NEPA Reforms Will Allow Farmers To Get Loans Faster

By Katherine Zehnder
Carolina Journal

The US Department of Agriculture will soon roll out its fall regulatory agenda, but reforming the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) will likely have the most significant impact on farmers, Deputy Secretary Stephen Vaden told the Carolina Journal.

“The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires all Federal agencies to consider the effects of their projects and programs on the environment. The Farm Service Agency complies with NEPA by completing an environmental review prior to approving a project or program. The type of review that is completed depends on the size of the project or program,” according to the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA) webpage.

CJ recently had the opportunity to ask Vaden what regulatory reforms that the USDA is looking at, and while Vaden indicated that he did not want to reveal too much ahead of the fall regulatory agenda, he said that the USDA would be “getting out of their way (farmers)” and highlighted NEPA reforms as one of the key reforms being examined be the USDA.

“There can be dozens of pages of environmental review that apply to a single loan, to a single farmer, that has been seen to be legally required,” said Vaden. “You can imagine, with as many loans as USDA issues on an annual basis, how many pages of analysis that adds up to, and even worse for farmers like those involved in livestock here in North Carolina, it then has given rise to lawsuits in federal court whereby environmental groups have sought to stop loans to individual animal agricultural operations.”

When conducting environmental reviews of its projects and programs, FSA evaluates their impacts on a broad range of natural resources, as well as on areas of special concern, including potential effects on minority and low-income populations, according to the USDA.

According to Vaden, under the Supreme Court’s recent precedent narrowing the scope of NEPA, and through the regulations the USDA is implementing in coordination with their federal partners, NEPA will now be applied strictly according to the statute as written — rather than expanded through decades of interpretation. In practice, this means they can deliver funding, loans, and assistance to farmers more quickly, without requiring them to wait for excessive paperwork or lengthy analyses on single, routine loans.

“NEPA has long been used as a proxy environmental policy tool, well beyond its original scope of analyzing possible environmental impacts of a major project and considering reasonable alternative,” Jon Sanders, director of the Center for Food, Power and Life at the John Locke Foundation. “Through mission creep and judicial expansions, it became a way to stop or stymie projects that environmental organizations oppose. It’s done this in several ways: through costly, lengthy paperwork requirements, through lawsuits, and through focusing on remote and speculative environmental impacts as opposed to foreseeable ones. The impacts need not even be closely causal to the project or substantial for a project to be denied.”

In addition to NEPA reforms, the USDA’s fall regulatory agenda will include 19 individual regulatory actions in the food and nutrition space, specifically addressing food stamps, according to Vaden. In addition, reforms will make it easier to access their rural development lending facilities.

In 2020, Donald van der Vaart, who currently serves on the North Carolina Utilities Commission, signed a letter in opposition to NEPA. He has previously served as the secretary of the NC Department of Environmental Quality. At the time of signing the letter, he worked as an energy researcher for the John Locke Foundation.