Interior’s NEPA ‘Streamlining’: When the Rules Become a Handbook, the Public Becomes a Footnote

I keep thinking about the smell of old paper in a county courthouse, that blend of dust, toner, and quiet menace. Not nostalgia. A reminder that process lives in stapled packets and public records. Process is not poetry. It is the thing that stops a powerful official from saying, with a straight face, trust me, we checked.

On February 23, 2026, the Department of the Interior announced a final overhaul of how it runs National Environmental Policy Act reviews across public lands. The headline is speed. The fine print is power. And the fine print is where the republic goes to take a nap.

What Interior finalized

Interior says it has finalized sweeping reforms to its NEPA procedures, rescinding more than 80% of its prior NEPA regulations and moving most of the procedural machinery into a streamlined Departmental NEPA Handbook of Implementing Procedures. The Department says the remaining regulations focus on when and how NEPA applies and which process to use, while the handbook carries the bulk of the how-to. Implementation is immediate.

NEPA is the law that forces federal agencies to look before they leap: analyze impacts, consider alternatives, and disclose what they learn before committing the government to a course of action. It does not ban projects. It makes government explain itself in public, on the record, with enough detail that a citizen, a county commissioner, a tribe, or a judge can follow the logic.

Interior frames this as restoring NEPA to a procedural statute and cutting delay for projects including energy development, critical minerals, wildfire mitigation, and water projects. This is also happening in the larger post-CEQ world, where the White House Council on Environmental Quality has rescinded its government-wide NEPA regulations and agencies have been rebuilding their own systems with a mix of regulations and guidance.

The Orwell check: “Streamlining” by relocating the rules

My Orwell check is simple: what language makes control sound like common sense? “Streamlining” is what you call it when you remove speed bumps. Sometimes the bumps were nonsense. Sometimes they were the only thing keeping the school bus off the cement truck.

Interior insists environmental review remains in full effect. Staff will still do analysis. The bigger question is where the public sits when that analysis is scoped, edited, and boxed into whatever deadline politics demands. A regulation is a rule with teeth. A handbook is guidance with manners. Shifting the center of gravity from binding regulation to guidance can make the process more flexible for the agency and more slippery for everyone else.

The Paine test and the liberty ledger

The Paine test asks: does this expand liberty or concentrate power? Project sponsors gain speed and predictability. Agencies gain discretion. That can be fine, right up to the moment discretion becomes: you will know what we decided when the bulldozers arrive.

NEPA liberty is concrete: the freedom to see what the government plans to do to your watershed, grazing allotment, hunting ground, sacred site, air, quiet, access road, or drinking water source, and to comment while the decision is still alive. Interior emphasizes that state and local governments retain a role as required by NEPA itself, and that the Department will coordinate with tribes and other partners. Good. But coordination is not the same thing as enforceable opportunity.

The tradeoff: Faster is not free, so demand receipts

• Guardrail one: Treat handbook changes like they matter. Publish a change log, date every revision, and keep prior versions accessible.
• Guardrail two: Preserve meaningful public windows. Commit in writing to minimum comment periods for major actions unless there is a true emergency, and define “emergency” as something other than a developer’s timeline.
• Guardrail three: Independent oversight. Inspectors general, congressional committees, and the Government Accountability Office should audit a sample of expedited reviews to answer the only real question: faster because smarter, or faster because looking away?

Courts will do what courts do: cross-examine the record. If Interior wants reviews that are efficient and durable, the best path to durability is not less sunlight. It is better sunlight.

Public lands belong to the public, including the people who voted for this administration and the people who did not. So here is the question: if the rules move from regulations into a handbook, what concrete promise will Interior make so the public does not get moved out of the process too?