Former President Donald Trump is promising an unprecedented number of US energy project approvals if he retakes the White House, but his plan to remake the federal bureaucracy so it issues speedy approvals could undermine his goals, experts in federal permitting told S&P Global Commodity Insights.
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Trump vowed in a September speech to “blast through every bureaucratic hurdle to issue rapid approvals” of energy projects. That will entail a sweeping change to federal employment protections that would enable him to fire vast swaths of the federal bureaucracy.
The plan, while light on details, would involve a return to what is known as Schedule F — an employment category created by an executive order Trump issued in October 2020. Reclassifying tens of thousands of federal civil servants as easily fired political appointees would ripple across all federal operations.
The change could prompt the departure of federal bureaucrats steeped in the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a decades-old law governing federal permitting. And while Trump’s new appointees could speedily approve new energy and mining projects, those permits would likely be vulnerable to legal challenges.
“If you were to get rid of a large chunk of the federal workforce who works on NEPA reviews, you’re replacing technical experts with political appointees who don’t have deep knowledge on this,” said Nikki Chiappa, who leads the nonpartisan Breakthrough Institute’s permitting program. “And then you create reviews that are poorly done and extremely prone to litigation, or you overburden maybe a small number of technical experts who are left, and that just slows the process entirely.”
Trump promises to wield Schedule F ‘aggressively’
In a campaign video released in 2023, Trump said he plans to make a return to Schedule F an immediate priority.
“First, I will immediately reissue my 2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats,” Trump said. “And I will wield that power very aggressively.”
Schedule F was crafted in such a way that it would effectively strip career civil service protections from any federal employee involved in developing or carrying out White House policies, said Louis Clark, executive director and CEO of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit that defends federal whistleblowers.
“You would essentially have agencies that would monitor themselves, or police themselves, in terms of personnel rules,” Clark said in an interview.
Clark said Schedule F was modeled after the Nixon administration’s “Malek Manual,” a policy document that formalized a process for establishing a political loyalty test at federal agencies.
Implementing Schedule F would likely cause disruptive levels of turnover at federal agencies responsible for permitting activities, said Jenny Mattingley, vice president of government affairs at Partnership for Public Service. The nonpartisan group advocates for improving the federal government by recruiting and retaining high-level talent.
Mattingley noted that roughly 4,000 positions across the executive branch already require presidential appointments.
“You’ve already got this constant turnover at the highest levels of agencies, so expanding that number by orders of magnitude under Schedule F hugely expands the number of political appointees you’ve got across government,” Mattingley said.
In April, the White House Office of Personnel Management finalized a rule aimed at thwarting a return to Schedule F in response to an executive order President Joe Biden issued in January 2021.
A future administration would need to follow a notice-and-comment process to repeal the rule. However, Clark said efforts to revive Schedule F could lead to a “slow bleed” scenario for the federal workforce.
“Some of your best people are just not prepared for that sort of political environment, much less being targeted,” Clark said. “I would say the majority of your highly professional and nonpolitical people are not going to work in that kind of atmosphere, so they’re going to resign.”
Project 2025, a policy blueprint for a future Republican president produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation and authored mostly by former Trump administration officials, calls for implementation of Schedule F.
In particular, it suggests politicizing the role of executive director of the Permitting Council — a unique federal agency tasked with overseeing and coordinating environmental reviews for high-priority infrastructure projects with expedited “FAST-41” status. Project 2025’s proposal recommends giving the role “delegated presidential directive authority over executive branch permitting agencies.”
Offshore wind, solar, pumped storage and electric transmission projects such as the first phase of Invenergy LLC’s 800-mile Grain Belt Express line currently dominate the Biden-Harris administration’s FAST-41 dashboard. Pending projects also include South32 Ltd.’s Hermosa critical minerals project in southern Arizona.
Trump is unlikely to stand in the way of new mining projects, but his antipathy for renewable energy in general and wind projects in particular is well documented. A political appointee atop the Permitting Council could slow-walk approvals, especially for proposed offshore wind projects, according to industry observers.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from Project 2025, but his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), wrote the foreword to the published policy document. The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Litigation not addressed
Replacing or overriding policy and technical experts will only exacerbate the problem of NEPA litigation, already one of the biggest obstacles to the timely completion of large infrastructure projects, said the Breakthrough Institute’s Chiappa.
Litigation under the statute delayed fossil fuel and clean energy projects by 3.9 years on average, according to a study the group released in July analyzing legal challenges to NEPA reviews between 2013 and 2022.
Projects under construction are likely safe from political interference, but new projects could be in jeopardy, said Christine Tezak, senior director at ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington, DC-based consulting firm.
“If environmental reviews are less robust, then there’s a question of whether or not you’re more vulnerable to judicial review,” Tezak said in an interview.
Both Trump and Biden sought to address NEPA delays by setting a two-year deadline for environmental impact statements under the statute, but neither tackled delays from judicial review.
A bipartisan permitting package in the Senate could incorporate House-proposed NEPA litigation reforms. But if the legislation does not pass, Trump may find that he has only slowed projects as they get trapped in the courts.