Last week, the Trump administration gutted one of the nation’s bedrock public health, environmental, and climate protection laws — the National Environmental Policy Act.

NEPA has long been a target of polluting industries, particularly the fossil fuel industry. It requires federal agencies considering approval of expansions or new operations to first evaluate and publicly disclose environmental and related social and economic harms and allows for a unique level of public participation and input into major federal actions. Dismantling the law could have devastating consequences for local communities across the nation.

The Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, is one such community. It is already inundated and overburdened by polluting operations and faces the threat of even more to come, with proposals for a massive new highway expansion and its fourth fossil-fueled power plant. NEPA is a fundamental tool used by residents to protect public health and safety. But it is not the only one. I visited Ironbound in mid-February, when I met Ana Baptista, who asserts that Ironbound is ready for any fight.

She helped lead local efforts to pass the New Jersey Environmental Justice Law in 2020, the first and foremost state law of its kind, which adopts and expands upon some of NEPA’s most critical requirements and is a model other states and the nation can now follow.

Her family immigrated to the U.S. from Portugal in the 1970s when Baptista was six-years-old, part of a wave of people who came to Ironbound fleeing a right-wing dictator and the economic collapse that followed in his wake. In this working-class largely community of color, her mother found work as a hospital cleaner, and her father at a fish market.

As a child, Baptista often served as their English translator, including when neighbors encouraged the family to attend local organizing meetings to halt the expansion of polluting industrial operations where they live. She recalls sitting in those rooms and thinking to herself, “We’re badass. We have power!”

By the time she was in high school, Baptista was a community advocate in her own right. Today, she is an associate professor of environmental policy and sustainability management and director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center at the New School in New York.

Baptista is trying to show me a local community garden a few blocks from her parent’s house. It’s the site of a proposed new solar-powered microgrid and an example of efforts to expand renewable green energy here with federal funding from the Inflation Reduction Act that has been appropriated by Congress but is now threatened by the Trump administration. Unfortunately, we’re stuck behind a massive eighteen wheeler truck blocking the small neighborhood street. A few blocks later, we hit another street clogged this time with a fossil fuel tanker truck. Baptista laughs when I ask if the trucks belong here, before answering an unequivocal, “no.” These are residential streets filled with children, schools, and homes, that are supposed to be off-limits to the thousands of heavy duty freight trucks that travel daily to and from the nearby Ports of Newark and Elizabeth and regularly inundate the community with both traffic and toxic diesel smoke.

“It adds up to a lot of really significant public health impacts and pollution impact in the neighborhood,” Baptista tells me.

As we tour Ironbound and the surrounding area, we pass under crisscrossing freeways and train tracks laden with freight cars. We are forced to pause our conversations to wait for passenger jets flying in and out of Newark Airport, roaring overhead by the minute, to pass. In the area known as the “Chemical Corridor,” we are struck by the putrid stench from the open air sewage treatment plant — the largest in the state — followed by that of the fat rendering facility that burns animal carcasses. We go by the state’s largest garbage incinerator, multiple fossil-fueled power plants, rows upon rows of giant oil storage tanks each the size of a large building that line the port, and an oil refinery, among other polluting operations harming public health and the climate.

Just as we catch sight of the New York City skyline in the distance, another tanker truck drives by this time carrying human sewage. Baptista reminds me that almost none of the commercial and industrial operations taking place here service her community.

The Trump administration is on course to make conditions here a great deal more difficult, including with its effort to decimate NEPA.

Trump Takes a Hatchet to the National Environmental Policy Act

NEPA was overwhelmingly passed by Congress in 1969 and signed by President Richard Nixon into law in 1970. The law requires the federal government to assess the impacts of proposed major actions on “the human environment” by requiring agencies to “look before they leap” and consider how permits and other actions — on everything from oil pipelines, export terminals, and power plants to bridges, tunnels, and wind farms — will impact the public and the environment; consider measures to mitigate or avoid potential harm (including not doing the project); and engage the public, including allowing citizens to bring legal action against the federal government if they believe it has failed to comply with these rules.

It is largely unique among federal law in that it explicitly requires agencies to consider the “cumulative impacts” of existing pollution sources and other harms on people and the environment, rather than consider projects or pollutants one-by-one. This is a particularly vital consideration for places already overburdened with pollution and industrial operations and when taking account of the added impact of additional emission on the worsening climate crisis.

“NEPA is hugely important,” Wendy Park, senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is currently arguing a NEPA case before the U.S. Supreme Court, tells me.

“NEPA is there for a purpose,” says John Reichman, a well-known New York attorney. Reichman represents more than 60 public health, labor, transportation, and environmental organizations in New York and New Jersey in a NEPA case involving Ironbound. “When you have a project which has substantial environmental impacts, you need to review what those impacts are and provide for mitigation measures. And if you don’t do that, then you’re basically undercutting a bedrock environmental law that the country has had since the Nixon Administration.”

During the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump reportedly privately promised to do the fossil fuel industry’s bidding in exchange for big political donations — suggesting he would upend historic progress made on the green energy transition, climate, and the environment under President Joe Biden.

In his short time as president, Trump has kept his word and then some, implementing a radical deregulatory agenda that goes well-beyond his first term in office and is part of a broader effort to dismantle our fundamental democratic institutions and the rule of law. Trump is eliminating environmental and climate protections and has provided for the unfettered and virtually unlimited expansion of fossil fuels, freed as much as possible from public oversight or enforcement. There’s little reason to believe this will benefit U.S. consumers, including because the president has significantly increased the industry’s ability to export its products overseas, which could lead to higher domestic prices for gasoline and home heating fuel. Dismantling NEPA is a fundamental component of this fossil fuel industry wish list, part of an effort it euphemistically refers to as “permitting reform” to not only greenlight all of its own projects, but also eliminate the competition. Eager to oblige, Trump has (temporarily, for now) suspended permits for all renewable energy projects, including wind and solar, on federal lands and waters.

