1. United States
2. Mass.
3. Letter

The USDA just finalized a rule that guts environmental review on our public lands. NEPA has been the law of the land since 1970. Before the feds can greenlight a major project (logging, drilling, road building in our national forests) they have to study the environmental impact, public comment, scientific review, and transparency. They just blew a 66% hole in it. Seven separate agency review processes got collapsed into one departmentwide framework, cutting the overall volume of regulations by two-thirds. Review timelines are already down 80% since they started this last July. They’re proud of that number. We shouldn’t be. Fast reviews aren’t better reviews. They’re just faster. Nobody’s catching the watershed damage. Nobody’s flagging the wildlife corridor that gets cut in half. Nobody’s hearing from the rural community downstream before the decision gets made. This also follows the Council on Environmental Quality scrapping its own NEPA regulations last April.  USDA is just making that rollback permanent. They call it cutting red tape. It’s cutting the public out. It’s cutting science out. And it’s cutting our parks and forests out of the conversation entirely. You need to fix this immediately!