During a recent House Natural Resources Committee hearing, Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-NM) delivered a pointed critique of ongoing Republican efforts to reform the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), raising sharp questions about whether the true goal is efficiency—or erosion of environmental oversight.
Speaking just two weeks after Congress passed a sweeping piece of legislation—referred to by Stansbury as “the big ugly bill”—that included major permitting reforms, the congresswoman expressed frustration over the committee’s return to the same policy debates.
“When is enough enough?” Stansbury asked, noting that the recently passed bill has not yet had time to be implemented, let alone evaluated. Having worked on water resources and infrastructure permitting for over two decades—including as a staffer at the Office of Management and Budget and as part of the Obama administration’s permitting council—Stansbury argued that project delays are more often due to incomplete paperwork or lack of agency staff than to NEPA itself.
Her deeper concern, however, lay in the direction of current proposals. “Is the end goal to repeal NEPA?” she asked. “Or is the goal actually to solve problems in the permitting process?”
Stansbury traced the history of NEPA back to its bipartisan origins in 1969, enacted in response to massive federal projects—dams, highways, and mines—that displaced communities, threatened ecosystems, and violated treaties with Indigenous nations. NEPA was designed, she said, to ensure that federal actions considered public input, environmental impacts, and cultural significance before moving forward.
She warned that stripping public review from environmental decision-making—as some recent proposals have suggested—would effectively gut NEPA. “Taking away the public’s ability for judicial review and comment,” Stansbury noted, “is exactly the stuff that they tried to shove into reconciliation and which the parliamentarian ruled was non-germane.” She continued. “And the reason why it got stripped from reconciliation is because they didn’t have 60 votes to pass it in the Senate to begin with because it’s a bad idea.”
Stansbury also pushed back on claims that permitting delays are the chief threat to energy infrastructure, arguing that the real crisis lies in the defunding of federal subsidies. “You know what the number one threat to utilities is right now?” She asked. “It’s the big ugly bill because they cut the federal subsidies for grid modernization. “
In closing, she questioned the sincerity of GOP concerns about infrastructure and energy reliability. She asked, “If you’re concerned about infrastructure, about energy security, about making sure that Americans utility bills are cheap, that we can get energy to market, then why do all of your policies seem to completely point in the opposite direction?”
Her remarks left one message clear: NEPA reform should be about solving problems—not silencing the public.
