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

13. Environmental Protection Agency · Minor

Stop EPA from publicly undermining other agencies' NEPA reviews

Done

442 13. Environmental Protection Agency

“In addition, EPA should refrain from publicly undermining the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process at other agencies and should instead focus on providing constructive, technical support during the interagency process.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    A refrain-from ask with an "instead" limb, sorted and leveled under playbook 3b: EPA is the actor, its own inaction is the compliance for the refrain limb, and the affirmative limb asks for the posture it should adopt instead. Both are met. **The instead limb, delivered as policy.** EPA rewrote its own instructions to reviewers along the Quote's lines. The Deputy Administrator's implementation memorandum of 2026-06-24, which supersedes the July 2025 “Policy and Procedures for the Review of Major Federal Actions with Environmental Impacts”, tells staff that comments “should be specific and concrete and avoid abstract questions of policy or any assertions of supervisory authority”, should “avoid overly broad expressions of preference for any policy or course of action not necessitated by EPA's relevant statutory authorities”, and should avoid demanding analysis unrelated to an environmental statute or of hypothetical impacts; it states that EPA “is neither the final decision maker nor the lead agency”, that the other agency “does not have to follow EPA's comments slavishly”, and that EPA will participate early in other agencies' scoping “to the fullest extent practicable”. The companion referral policy of the same date puts the Clean Air Act section 309 referral to CEQ — the loudest public act of undermining available to EPA, a formal finding that another agency's action is environmentally unsatisfactory — behind an Administrator's determination made only “after exhausting every reasonable effort to resolve these issues at the agency level”. **The refrain limb, and how far the negative reaches.** No referral to CEQ and no public EPA opposition to another agency's NEPA review was found in the window, and the mechanism by which EPA used to grade other agencies' environmental impact statements in public is gone: the EIS rating-system criteria page (`epa.gov/nepa/environmental-impact-statement-rating-system-criteria`) returns 404 and the surviving section 309 page carries only the June 2026 documents. That negative is strong about EPA policy and about EPA's published output; it does not reach every individual comment letter EPA filed in another agency's docket, which live in EPA's EIS database and were not read (read-queue row). `done` rather than `partial`: the earlier pass held it down because “no allowlisted source says the practice has changed”, which asks for affirmative proof that a thing is not happening — the test 3b's refrain-from rule sets aside.

  2. Attempted

    The House voted to remove the authority altogether. H.R. 6398, the RED Tape Act, passed the House on 2026-04-16 and strikes from Clean Air Act section 309(a) the requirement that EPA review and comment publicly on “newly authorized Federal projects for construction and any major Federal agency action … to which section 102(2)(C) of Public Law 91-190 applies” and on “proposed regulations published by any department or agency”, leaving only EPA's review of proposed legislation. That would end EPA's public commentary on other agencies' NEPA reviews rather than redirect it, which is more than the Quote asked for; it is `attempted` because the Senate has not acted — the bill was received and referred to Environment and Public Works on 2026-04-17.

Research log

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

Research notes

  • The memorandum and the accompanying roles-and-responsibilities guide were found from epa.gov/nepa/epa-review-process-under-section-309-clean-air-act and read.
  • Reviewed 2026-09-01: read as a refrain-from ask with an “instead” limb, and moved from partial to done. The earlier reason for holding at partial — “the policy is in place, but the Quote is about EPA’s behaviour, and no allowlisted source says the practice has changed” — is a test that does not apply here: for a refrain-from ask, no source has to say the practice changed, because not doing the thing is the compliance. That EPA’s rating-system page no longer exists (confirmed again 2026-09-01) is corroboration, not the load-bearing evidence.
  • The referrals-to-CEQ policy PDF was found on the same section 309 page as the memorandum and read on 2026-09-01. It is a procedure document with no historical list of referrals, so it evidences the constraint, not an absence of referrals; the absence is a negative search stated in the note with its reach.
  • The July 2025 predecessor policy is named in the June 2026 memorandum but its own page and PDF were not found; it is not written as a separate event.
  • Adjacent and not this ask: EPA’s proposed update of its own NEPA implementing procedures (2026-06-25, 2026-12862, docket EPA-HQ-AO-2025-1080) concerns EPA’s compliance with NEPA for EPA actions, not its comments on other agencies.
  • 2026-09-06: the individual-letter check was attempted and still could not be made. Status unchanged. The check needed EPA’s EIS comment-letter database, filtered to letters filed on or after 2025-01-20, to test whether any single section 309 letter publicly opposed another agency’s review. The database at https://cdxapps.epa.gov/cdx-enepa-II/public/action/eis/search opens and its result tables can be read; the sixty-day view returns sixteen EISs with EPA comment letters, from the Morganza to the Gulf supplement to the draft Plutonium Pit Production programmatic EIS. The letters themselves could not be retrieved: each download sits behind an automated challenge, and no letter was obtained. So the reach of this event’s negative is exactly what its note already claims and no more — it covers EPA policy and EPA’s published output, and it does not cover the individual letters.
  • One structural detail from the database that does corroborate the note: its results table carries no rating column. EPA’s public grading of other agencies’ EISs — the LO/EC/EO/EU scale — is absent from the database’s own presentation as well as from the criteria page that no longer exists, which is consistent with the mechanism having been retired rather than merely undocumented. Recorded as corroboration, not as load-bearing evidence, on the same footing as the missing page.
Action
restrict
Object
EPA commentary on other agencies’ NEPA processes
ID
1191