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(CN) — Two conservation groups are suing the Trump administration, challenging a U.S. Department of Agriculture rule that strips public comment requirements from most national forest projects.
In a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club accuse the Trump administration of violating environmental law by approving an interim final rule that eliminates the requirement for federal agencies to solicit public comments during project reviews.
“It’s illegal and unjust for Trump to shut out the American public while wrecking our national forests so mining, logging and oil companies can make a quick buck,” Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. “We’re suing to make sure people have a say in what happens on their public lands, as they have for 50 years.”
The conservation groups named the Department of Agriculture, U.S. Forest Service, the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service — along with their administrators — as defendants.
The Department of Agriculture adopted an interim final rule in July that rescinded National Environmental Policy Act regulations for the agency and its sub-agencies. This rule eliminated the requirement that the agencies publish a draft environmental impact statement and the requirement to solicit public input on the statement.
The rule also eliminated the requirement that the Forest Service solicit comments on the scope of issues to be addressed in an environmental assessment or categorical exclusion — the latter of which is how the bulk of the agency’s projects are approved.
At the time, Secretary Brooke Rollins described the rule as a way to modernize NEPA and cut back on delays.
“Overregulation has morphed the NEPA process into bureaucratic overreach on American innovation,” Rollins said in a June statement announcing the rule. The rule came in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order “Unleashing American Energy.”
The result of the interim rule means the bulk of development proposals within the 193 million-acre national forest system won’t be announced until after the projects have been approved. Plus, the conservation groups point out that the very rule at issue was itself approved without chance for public comment — which itself violates the Administrative Procedure Act, the groups claim.
“Federal law gives us the right to know what our government is up to and to speak out when destructive projects threaten our national forests,” Park said. “Cutting the public out means the Trump administration can rubberstamp destructive projects that’ll devastate our forests and harm nearby communities.”
The rule means the public cannot comment on projects led by Wildlife Services, a unit of the Department of Agriculture that manages conflicts with predators, which the groups say kill more than 1 million native animals each year. It also restricts public involvement surrounding the federal government’s responses to major disease outbreaks in factory farms, according to the groups.
“Preserving the public’s right to comment on projects on public lands is not only about democracy in action — it also leads to better outcomes,” Nat Shoaff, senior attorney at Sierra Club, said in a statement.
The groups are asking a federal judge to find that the Trump administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act when it issued the final rule without providing public notice and comment on the rule, nor by explaining the changes to its public participation procedures. The groups also want the court to find the rule violates both the Administrative Procedure Act and NEPA and have it vacated.
“Instead, the Trump administration has sought to cut out the public’s voice as it fast tracks logging, mining, oil and gas drilling, and other industrial projects for large corporations,” Shoaff said. “This not only undercuts clean energy development — and threatens some of our most treasured places — it’s against the law.”
The Department of Agriculture declined to comment.
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