Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

16. Department of the Interior · Minor

Reinstate Trump-era secretarial orders limiting NEPA document length and cost

Done

533 16. Department of the Interior

“The Trump Administration adopted common-sense NEPA reform that must be restored immediately. Meanwhile, DOI should reinstate the secretarial orders adopted by the Trump Administration, such as placing time and page limits on NEPA documents and setting forth—on page one—the costs of the document itself.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    The cost half is delivered exactly as the Quote describes it, and it is the last of the three things the Quote enumerates. SO 3449 reinstates SO 3380 in full by reference, requires bureaus to identify and quantify the cost of preparing, reviewing and issuing any covered document over $10,000 — "analyses under the National Environmental Policy Act" first among the examples it names — and to display that cost on the document, and orders a Department-wide cost-estimation standard and a prescribed format and placement within sixty days. With the February 2026 Handbook's page limits and deadlines already in force, every item in the Quote's list — time limits, page limits, cost on page one — now binds Interior's NEPA documents. `done` by other means rather than as asked: SO 3380 was reinstated by name, SO 3355 was not, and the limits arrive through 516 DM 1. The earlier reading of this event said "the page and time limits are still missing"; they were not missing, they were in a handbook nobody had opened.

  2. Partially done

    Interior finalized the rescission of more than eighty per cent of its NEPA regulations, moving the remaining procedures into a Departmental NEPA Handbook of Implementing Procedures. **The Handbook was located and read on 2026-09-06 (read-queue ticket 07), and it carries the limits this Quote asks for.** 516 DM 1 (February 2026) caps the text of an environmental impact statement at 150 pages, or 300 for a proposed action of extraordinary complexity, and an environmental assessment at 75 pages, excluding citations and appendices; it prescribes the page format down to margins and point size and counts oversized graphics as one page each; and it requires the Responsible Official to certify, on the face of the document, that the bureau prioritized its analysis within those limits. It sets deadlines to match: an environmental impact statement is to issue within two years and an environmental assessment within one, running from the earliest of three defined trigger dates, publishing "in as substantially complete form as is possible" on the day the deadline elapses unless the Deputy Secretary approves an extension after the bureau has conferred with the Solicitor. So the time-and-page-limits limb of the Quote is delivered — by a departmental handbook rather than by reinstating SO 3355, and implementing limits Congress set in 2023 rather than limits Interior chose. This corrects the earlier reading, which recorded that "no allowlisted source records the page or time limits SO 3355 set being restored": the source existed and had not been opened.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Two halves: page and time limits (SO 3355, see #1456) and cost-on-page-one (SO 3380, see #1459). The cost half is reinstated by name; the limits half arrives through the NEPA rewrite rather than through the order.

  • Why this is done and #1456 is not, on the same document (2026-09-06). The two Quotes ask different things. #1456 asks that SO 3355 itself be reinstated, and it was not: the order has no page in Interior’s Secretary’s Orders library, its one-year EIS clock is now a statutory two-year deadline, and the executive order it implemented (EO 13807) was revoked in 2021 — so #1456 gets the page-limit limb and stops at partial. This Quote asks that Interior reinstate the Trump-era orders “such as placing time and page limits on NEPA documents and setting forth—on page one—the costs”, and it is the enumerated list, not the order numbers, that says what would satisfy it. Every item on that list now binds. Leveled on what the documents do rather than on the instrument’s name; the alternative reading is that an ask naming secretarial orders is not satisfied by a handbook.
  • Same-instrument note. 516 DM 1 is the shared citation for this item and #1456, and the two readings above are what it does to each Quote.
Action
reinstate
Object
Trump-era DOI secretarial orders on NEPA time and page limits
ID
1500