Trump builds on Biden efforts to modernize permitting technology

The Trump administration has started a push to improve the technology used for environmental reviews and permitting in the name of greater speed and transparency.

A memo issued Tuesday calls on the Council on Environmental Quality to work with the administration’s Energy Dominance Council, charged with upping domestic oil and gas production, to create a modernization action plan. 

That plan, due in 45 days, is set to include data standards and minimum technology requirements for agencies, as well as a “roadmap for creating a unified, interagency permitting and environmental review data system.”

CEQ will also be leading a new interagency Permitting Innovation Center to design and test new software prototypes, like case management systems, that could help implement the plan. 

“We need to drill more, map more, mine more, and build more,” Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum said in a statement about the memo. “The Permitting Technology Action Plan will channel our greatest asset, American innovation and technology, to overhaul our current permitting process and power our nation faster, better, cleaner, and more reliably than ever before.”

The memo actually builds on efforts started during the Biden administration; CEQ issued recommendations that the government modernize the technology for environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act last year. 

“Most of what's new here is rhetoric and connecting it to the new Energy Dominance Council,” said Ryan Hathaway, director of climate and environmental justice at Lawyers for Good Government and longtime NEPA expert who, until earlier this year, worked on environmental justice for CEQ. 

Since the release of the report last year, CEQ has been working on establishing data standards, according to two federal employees who work on permitting. They were granted anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak on the record. 

“This is long overdue,” Eric Beightel, the former director of the Federal Permitting Council, told Nextgov/FCW. He’s now the federal strategy lead at Environmental Science Associates. “Each agency has kind of a siloed system and they don't talk to each other readily, and so it's more difficult to share information.”

“Nobody has a good case management system to manage that flow of information from applicants, between people in the agency, across the agencies,” one of the current federal employees said. “It’s still tons of stuff that’s done by emailing around PDFs or Word documents.”

“This is an unabashedly good thing,” they added. 

Still, many unknowns about implementation remain.

The memo follows an interim final rule issued by the Trump administration in February to claw back all of CEQ’s regulations for NEPA. This followed a 2024 court ruling last year that found that CEQ didn’t have rulemaking authority in the first place.

Because of those rescinded regulations, “there’s a lot of questions,” Beightel said.

Among them are how to build technology while permitting rules are actively changing due to the White House’s deregulation efforts. 

The workforce cuts being made across the government, including to the entire tech team that helped author the CEQ report on technology issued last year, present another potential hurdle. 

Hathaway also cautioned that adding the new Energy Dominance Council into the project with CEQ could actually bog down the process.

“It is good that they are thinking about modernizing the permitting process,” said Jessie Mahr, director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center. “It's just that you need the workforce to do that. You need the funding to do that. You need thoughtfulness about the type of infrastructure that the community needs, and [to] not just push purely oil and gas infrastructure.”

“It depends on the nature of their projects, and when you put this in context of any rollbacks on environmental justice, rollbacks on safe air and drinking water, I'm not confident,” she continued. 

There’s also the fact that, last year, the Supreme Court ended Chevron deference — the longstanding precedent of courts deferring to agencies to interpret ambiguous statute — opening up the question of what role and influence CEQ even has, said Beightel. 

“Is the CEQ going to actually set the standard, and are they without regulations and without any other force here? What is their role to ensure that agencies are complying?” he asked. “And as we think about all of the budget cuts that we're looking at [and] staffing reductions … how exactly are they going to actually implement this?”