The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to speed up permitting and boost transparency within its comment letter process, the Daily Caller News Foundation first learned.
The EPA is unveiling a new memorandum on Wednesday aiming to promote “common sense, transparency, and clarity” when the agency comments on other agencies’ Environmental Impact Statements (EISs) under Section 309 of the Clean Air Act (CAA) and Section 102(2)(C) of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Under CAA Section 309, the EPA reviews all draft EISs prepared by other federal agencies. The EPA is also required to make these reviews publicly available, and the agency completes this requirement by posting its EIS comment letters in the EIS database.
“Previous administrations have sometimes misused this process, deploying unhelpful and expansive comment letters that went well beyond EPA’s statutory authorities to stymie unfavored projects,” which sometimes resulted in “confusion and costly delays,” according to an EPA news release first obtained by the DCNF.
The EPA also claims in its press release that comment letters sent during former President Joe Biden’s term sometimes promoted “far-left objectives that had nothing to do with EPA’s statutory responsibilities,” such as “advancing ‘environmental justice,’ ‘net-zero’ climate policies, and remedies for ‘historical injustices.’”
Biden’s EPA once sent a sixteen-page comment letter to the Interior Department “regarding a coal mine project critical to domestic energy supply, opining about climate change, noise, and the widely discredited concept of the social cost of greenhouse gases,” according to the EPA.
“EPA’s environmental expertise is most valuable when it is clear, consistent, and delivered early in the process,” EPA Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi told the DCNF in a statement. “This memo helps EPA get actionable feedback to other federal agencies and project sponsors when it matters most—without wasting taxpayer resources analyzing topics that are outside of EPA’s authority—so that projects can move forward more quickly and with more clear and concise environmental impact statements.”
EPA memo by irelandowens.dcnf
The key objective of EPA’s CAA Section 309 review is to “promote timely and informed decision-making by federal agencies by leveraging EPA’s environmental expertise to help other federal agencies identify and consider potential human health or environmental impacts from proposed projects,” per the EPA’s new memorandum.
“Such comments regarding impacts should fully align with those duties and responsibilities imposed by the environmental statutes from which EPA’s expertise and authority are derived,” the memo says.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been attempting to expedite federal permitting. In May 2025, the Trump administration announced a permitting technology “action plan” aiming to “modernize Federal environmental review and permitting processes for infrastructure projects involving roads, bridges, mines, factories, power plants and more.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a July 15, 2025 X post that the administration wants to “ensure companies investing BILLIONS into the US can do so with a permitting process that takes less time, costs less money, and comes with more certainty.”
(DCNF)