Republican leaders in the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are calling on President Joe Biden’s Administration to stop inserting what they call “regulatory roadblocks.”
Sam Graves (R-MO), the committee’s ranking member, and other committee Republicans wrote in a letter to the President’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps), that the new regulatory actions being proposed would kill infrastructure projects.
“Although the Administration is handing out an unprecedented amount of money for infrastructure, eliminating good regulatory reforms and adding new barriers to builders, job creators, and local communities will make it much harder to build needed infrastructure, move goods and people more efficiently, and emerge from this ongoing supply chain crisis,” Graves said. “Actions like these will result in pushing more paper and increased compliance costs rather than putting shovels in the ground.”
The letter to CEQ responds to the administration’s proposal to roll back recently implemented updates to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
“NEPA-related delays in infrastructure projects can lead to a tremendous loss of investment and extinguish the labor force when jobs are put on hold or never materialize,” the letter said. “Such significant and persistent problems represented a big reason why national labor and commerce groups strongly supported updating and modernizing NEPA last year…. Accordingly, we strongly urge CEQ to abandon efforts to change the existing NEPA rule through this harmful, unreasonable, and misguided proposed rule.”
Also signing the letter were U.S. Reps. Rick Crawford (R-AR), Bob Gibbs (R-OH), Daniel Webster (R-FL), Rodney Davis (R-IL), Garret Graves (R-LA), and David Rouzer (R-NC).
Separately, Graves and Rouzer sent a letter to the heads of the EPA and the Corps following reports that the Corps has stopped issuing Clean Water Act permits after a District Court suspended the use of the EPA’s Navigable Water Protection Rule issued under the previous administration.
“This incredibly long suspension of the program would delay infrastructure project development in this country for years, as project proponents rely on certainty in these permitting programs to plan and invest in critical infrastructure…,” said Graves and Rouzer in their letter. “We urge EPA and the Corps to provide a remedy to this unacceptable regulatory gridlock and immediately implement all Section 404 permitting programs to ensure we can continue to advance infrastructure projects across the nation.”