"A White House environmental office will officially strike down its federal permitting rules Thursday, wiping out a set of standards that had been in place nearly 50 years.
The immediate impact on developers and agencies is minimal because the rules were already essentially dead, having been wiped out under an interim final rule in February 2025 by the Council on Environmental Quality.
The rules, issued under the National Environmental Policy Act, prescribe how environmental reviews should be conducted, what factors should be considered, how to involve public input, how to create categorical exclusions for certain types of projects, and a wide range of other procedural requirements.
Environmentalists have long called NEPA and its regulations the “Magna Carta of environmental law” because it so rigorously circumscribes what federal agencies can and cannot do."
Stephen Lee reports for Bloomberg Environment January 7, 2026.
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