forward with their aligned NEPA updates, marking a significant shift in how environmental reviews are handled across the federal government.

Originally reported by Julie Strupp in Construction Dive.