Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins says the agency’s new rules on carrying out the National Environmental Policy Act will cut red tape. (Courtesy of USDA)

The USDA will adopt new regulations on evaluating the environmental effects of grazing and other agency-approved activities, saying the rules will follow directions from President Trump and the U.S. Supreme Court.

The regulations will guide the agency’s execution of the National Environmental Policy Act. The rules will be published soon and will take effect immediately, the agency said June 30.

The regulations are intended to eliminate unnecessarily long and cumbersome environmental reviews, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement.

“We have been hamstrung by overly burdensome regulations for decades,” she said. “Overreguation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation.”

NEPA, signed by President Richard Nixon in 1970, requires federal agencies to consider the environmental consequences of their actions, such as funding farmland conservation or permitting logging or grazing on federal lands.

NEPA applies to more than 100,000 federal actions a year and routinely provides the basis for allegations the government has failed to do an adequate environmental review.

To prepare for lawsuits, agencies compile massively long environmental reports that take years to write to address every possible objection to a project.

In the upcoming 185-page rule, the USDA said it will exclude more projects from environmental reviews, and set page and time limits on reports.

For example, the agency will stop requiring environmental reviews for rangeland improvements on allotments with grazing management plans. The assessments duplicate previous NEPA reviews that authorized grazing on the allotment, according to the agency.

The Natural Resources Conservation Service will stop doing environmental assessments on dam repairs that don’t change the dam’s construction footprint. NRCS analyzed 51 environmental assessments on dam repairs and concluded 34 were unnecessary.

For projects that are reviewed, environmental assessments will be limited to 75 pages, not including citations and appendixes, and must be done in one year.

Environmental impact statements will be held to 150 pages and done in two years. The page limit will be raised to 300 pages for projects if “extraordinarily complex.”

The USDA said it’s taking guidance from Trump and the Supreme Court. Trump issued an executive order Jan. 20 directing the USDA and other agencies to issue permits quicker.

The Supreme Court ruled in May that 55 years of court decisions have made NEPA a roadblock Congress didn’t intend. “The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in the controlling opinion.

At issue was whether a federal agency adequately reviewed the environmental consequences of a new railway in Utah to transport crude oil. A lower court ruled the agency should have studied whether the rail line will cause more drilling and refining by companies not involved in building the rail line.

The Supreme Court told judges to give agencies considerable deference in deciding what to put in environmental reports. Also, the agency only had to study the proposed rail line, not speculate about what other companies will do if it’s built, the court ruled.