Five more executive actions - two presidential memoranda intended to expedite the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines and three more longer term - sweeping directives which requires the changing of approval process and regulating future infrastructure and pipelines projects, have been signed by US President Trump on Tuesday.
According to Trump, the signing is about "streamlining the incredibly cumbersome, long, horrible, permitting process." Since entering the Oval Office, signing ceremony has already become a trademark of his short presidency.
Trump also said that the construction isn't a done deal - reversing the Obama administration policy to disapprove the Keystone pipeline. He said the project is under subject to a renegotiation of terms, and he emphasized that the project would bring "a lot of jobs, 28,000 jobs".
With the administration taking seven years to make a decision before ultimately killing it over environmental concerns, Keystone XL became a lightning rod for Obama's energy policy. The project caused environmental groups reacted quickly and vociferously, promising legal action and White House protests, reported USA Today.
Meanwhile, Michael Brune of the Sierra Club said "President Trump will live to regret his actions this morning" and said the actions will cause "a wall of resistance the likes of which he never imagined."
The directives Trump signed Tuesday included one executive order and four presidential memoranda:
- A memorandum expediting the Keystone XL Pipeline, a proposed 1,179-mile cross-border pipeline from Alberta to Nebraska.
- A memorandum directing the secretary of the Army to "review and approve in an expedited manner" the Dakota Access Pipeline, a 1,172-mile pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois that has been the subject of heated protests by American Indian groups and environmentalists.
- A memorandum requiring the secretary of Commerce to come up with a plan to mandate American-made steel for all new, expanded or retrofitted pipelines in the United States.
- A memorandum to all federal agencies to review manufacturing regulations.
- An executive order fast-tracking approval for "high-priority infrastructure projects."
"This is the expediting of environmental reviews and approvals for high-priority infrastructure projects," Trump said. "We can't be in an environmental process for 15 years if a bridge is falling down."
"If it's a no, we'll give them a quick no, and if it's a yes, it's like 'Let's start building,' " he said. "The regulatory process in this country has become a tangled-up mess, and very unfair to people," he added.