On his first day in office, Trump signed the Unleashing American Energy Executive Order. Under the heading, “Unleashing Energy Dominance through Efficient Permitting,” the order directs the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to propose rescinding all of its NEPA regulations. On February 19, the CEQ acted on the order, taking the unprecedented step of eliminating all of its rules that implement NEPA, thereby taking the legs out from under the law.

“It’s the shoot first, ask questions later form of rulemaking,” Kristen Boyles, a managing attorney at Earthjustice in Seattle, Washington, tells me. Earthjustice regularly represents community groups engaging in the NEPA process, including before the U.S. Supreme Court. CEQ short-circuited standard rule-making, she explains, by announcing the change and asking the public to submit comments “on the decision they’ve already made and finalized, which is as silly as it sounds,” Boyles says, stressing: “there’s no reason you have to immediately repeal regulations that have been in place for 50 years.”

Trump has not repealed the law, which would require an act of Congress. But a law is fairly meaningless if it cannot be clearly implemented and enforced, the task that CEQ was established to perform. Earthjustice declared, “CEQ Eviscerates NEPA” in a press release responding to the action. Hundreds of individual federal agencies that are facing severe staffing and funding cuts are now tasked with implementing the law, many of which are led by proponents and authors of Project 2025, the notoriously right-wing extremist policy playbook, which describes NEPA as “a monstrosity.”

The agencies have a wide variety of approaches to NEPA. Some have extensive policies while others have none, or simply refer to CEQ’s rules, which no longer exist. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has one of the most robust NEPA policies, but Rolling Stone has learned that staffing cuts from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency may have resulted in all EPA staff who conduct NEPA reviews in at least two regions of the country being terminated or placed on administrative leave — impacting Arkansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and 74 Tribal Nations, according to a letter from members of Congress to the EPA and an anonymous source within EPA close to the matter.

CEQ released a memorandum providing guidance to the agencies on how to proceed in its regulatory absence that included a list of several core NEPA provisions it would prefer they largely ignore, Boyle explains. These include consideration of cumulative impacts, environmental justice, and the climate. The memo further threatens to severely constrain both public and government involvement by instructing the agencies to prioritize documents prepared by the “project sponsor” — typically a company seeking to build or expand projects, such as oil refineries or pipelines.

Democratic members of Congress have raised alarm and environmental groups and attorneys general are sure to sue. But in the interim, the likely result is stagnation — a lack of implementation, oversight, and enforcement that will be measured in lives lost while chaos and confusion reigns, “which is likely the point,” Boyles adds, followed by a deep long sigh.

Diesel is Deadly

Ironbound’s main street bustles with young families walking by storefronts displaying flags and posters from Brazil, Ecuador, Venezuela, and other nations representing the multitude of cultures and ethnicities sharing the neighborhood. The tight-knit Portuguese community is easy to find at restaurants serving Portuguese food to a clientele speaking almost entirely in Portuguese, where TVs are tuned to Portuguese stations, and where people clearly know and care for their neighbors.

“There is a lot of love of community here,” Baptista tells me, pride filling her voice. “The communities here have a very strong fabric.”

The red brick elementary school Baptista attended as a child is just about half a block from her parents’ home and has an outdoor playground that sits at the intersection of several streets. She explains at least 200 to 300 trucks pass by the school every hour, based on counts she conducted when she worked as the environmental justice organizer at the non-profit Ironbound Community Corporation on whose Board of Trustees she still serves. In the nearby predominantly Black Southward neighborhood, the Southward Environmental Alliance counts some 500 trucks per hour passing through their small community.

“The biggest source of localized air pollution is definitely from the diesel trucks because of the intensity of trucking here,” Baptista says, adding, “the community has been organizing for decades to try to clean up trucking and the seaport in general.”

“Diesel is deadly,” she stresses. “Diesel is one of the worst air pollutants for public health, especially children.” Diesel fumes from trucks are a significant contributor to childhood asthma suffered by one in four children in Newark, almost three times the national average. It strikes unequally, with an asthma mortality rate among Black and Hispanic children in New Jersey five times greater than that for white children in the state.

Community groups are using NEPA in their fight against a proposed bridge expansion project that would significantly increase truck traffic in Ironbound, Southward, and other already hard-hit areas of the city. A proposal to tear down, replace and expand the Newark Bay Hudson County Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike would bring as much as 38.5 percent more trucks while failing to reduce traffic congestion, New York attorney John Reichman tells me. Reichman represents dozens of local groups who argue that the project has proceeded without a proper environmental review as required by NEPA, including failing to account for the success of New York’s congestion pricing system.

In its first week, congestion pricing resulted in a 65 percent reduction in rush hour traffic from the Holland Tunnel, which significantly lessens the need for the bridge extension, Richman argues. It’s also extremely popular, with six out of ten New Yorkers in a recent poll saying they want the measure to continue. The environmental review also failed to adequately account for a more viable alternative as required by NEPA: investing the more than $10 billion slated for the project to expand public transit.

Reichman is adamant that the Trump administration cannot simply eliminate federal NEPA regulations or New York’s congestion pricing by fiat, as Trump has proposed (regardless of whether Trump declares himself “King”). “Too often people are just cowering at these actions and not just saying they’re bullshit,” which they are, he tells me.