The USDA will adopt new regulations on evaluating the environmental effects of grazing and other agency-approved activities, saying the rules will follow directions from President Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court. The regulations will guide the agency’s execution of the National Environmental Policy Act. The rules will be published soon and will take effect immediately, the agency said June 30. The regulations are intended to eliminate unnecessarily long and cumbersome environmental reviews, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement. “We have been hamstrung by overly burdensome regulations for decades,” she said. “Overreguation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation.” NEPA, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, requires federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of their actions, such as funding farmland conservation or permitting logging or grazing on federal lands. NEPA applies to more than 100,000 federal actions a year and routinely provides the basis for allegations the government has failed to do an adequate environmental review.
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