This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Public participation is a hallmark of environmental regulation, embedded in every major environmental statute enacted over the past half-century. Yet the Trump administration has systematically sought to curtail public input into the government’s environmental decision-making by shirking decades of precedent and making strained interpretations of longstanding federal law.
Looked at collectively, the pattern of public disenfranchisement is unmistakable.
There are good reasons to speed up the process of writing regulations and issuing permits, but truncating public input has serious costs. It can result in flawed policy that is harder to implement, full of avoidable error, and more vulnerable to being struck down by courts. Input from industry, public interest groups, academics, states, and other agencies gives regulators critical feedback on the potential impact of their proposed rules, helping them to anticipate and avoid unforeseen problems.
Stakeholders possess information, experience, and expertise the government lacks, and they can suggest alternatives to make rules more effective or less costly. By testing agency assumptions and pushing officials to explain their rationale, public comments perform a crucial vetting function. The process also helps to make government more accountable by alerting Congress to potential pitfalls and building a record in the event of judicial review.
In 2025, the administration began stifling public input on the rigorous environmental reviews required by the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act. Under this law, federal agencies must evaluate and disclose the foreseeable environmental impacts of the major projects they build, fund, or approve, from highways to dams to data centers. The point of NEPA disclosure is to avoid unnecessary harm by having agencies look before they leap.
Research shows that when people participate in decisions that affect them, they are more likely to view those decisions as legitimate.
The process can delay projects, but it can also improve them substantially. Studies show that public-comment requirements and stakeholder engagement have repeatedly identified environmental risks that proposing agencies had missed. Often, significant harms can be reduced by taking sensible steps, like rerouting roads around sensitive areas, as was done with Utah’s Legacy Parkway, which was redesigned to largely avoid the Great Salt Lake wetlands. In another example, the Energy Department amended its permitting plan for the Los Alamos National Laboratory to include a comprehensive wildfire-mitigation program after commenters focused attention on the risks of wildfire. These steps significantly reduced impacts when a fire later burned the region.
For this process to work, however, the government must share its draft impact statements with the public, which past Republican and Democratic administrations have done. The Trump administration lifted that obligation, though, and agencies including Interior, Agriculture, Energy, and Transportation announced last year that they will no longer share drafts, making informed public comment practically impossible. Several agencies have also jettisoned the requirement to analyze proposed projects’ indirect and cumulative impacts, like climate change. The agencies made these changes without taking comment first, thus narrowing public involvement without public involvement.
The Trump administration’s efforts to suppress public input are part of a larger backlash in which critics on both the right and left claim that procedural red tape strangles worthy projects. Some of this criticism is fair, but it can be overdrawn. Infrastructure projects falter for many reasons, including high costs, supply chain problems, and opposition from rival developers.
Environmental reviews may be part of the problem, but project timelines would be shorter if agencies followed NEPA rules more carefully from a project’s inception. Congress already limited the scope and length of environmental reviews in 2023, and while more steps are needed to streamline federal permitting, that can be done without jettisoning valuable public consultation.
The permitting reform legislation proposed in the Senate in September would, among other things, drastically limit legal remedies when agencies violate NEPA, barring courts from delaying projects even when the agencies make blatant errors in environmental reviews. If projects proceed no matter what, there is little incentive to engage the public. The changes might speed up projects, but they will also result in many avoidable and unnecessary harms.
An EPA rule change could allow pollution-spewing data center generators to be fast-tracked without public input.
In addition to thwarting comments on new projects, the administration is also marginalizing comments on new regulations. The president has directed agencies to issue rules without taking input first, citing the “good cause” exception to the requirement in the Administrative Procedure Act that agencies publish their proposed rules in the Federal Register, triggering a 30- or 60-day comment period. Decades of legal precedent holds that agencies may finalize rules before taking comment only in exceptional cases where they can justify the urgency—for example, where the rule is necessary to foil terrorism, respond to a public health emergency, or prevent investors from gaming the market in anticipation of a regulatory change.
Finalizing rules more quickly has obvious appeal—the current system is slow and cumbersome and blocks both Republican and Democratic administrations from getting things done. But shunting public input to the end of the process will not solve that problem if rules are less sound, prone to error, and more vulnerable to legal challenge as a result.
In another example of limiting public participation, the EPA is proposing to drop a longstanding federal requirement that state and local air agencies allow the public to comment on air pollution permits for new “minor” sources that emit pollution below a certain threshold. This classification could include data centers that divide up their power generation units to make each source appear smaller. These permits are highly controversial because data centers powered by gas or diesel generators emit substantial air pollution. But the rule change could allow these permits to be fast-tracked without any opportunity for the public to weigh in.
Besides undercutting notice and comment, the administration has stymied public participation in a broad range of environmental decisions by declaring emergencies and citing national security, among other tactics. For example, in March, the Interior Department invoked a never-before-used national security exemption to relieve the oil and natural gas industry of Endangered Species Act requirements in the Gulf of Mexico on the rationale that court rulings enforcing the law might hamper energy production, which the administration linked to national security. In 2025, President Trump granted two-year exemptions from Clean Air Act hazardous air pollution standards to coal plants, coke ovens, and chemical manufacturers, invoking for the first time a national security-based provision in the Clean Air Act.
In another gambit in June, the EPA found a creative way to revoke three waivers that allowed California to set its own clean car standards: by relabeling them as rules and submitting them to Congress for fast-track “disapproval” under the Congressional Review Act. Both the Government Accountability Office and the Senate Parliamentarian objected to this maneuver but were ignored. Normally, waiver rescissions would require public notice and comment. (A district court has blocked EPA from relabeling a second batch of waivers.)
The administration claims the president may order a court to dismiss citizen suits like the one against xAI for any reason.
Separately, the administration is trying to frustrate the citizen suit provisions that Congress included in virtually every major environmental law passed in the 1970s and 1980s. Under these provisions, individuals or groups may file a lawsuit against regulated entities for statutory or regulatory violations (unless the federal government is “diligently prosecuting” the same violations). Citizen suits may also be brought against federal agencies for failing to perform congressionally mandated duties, like setting pollution standards by certain deadlines. This summer, in response to a citizen suit by a coalition of states and nonprofit groups, a federal court held that the EPA had failed to identify areas with unhealthy levels of soot pollution—a first step toward applying stricter control measures—by the legal deadline and ordered it to do so by early next year. (The administration is appealing.)
While it’s true that private enforcement actions can be inconvenient for an administration, there is no doubt that citizen suits have profoundly improved conditions for communities affected by harmful pollution. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have sometimes objected to these suits, but no administration has sought to eliminate them.
Until this summer, that is, when the Trump administration intervened in a citizen suit against xAI for violating the Clean Air Act when generating power for its data centers. The administration claims that the president may demand that a court dismiss a citizen suit for any reason, whether the administration is diligently prosecuting violations or not.
Public participation does take time, but it is valuable to governance. It gives regulated industries, professional associations, public interest groups, experts, other agencies, states, and individuals a chance to be heard. It also helps to build trust in government. As quaint as that claim may sound, it is backed up by evidence. Research shows that when people participate in decisions that affect them, they are more likely to view those decisions as legitimate, even when they don’t go their way. Having a voice matters. There are good reasons to reform our regulatory and permitting system, but not by dispensing with public participation.