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Trump To Use COVID-19 As Cover To Ram Through Energy, Infrastructure Projects
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to use their emergency authorities to accelerate energy, highway and other infrastructure projects, a move that the administration says will help jump-start an economy ravaged by the COVID-19 pandemic, HuffPost has confirmed.
The order will “expedite construction of highways and other projects designed for environmental, energy, transportation, natural resource, and other uses” and further the administration’s efforts “to reform burdensome and outdated bureaucratic processes that prevent projects from moving forward,” a senior administration official said in an email. It also instructs the departments of Interior, Agriculture and Defense to speed up energy and other projects on federal lands.
Agencies will have the authority to waive environmental reviews normally required under the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, according to The Washington Post, which broke the story Thursday.
Also on Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a new rule to overhaul how cost-benefit analyses factor into Clean Air Act regulations, ultimately limiting the agency’s ability to put in place stricter rules to safeguard clean air and fight climate change. While EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement that the rule will “improve the transparency,” the Union of Concerned Scientists called it “a backdoor way to justify rollbacks of public health and environmental protections.”
The two actions further the administration’s pro-industry agenda, which has targeted numerous environmental regulations in order to boost fossil fuel production and other development.
Last year, the Interior Department finalized a rollback of the Endangered Species Act, one of America’s most important laws for protecting imperiled animals and plants, making it easier to remove recovered species from the protected list and paving the way...
