Tear Down this Paper Wall
To unlock American industrial capacity, we must end NEPA and eliminate its bureaucratic labyrinth.
By Christopher Koopman, CEO of the Abundance Institute, and Josh T. Smith, energy policy lead at the Abundance Institute
America stands at the threshold of a potential new golden age of innovation and industry. Our technological capabilities have never been greater, our entrepreneurial spirit remains unmatched, and there is growing bipartisan recognition that we must rebuild American productive capacity. What stands in our way is not lack of vision or resources. The biggest impediment to the future is the regulatory apparatus that makes building impossible in America today.
At the center of this paralysis stands the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), perhaps the single greatest procedural barrier to American progress since it was signed in 1970. NEPA marks the dividing line between an America that built with confidence and an America that regulates itself into inaction. If we’re serious about restoring American technological leadership and industrial renewal, eliminating NEPA is the keystone reform that would unlock our capacity to build again.
Prior to NEPA’s passage, America built things with breathtaking speed and ambition. In 1931, we completed the Empire State Building in 410 days from groundbreaking to opening. In 1942, we constructed the 1,700-mile Alaska Highway in under eight months. In 1943, we finished the Pentagon after 491 days. Plans to have workers at their desks at the nation’s military command within six months of groundbreaking were delayed by only a single month.
But now? The average environmental impact statement, the most stringent review required for federal projects under the law, takes nearly four years on average. Only one in three is completed in two years or less. As these drag on, the projects exist only on paper–waiting in limbo to break ground.
NEPA represents the ultimate triumph of paperwork over progress. NEPA’s original text may have been just a few pages, but its main function today is to generate environmental impact statements running to thousands of pages, taking years to complete and costing millions of dollars. This happened one lawsuit at a time in a process that invited them.
Little has improved in the nearly three decades since President Clinton’s Council on Environmental Quality concluded that NEPA reviews had devolved into “producing a document to no specific end.” Instead, things have gotten much worse.
These lawsuits compounded over time. Activists bent on slowing down development were happy to drive courts towards examining finer and finer points of procedural minutiae. The system’s logic is startlingly clear and perverse. NEPA imposes no substantive environmental standards. Even an environmentally catastrophic process can move forward so long as the paperwork catalogues the damage. Builders try to imagine every possible and unlikely problem to ward off litigation. Because the standard is that everything must be in cataloged, the other team finds anything at all for grounds to sue.
The consequences to our productivity have been considerable. In 2011, President Obama accidentally diagnosed this reality when he admitted that in American industry “’shovel-ready’ was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” This wasn’t a temporary circumstance but a permanent feature of our NEPA-constrained system.
It isn’t as if building has become technically impossible. Look across the Pacific. China has built 23,500 miles of high-speed rail in the time we’ve spent debating whether to build a single line between Los Angeles and San Francisco. In 2024, China added 429 GW of new power generation. We almost added 49 GW. While America deliberates, our competitors decisively build.
This transformation from a nation of builders to a nation of paperwork pushers is measurable and stark. Patrick Collison, the Stripe co-founder, maintains a database of “Fast” accomplishments across history. The American entries virtually end around 1970, precisely when NEPA became law.
And consider the revealing fact that when legislators truly want something built, their first instinct is often to exempt new efforts from NEPA. Infrastructure bills, critical industries like semiconductor manufacturing, and military construction regularly receive NEPA carve-outs.
Cases where the policy has been side-stepped reveal how quickly public projects can move. After a fire on the I-95 highway in Pennsylvania wiped out a highly trafficked bridge, experts suggested it would take months to repair the damage. But by leveraging a NEPA exemption and waiving similar state policies, Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro announced reopening to traffic a mere 12 days later. The Pennsylvania Transportation Secretary reportedly stayed at the site to promptly and personally approve repairs.
This tacit admission that NEPA is incompatible with actually building things should be a wake-up call.
And the cruel irony is that NEPA has become profoundly anti-environmental in practice. Solar farms languish for years in review. Transmission lines needed to enter a new age of energy abundance face endless delays. Nuclear plants have become nearly impossible to build. Ironically, even basic forest management is often neglected. Agency staff do paperwork. They aren’t empowered to protect the environment.
NEPA’s cardinal sin is creating an administrative state with the ability to interrupt every undertaking in America. Although the text of the law states that it should apply to “major” actions, NEPA now applies to every federal action, as noted by the economist Eli Dourado. Courts have interpreted NEPA to apply incredibly broadly—actions involving even de minimis public funds or touching public lands fall within its crosshairs.
States weren’t exempt as NEPA’s corrosive influence spread like a virus. They created mini-NEPAs, with California’s CEQA perhaps the most notorious. The result: Even modest housing projects in states from coast to coast face years of review and litigation. Officials across government have become paralyzed by fear of lawsuits, choosing inaction over potentially controversial approvals.
But most insidiously, NEPA has normalized government failure. When four-year permitting timelines are standard, when most energy projects are abandoned before being connected to the grid, and when routine infrastructure maintenance requires years of review, failure becomes the baseline expectation. The exceptional becomes ordinary.
This normalization of failure corrodes public faith in our institutions. Americans increasingly believe the government cannot accomplish significant projects because, under NEPA, it largely cannot. The 2024 Financial Times report finding that two out of five Inflation Reduction Act projects were already caught in permitting delays should shock all into swift action. The lack of response suggests that most accept this bureaucratic morass as inevitable.
