A letter to President Bush from leading congressional Democrats blasts the administration for undermining and dismantling the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), considered the Magna Carta of environmental law. Signed by President Nixon in 1969, NEPA requires agencies to assess the social, economic, and environmental impacts of proposed federal actions by writing a detailed statement called an Environmental Impact Analysis. This statement must also present alternatives to actions that might harm the environment and be subjected to public scrutiny and input. The administration is proposing legislation to waive NEPA provisions as part of its "Healthy Forests Initiative," denying public comment on timber cutting proposals, as well as the opportunity to challenge them in court. Likewise, the administration’s 2001 energy plan seeks to expedite oil exploration at the expense of environmental review. Yet the administration “not only seeks to circumvent NEPA through legislative proposals which at least allow for a dialogue between the Administration, Congress and the public, but also through administrative directives and court proceedings,” write Reps. Nick Rahall (D-WV) and John Dingell (D-MI), the top Democrats on the House Resources Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee respectively, in their letter to the president. “These actions individually remain below the radar of the American people, but as a whole they chip away at NEPA to the point where this law would exist in name only under your administration.” For instance, the administration suspended regulations for ecological sustainability in the National Forest Management Act (NFMA) in the spring of 2001. Rahall and Dingell see this as the first step toward dismantling environmental review of projects in all National Forests, noting that the chief of the Forest Service has already approved a number of other changes to NFMA, the most significant of which would categorically exclude forest management plans from NEPA. “As NEPA requires the federal government to consider alternatives before implementing actions, by removing such requirements you would be encouraging a dictatorial and blind approach to managing America’s natural resources,” the congressmen write. Meanwhile, a federal court recently rejected a Justice Department argument that NEPA doesn’t apply to oceans beyond three miles of the nation’s shorelines. Yet notes from an August meeting at the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which has formed an http://ceq.eh.doe.gov/ntf/">NEPA task force to study various aspects of the law, indicate that the administration “is considering stripping NEPA protection from the oceans,” according to Rahall and Dingell, constituting “the single greatest environmental rollback ever.” “This Administration’s closed-door approach to governing has already sparked significant distrust and controversy,” the congressmen note. “Instead of using NEPA’s public participation requirements to help dispel this distrust, the Administration’s attacks on NEPA promote even more secrecy and back-room deals.”