Highlights
- The Trump Administration has issued a Presidential Memorandum, "Updating Permitting Technology for the 21st Century," aimed at modernizing and streamlining the federal environmental review and permitting processes through enhanced use of technology.
- The action also seeks to address long-standing inefficiencies in the environmental permitting process for infrastructure projects through a comprehensive technology modernization initiative.
- This Holland & Knight alert details the action's key provisions, implementation timeline and permitting technology action plan, as well as implications for stakeholders.
The Trump Administration has issued a Presidential Memorandum aimed at modernizing and streamlining the federal environmental review and permitting processes through enhanced use of technology. The April 15, 2025, action, "Updating Permitting Technology for the 21st Century," seeks to address long-standing inefficiencies in the environmental permitting process for infrastructure projects through a comprehensive technology modernization initiative.
Key Provisions of the Executive Action
The Presidential Memorandum directs federal agencies to maximize the use of technology in environmental review and permitting processes for infrastructure projects of all kinds, including roads, bridges, mines, factories and power plants. The administration notes that the government "does not properly leverage technology to effectively and efficiently evaluate environmental permits, causing significant delay to important infrastructure projects that impact our economic well-being."
The action focuses on eliminating paper-based applications and review processes while accelerating project processing times with "little to no impact on quality of review." It aims to reduce the length and increase accessibility of permit-related documents, minimize duplicative data submissions and facilitate greater interagency use of existing analyses for multiple permit applications on the same projects.
Additionally, the memorandum emphasizes the need to 1) eliminate friction in coordination between agencies in the environmental review and permitting processes, 2) improve transparency and predictability of project permitting schedules and 3) help ensure agency legal departments have adequate support, funding and technology to expeditiously defend challenged environmental documents and permit decisions.
Implementation Timeline and Permitting Technology Action Plan
The memorandum establishes an ambitious timeline for implementation. Within 45 days (by May 30, 2025), the chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), in consultation with the recently established National Energy Dominance Council1 and relevant permitting agencies, will issue a Permitting Technology Action Plan (PTAP) for modernizing technology used for federal permitting and environmental review processes.
The PTAP will establish an initial data and technology standard for permit applications and reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other applicable permits and authorizations. It will define minimum functional requirements for agency NEPA and permitting-related software systems, including systems for case management, automation to expedite "low-level" reviews and data-driven document structure, along with data collection and reporting to minimize timeline uncertainty for environmental reviews.
Additionally, the plan will include a road map for creating a unified interagency permitting and environmental review data system consisting of interconnected agency systems and shared services, an interagency governance structure for oversight of implementation and a detailed timeline for agencies to accomplish the activities outlined in the plan.
Within 90 days of the PTAP's issuance (anticipated in August-September 2025), agency officials will begin adopting and implementing the CEQ data and technology standards and minimum functional requirements in new and existing agency environmental review and permitting systems. The CEQ chair will coordinate with relevant agency chief environmental review and permitting officers (CERPOs) and chief information officers (CIOs) to provide oversight on implementation.
New Permitting Innovation Center
Moving even more quickly, the memorandum directed the CEQ chair to establish and lead an interagency Permitting Innovation Center (Center) within 15 days of the memorandum's issuance. Consistent with this direction, the CEQ issued a memorandum to the heads of federal agencies on April 30, 2025, establishing the Center to be led and staffed by CEQ. Under the memorandum, within the next 30 days (by May 30, 2025), the Center will develop the PTAP in coordination with relevant agencies, develop an initial NEPA permitting and technology standard, and issue the PTAP.
The Center will facilitate agency adoption of prototype software systems, including case management systems, application submission and tracking portals, automation of application and review processes, data exchange between agency systems and acceleration of complex reviews. The administrator of general services, through the U.S. General Service Administration's (GSA) Technology Transformation Services (TTS), will provide support for the establishment of the Center consistent with applicable law.
Connection to Previous Initiatives
This executive action builds upon previous efforts to modernize the environmental permitting process, particularly Section 110 of the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA). Section 110 amended NEPA to require CEQ to evaluate how digital technology could improve permitting processes, including by developing a "unified permitting portal."2
CEQ fulfilled this mandate by issuing its "E-NEPA Report to Congress on the Potential for Online and Digital Technologies to Address Delays in Reviews and Improve Public Accessibility and Transparency" (E-NEPA Report) in 2024. The report outlined a comprehensive vision for modernizing the NEPA process through technology, including:
- goals for a unified permitting portal with real-time collaboration, geospatial visualization, mobile access and tools for tracking and organizing public comments3
- a recommendation for a distributed framework of interoperable systems that communicate via a shared "data fabric," rather than a single centralized platform4
- adoption of a standardized NEPA taxonomy and leveraging of geospatial data
- creation of "playbooks" for agency use, expanded training and scaling of existing collaboration tools5
- implementation of agile development, user-centered design and continuous iterative improvement as essential practices6
Notably, the report warned against a monolithic, government-wide permitting platform, citing risks of past failures, and instead advocated for building interoperable tools that could evolve into a more unified user experience.7
The April 2025 Presidential Memorandum represents a significant shift from evaluation to implementation, operationalizing CEQ's recommendations with enforceable timelines and concrete action items. Although the E-NEPA Report provided the conceptual framework, this new executive action creates the mechanisms and mandates federal agencies to turn those concepts into reality.
Implications for Stakeholders
This executive action represents a significant shift toward modernizing the federal environmental review and permitting processes through technology. For project developers and infrastructure investors, these changes could potentially reduce the administrative burden of preparing and submitting permit applications while decreasing timelines for permit reviews and approvals. To that end, the Trump Administration has taken other actions to expedite the NEPA process. (See Holland & Knight's previous alert, "DOI Implements Unprecedented 14-Day NEPA Review Process Under National Energy Emergency EO," April 24, 2025.) The initiative also aims to improve predictability in project scheduling, enhance transparency throughout the permitting process and reduce redundancies in data submission requirements.
The memorandum's focus on strengthening agency legal departments to provide "the most expeditious and best defense of challenged environmental documents and permit decisions" suggests an anticipation of legal challenges to permitting decisions and a desire to ensure those decisions can be effectively defended.
As implementation proceeds, stakeholders should monitor the development of the PTAP and agency adoption of the new technology standards, as these will determine the practical impact of this initiative on future projects.
Footnotes
1 EO 14213, "Establishing the National Energy Dominance Council," 90 Fed. Reg. 9945 (Feb. 14, 2025).
3 Id. at 20–21.
4 Id. at 21–22.
5 Id. at 62–63.
6 Id. at 6–7.
7 Id. at 24.
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