Earlier this year, the Trump administration gave the DOGE treatment to federal environmental review. In February, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) unilaterally rescinded longstanding regulations and leveraged legally dubious emergencies to clear projects in months—a process that would ordinarily take years.

The administration’s actions here constitute some of the most aggressive attempts to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in the law’s 55-year history. But a future president can easily undo them. If the United States wants to get back to building things again, we need more than just temporary solutions. We need a hard reboot of NEPA, restoring it to its original purposes: deliberative project planning and public transparency.

Trump’s critics are probably right that his recent tests of the law are risky and prone to failure. A lack of CEQ regulations pushes NEPA implementation to the agencies. That means a web of new emergency rulemakings, flimsy CEQ guidance, and approaches to project approval, inviting scrutiny and lawsuits.

Yet the administration prefers to walk into these legal walls rather than face the certainty of delayed project deployment under NEPA. Indeed, NEPA was a legal and policy morass long before the administration started end-running it. As our research has shown, even projects that have gone through full environmental review often spend years in litigation, generally yielding no meaningful changes to the projects themselves and thus no additional environmental protection.

We need to restore NEPA to its function before litigation caused it to metastasize and cripple development. This would free agencies to start writing clearly bounded reviews with environmental considerations in mind, but without having to worry about being second-guessed by judges.

Fortunately, in recent years, environmental permitting reform has emerged as one of the few areas of bipartisanship and legislative entrepreneurialism. This Congress has witnessed the introduction of the ePermit Act, which would modernize digital NEPA documentation; the SPEED Act, which would make NEPA review effectively optional; and the Fix Our Forests Act, which would streamline NEPA procedures for wildfire management projects. Legislators hope that a permitting deal will come together in the next few months that will include some or all of these ideas, as well as changes to the Clean Water Act and the National Historic Preservation Act.

But the odds remain long, and execution matters. To seize the moment, we need to begin stabilizing NEPA. Three principles should guide our efforts.

First, we need to provide certainty to agencies, project developers, and the public. Projects that serve Americans, like highways and transmission lines, need a clear path to completion.

To get there, we need to address obstructive litigation, a root cause of NEPA delay and dysfunction. Lawmakers should limit the grounds and time horizons for lawsuits, as well as moving all litigation to one authoritative review body instead of to hundreds of federal judges in district and appellate courts who currently oversee cases.

Second, we need to ensure that the public has a voice but not a veto. NEPA reforms should ensure that agencies take public views into consideration. Doing so will reduce the chance that undiscovered opposition will move to local and state venues to stop projects.

Finally, we need to update the federal government’s decrepit systems for managing and communicating about data. Agencies should have access to artificial intelligence, government-wide documentation platforms, and other modern digital tools for streamlining regulatory procedures.

After President Nixon signed NEPA into law in 1970, he warned, “No matter how pressing the problem, to overorganize, to overstaff, or to compound the levels of review and advice seldom brings earlier or better results.” Unfortunately, that is exactly what happened to this law. It’s time to start over.

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