The governmentwide plan is a continuation of Biden-era recommendations to improve the often-lengthy process of issuing permits under the landmark National Environmental Policy Act.
How this plays out in the context of the Trump administration’s staffing cuts and its push to rollback NEPA remains to be seen. But the effort to speed up permitting is relevant for the administration's push to “drill more, map more, mine more and build more,” as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum stated in April, when the White House charged the Council on Environmental Quality with making the plan.
“The Trump Administration is working tirelessly to implement innovation-driven environmental review and permitting reforms to eliminate needless delays that cripple the growth of the U.S. economy, replacing outdated technology with efficient, speedier solutions,” CEQ Chief of Staff Katherine Scarlett said in a statement.
The new strategy includes automating work, moving from paper to digital and ultimately working towards a more integrated, interoperable system with up-to-date status and timeline data for projects.
Currently, different federal agencies involved in permitting operate their own often-outdated, disconnected technology and datasets, even as permitting is often a multi-agency process.
“It’s still tons of stuff that’s done by emailing around PDFs or Word documents,” one government employee previously told Nextgov/FCW.
Agencies have 90 days to adopt and begin implementing an initial data and tech trump administration debuts permitting modernization staff could jeopardize
