President Donald Trump on Tuesday rolled out yet another executive order aimed at speeding up approvals for infrastructure projects — the latest in a string of efforts to call attention to his languishing proposal for a $1 trillion initiative to rebuild the nation's roads, tunnels and bridges.
Tuesday’s order aims to shrink the environmental permitting process to as little as two years, down from an average of seven years for "complex" highway projects, and ensure that just one federal agency serves as the point of contact for each project's paperwork. It also nixes an Obama-era flood standard that would have required federally funded projects to be built to withstand the stronger storms projected to occur as the planet warms.
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"My administration is working every day to deliver the world-class infrastructure that our people deserve and, frankly, that our country deserves," the president said in the lobby of Trump Tower. He was flanked by Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
The executive order is another drip in the trickle of actions Trump has taken to highlight his interest in bolstering the nation's infrastructure, relying on existing authorities granted by Congress in its 2015 surface transportation law. He made a similar announcement in June at DOT headquarters, when he dropped thick binders full of permit paperwork on stage and vowed to end the “painfully slow, costly and time-consuming" review process.
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But Tuesday’s announcement did little to flesh out exactly how his administration plans to boost public and private investment in those projects. The most detail the White House has provided to date was a six-page fact sheet released with little fanfare along with Trump’s fiscal 2018 budget proposal in May.
While infrastructure boosters have largely cheered the administration's posture on speeding up permit approvals, they're also eager to see the president put some substance into a policy priority that they hope can notch a rare bipartisan win for Trump's first year in the West Wing.
Even so, administration officials and their allies said Trump’s latest order is a significant step toward smoothing out what they've decried as a long, confusing federal permitting process that allows a multitude of agencies to approve or reject projects.
“We’re pleased that the Trump administration is continuing its effort to slice through burdensome, duplicative processes across government," said Christine Harbin, Americans for Prosperity's vice president of external affairs, in a statement. "Particularly in the federal infrastructure space, permitting holdups can add years to projects that would otherwise be improving our infrastructure and contributing to our economy."
Just days into his presidency, Trump signed an executive order directing federal officials to expedite environmental reviews for infrastructure projects deemed "high priority." And he visited DOT headquarters in June at the end of the White House's "infrastructure week" to announce he was standing up a council previously created by Congress to guide project sponsors through the federal permitting process. He also said in June that he would revamp an Obama-era online "dashboard" to allow the public to track projects and see when deadlines are blown.
"The over-regulated permitting process is a massive, self-inflicted wound on our country. It's disgraceful," Trump said Tuesday.
But Trump is just the most recent president eager to hasten the federal permit process. President Barack Obama signed orders of his own to speed up those environmental review proceedings, and President George W. Bush before him formed a task force with the goal of "modernizing" the National Environmental Policy Act, the 1970 law that requires federal agencies to evaluate the environmental impacts of proposals affecting anything from construction to land management before endorsing them.
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Environmental groups blasted the administration's latest permitting order, calling it a giveaway to big business that skirts long-standing safeguards for communities.
"Arbitrary decisions and artificial deadlines can lead to costly mistakes we’ll all pay for down the line," said Rhea Suh, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Trump's news conference following his meeting with administration officials on infrastructure quickly devolved into a back-and-forth with reporters about the statements he'd made after last weekend's deadly protests in Charlottesville, Va.
Before he left the lobby, though, he maintained that he still expects Democrats "will go along with" an infrastructure bill that his administration hopes lawmakers will consider later this year.
