The White House Tuesday finalized a regulation restoring three elements of a key environmental protection law that had been altered during the Trump Administration.

The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) reinstated longstanding provisions to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) that were modified in 2020. According to CEQ, the modifications caused challenges to agencies attempting to implement the changes and were confusing to stakeholders and the public. The rulemaking, published Wednesday in the Federal Register, is the first of two phases in modernizing the regulations that implement NEPA.

The first of the changes restores the requirement that federal agencies evaluate all of the environmental impacts of their decisions, including the “direct,” “indirect” and “cumulative” impacts of any proposed action. This will include evaluating the impacts of climate change on proposed actions, and as CEQ notes, was “the practice for decades” prior to the 2020 change.

The second element restores to agencies the flexibility to determine the “purpose and need” of a proposed action. This will allow agencies to work with communities and other stakeholders to develop alternative approaches to projects and actions that could help minimize environmental and public health costs. The previous rule had eliminated agencies’ ability to consider project alternatives that did not fully align with the sponsor’s goals—the sponsor often being a private company.

Finally, the new regulations remove “ceiling provisions” added to NEPA by the Trump Administration which set NEPA provisions as the maximum requirements that an agency could include in their own NEPA procedures. The new rule establishes NEPA regulations as a floor, not a ceiling, for environmental review standards for federal agencies. This will allow agencies the discretion to develop standards beyond the NEPA floor requirements.

CEQ Chair Brenda Mallory said: “Restoring these basic community safeguards will provide regulatory certainty, reduce conflict, and help ensure that projects get built right the first time.” In the coming months CEQ will propose a second phase of NEPA rulemaking to further improve efficiency and effectiveness in environmental review processes and reflect the Biden Administration’s twin goals of achieving environmental justice and confronting climate change.