To reclaim American technological leadership and restore our industrial might, we must first confront this fundamental impediment to progress. No vision of American renewal can succeed without addressing the regulatory paralysis that NEPA has institutionalized. Building a golden age of American innovation requires first clearing the regulatory underbrush that has choked our capacity to build.
An American Industrial Age
As both the political Left and Right seek to unleash domestic industry and our productive potential, NEPA could strangle such efforts in the crib. We need a system that can deploy the fruits of American innovation at scale. The current NEPA regime makes this impossible, stifling both environmental progress and technological advancement.
But we’re starting to see small signs of progress. In its first 100 days, President Trump’s administration has taken swift executive action on regulatory reform. While these moves represent important developments, executive orders remain vulnerable to equally swift reversal by future administrations. If America is serious about recapturing the spirit that built wonders, then the long-term solution is for Congress to act. The solution to what ails America’s productive potential isn’t to tinker at the margins of a fundamentally broken system. The solution is simple: eliminate NEPA.
Repealing NEPA entirely is the most far-reaching option. A relatively straightforward, “NEPA Repeal Act of 2025” bill would delete NEPA from the US code and terminate regulations and guidance related to the process. In strictly legislative terms, the text could effectively fit on one page.
Unfortunately, that is where simplicity stops. This approach faces steep odds in the Senate. Republicans with 53 members would need a party-line vote and to win seven Democrats to their cause to get the required supermajority of 60 votes to prevent a filibuster. Yet complete repeal would catalyze a cascade of positive changes throughout our regulatory system. It would signal that America is serious about building again.
If full repeal proves politically unattainable, Congress should pursue four substantial reforms:
Restrict Litigation Access: Limit injunctive relief to cases brought promptly by directly affected parties where imminent environmental harm is demonstrable and no other remedy exists. Environmental lawsuits should require substantive standing, not procedural technicalities. Changes like this would blunt the weaponization of NEPA by advocacy groups and grant would-be builders confidence that their plans could actually materialize.
Shorten Time Horizons: Reduce the statute of limitations from six years to 180 days, forcing opponents to raise objections quickly rather than strategically delaying projects through last-minute litigation.
Focus on Proximate Effects: Require agencies to consider only direct, proximate, and reasonably foreseeable effects of federal actions, not speculative or remote possibilities that turn environmental reviews into exercises in science fiction. Like restricting litigation access, this shrinks the target for the weaponization of NEPA against builders. Today, reviews require predictions about hypotheticals that are unending and unanswerable.
Expand Categorical Exclusions: Exempt routine actions and smaller projects from review, focusing limited resources on truly significant undertakings.
Congress has already recognized NEPA’s deficiencies in limited ways. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 made modest improvements to NEPA processes, and some have pointed to a small increase in projects completed within two years. Yet the Council on Environmental Quality’s January 2025 report reveals that nearly two-thirds of projects still face significant delays. These incremental improvements only underscore how far we have to go. Such a reality underscores the impossibility of delivering the productivity that America demands by editing NEPA at the margins.
Those who claim repeal would lead to environmental catastrophe ignore a basic reality: NEPA coexists with dozens of substantive environmental laws and regulations that would remain in place. The Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Endangered Species Act would continue to protect our environmental commons. NEPA’s procedural maze adds enormous costs without providing corresponding environmental benefits. Given this, it’s worth considering stricter environmental standards as part of the political horse trading in Congress.
These reforms represent the minimum acceptable change. Anything less perpetuates a system designed to fail. Still, the cleanest, most effective solution remains complete repeal.
Overcoming Activist Obstacles
While the process may be theoretically straightforward, the battle over NEPA will not be easily won. Entrenched interests have grown dependent on the status quo’s procedural labyrinth. Lawfare has become a profitable industry for activist groups and their attorneys. Environmental organizations have built fundraising models around NEPA litigation, preferring to block all development rather than facilitate cleaner alternatives. Bureaucracies have expanded to manage the paperwork. These constituencies will fight fiercely to preserve their influence.
That makes it even more imperative for Congress to act quickly, amid the energy of a new administration committed to industrial revival—especially because there are growing cracks in NEPA’s defensive perimeter. Pragmatic voices on both sides recognize NEPA’s fundamental failure. Democratic commentators increasingly acknowledge that the Left’s political goals are impossible without faster permitting for renewable projects. Republican industrial policy advocates understand that reshoring manufacturing requires streamlined approvals for new facilities. The status quo serves neither vision of America’s future.
A challenge in exploiting the unique timing of an executive willing to consider bold action and a nascent bipartisan agreement that NEPA is a core problem is that the Right has its own contingent of NEPA users. Some conservatives have opportunistically weaponized NEPA against projects they dislike. For example, the halting of the Empire Wind offshore project and targeting other projects in Virginia.
These internal divisions could squander the opportunity. The guiding principle should be simple: atoms, not paperwork. Real infrastructure serves Americans better than environmental impact statements gathering dust. Actual factories create more prosperity than regulatory compliance officers. Physical transmission lines carry more electricity than hypothetical grid upgrades perpetually under review.
Imagine an America where projects move at the speed of permits measured in days, not decades. Where energy infrastructure, such as pipelines or transmission lines, can be built quickly to meet our needs. Where housing can be constructed to meet demand. Where transit systems can expand without delay. Where industrial facilities can be approved before the technology they’re built to produce becomes obsolete.
This is precisely how America operated before 1970. We can choose this future if we have the courage to strike directly at the root of it by eliminating NEPA.
The path forward should be clear: delete NEPA now. Let America build again.