The Trump administration sparked controversy in January when it announced plans to alter the way environmental reviews are conducted for new building projects. Much of the reaction has focused on the move as a straightforward rollback of environmental protections, but the truth is more complicated. The federal government’s current environmental review practices do need serious reform, but if the reforms are not carefully designed, they could prove pointless.

At issue is the National Environmental Policy Act. Enacted 50 years ago as part of the first major wave of environmental legislation, the law was intended to force federal agencies to minimize the environmental harms of their own infrastructure projects (such as highway construction) and take these harms into account in federal land management and permitting decisions. To ensure that federal agencies did not simply give lip service to these considerations, the law also included several “action-forcing” provisions requiring agencies to follow certain procedures, produce written environmental impact statements and justifications of their decisions, and allow private parties the ability to sue if they felt the agency’s analyses were incomplete or procedurally flawed. If courts ultimately agreed, the suing parties could recover their attorney’s fees.