Trump Orders Agencies to Digitize and Accelerate Infrastructure Permitting
White House called it the most sweeping reform of NEPA in its 50-year history.
Jericho Casper
WASHINGTON, April 17, 2025 – President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued a presidential memorandum directing federal agencies to overhaul how they handle environmental permitting, signaling an aggressive shift toward using modern technology to accelerate reviews for major infrastructure projects.
“The government does not properly leverage technology to effectively and efficiently evaluate environmental permits, causing significant delay to important infrastructure projects that impact our economic well-being,” the directive from Trump stated.
“This will now change. My administration will apply modern technologies to longstanding problems to deliver outstanding results at 21st-century speeds,” Trump wrote.
The directive places the Council of Environmental Quality at the helm of fast-tracking a digital overhaul, tasking CEQ, in consultation with the National Energy Dominance Council and relevant permitting agencies, with issuing a Permitting Technology Action Plan within 45 days.
That plan must lay out how federal agencies will: eliminate paper-based application and review processes; prioritize automation, shared analysis, and data exchange between agencies to accelerate permitting timelines; and, create deadlines and mandates that could reshape interagency cooperation and speed up reviews.
Additionally, a Permitting Innovation Center will be established within CEQ within 15 days to prototype and test software tools (e.g., tracking portals, automation features) to facilitate these reforms. Key agencies must adopt the standards within 90 days of the CEQ's plan.
At a recent Broadband Breakfast event, nuclear energy and digital infrastructure leaders described a federal permitting system “riddled with choke points,” including staffing shortages in part due to federal layoffs, overlapping reviews across agencies, and siting conflicts. They said these delays were affecting a wide range of critical infrastructure projects – from broadband and digital infrastructure to clean energy developments, electric transmission lines, data centers, semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and more.
The Trump administration’s framed the directive as “the greatest and fastest permitting reform ever to take place in the decades-long history of NEPA,” or the National Environmental Policy Act, a bedrock environmental law, which broadband deployments funded by the $42.45 billion Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment program must undergo.
The new directive builds on Trump’s Day One Executive Order Unleashing American Energy, which directed agencies to streamline the environmental review process. In response, the CEQ issued an interim final rule rescinding its own NEPA regulations, a move that shifts CEQ into a consulting role and creates a “clear path for agencies to expeditiously reform their own NEPA procedures and allow America to build again,” the memo stated.
The move comes amid renewed attention from Congress. At a February hearing of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, lawmakers from both parties acknowledged that permitting deadlocks were threatening the country’s infrastructure ambitions — but clashed over how to fix the problem.
Republicans like Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., called for expanded categorical exclusions and tighter timelines to prevent endless reviews. Democrats like Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., agreed that permitting delays are costly but warned that gutting NEPA would undercut environmental protections and public accountability.
According to CEQ, lawsuits over NEPA approvals delay projects by an average of 4.5 years, with thousands of legal challenges filed annually. One study found that 24% of transmission projects that cleared environmental review still faced litigation. While 88% of these lawsuits ultimately fail, the legal uncertainty alone can stall projects for years.
In 2020, the Trump White House estimated that permitting delays could cost the U.S. economy up to $3.7 trillion in lost GDP by 2025, with projects often facing delays of five to ten years due to duplicative reviews and litigation.
