PORTLAND, Ore. — The arrival of a new presidential administration in 2025 prompted significant changes to the federal environmental review process for the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project, including abandoning or downplaying much of the review’s climate change and environmental justice impact analysis, according to a final version of the project’s Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement released last week.

The Environmental Impact Statement is the culmination of the federal review process for infrastructure megaprojects, providing a comprehensive analysis of how a project will affect the surrounding environment and community. It is typically produced in conjunction with agencies such as the Federal Highway Administration, and its release is one of the last steps for a project to win final federal approval.

The final IBR document comes in at 944 pages, excluding appendices, making it 16 pages shorter than the draft version released in 2024. The final version is fairly similar to the draft, with some sections expanded and most largely unchanged — but while the climate change and environmental justice chapters totaled over 70 pages in the draft, the final version reduces them to a single paragraph each.

Those paragraphs explain that a series of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in January 2025 and a subsequent memo from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy directed the federal government to stop considering greenhouse gas emissions and climate analysis in the federal review process.

“Any purported GHG emissions or climate change impacts, including comments on GHG emissions or climate change, will not be considered in the federal decision. Accordingly, no GHG emissions or climate change analyses are included in this Final SEIS,” the report states, in part.

Almost identical paragraphs are inserted into the summary section near the top of the document, as well as similar language explaining the removal of analyses that looked at “indirect effects” of the project.

Not all of the information from those sections is completely missing from the final version; for example, the Environmental Justice section includes information on the total number of residential and business displacements by the project, and that information was also included in other sections that remain in the final version. However, more detailed information such as the impact of the project on specific minority populations was omitted.

Some of the replacement paragraphs reference a new document called the State Environmental Policy Addendum, which is intended to satisfy the requirements for climate change, greenhouse gas emissions and environmental justice analyses under Washington and Oregon state law — though it adds that the Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transportation Administration “were not involved in the development of the SEPA Addendum” and “did not consider the document in the Final SEIS.”

The changes also heavily impacted the project’s responses to public feedback. The federal environmental review process includes the release of a draft version of the Environmental Impact Statement for public feedback, and the final version must incorporate and respond to each individual comment received. 

IBR’s draft version was released in 2024 and the final version was originally expected to follow the next year, but was heavily delayed — a setback that program leaders attributed in part to an unexpectedly large number of public comments, stressing that both the project team and the federal agencies needed to review and respond to each of the roughly 3,600 comments.

The comments and responses are collected in a pair of supplemental documents titled Appendix S, collectively totaling more than 8,000 pages. The first of the two documents begins with a series of “Standard Responses” intended to apply to comments that pertained to single and similar topics. But the section has no responses on climate change or environmental justice, despite the document also stating that IBR received more than 400 comments about those two topics.

The rest of the document, along with the entirely of the second document, is a list of detailed responses to individual comments that were either about unique topics or addressed more than one topic. However, whenever any portion of a comment brings up climate or environmental justice issues, the corresponding portion of the response simply features a paragraph about rule changes under the Trump administration, with almost identical wording to the paragraphs in the main document summary. 

All told, variations of that paragraph appear nearly 500 times across the two Appendix S documents, in some cases repeating several times within the same response to an individual comment.

KGW has reached out to IBR for comment about the removal of the climate analyses and will update this story if we hear back.