The Bureau of Land Management has approved over 6,100 Applications for Permits to Drill since President Trump took office. That's more drilling permits than any administration has issued in the past 15 years — and 63.7% more than the prior administration approved in the same timeframe.
Nobody's talking about it because permitting reform doesn't trend on Twitter.
The White House released the milestone numbers on June 30, 2026, exactly one year after Trump signed Executive Order 14154, titled "Unleashing American Energy." The order directed every federal agency to overhaul its environmental review procedures under the National Environmental Policy Act — NEPA, the 1970 law that was designed to protect the environment but evolved into a bureaucratic weapon that could delay a highway project for a decade. As reported by 100 Percent Fed Up, the results have exceeded projections across the board.
More than 60 federal agencies and departments have either completed or are actively reforming their NEPA procedures. The Council on Environmental Quality — CEQ, the White House office that coordinates environmental reviews — published its final streamlining action in January 2026. Interior finalized its reforms on February 23, 2026. The EPA proposed its own reforms on June 24, 2026. The Department of Energy updated its procedures on June 30, 2025. That's not one agency acting alone. That's a coordinated overhaul across USDA, Commerce, Interior, Energy, FERC, Transportation, and the Army Corps of Engineers.
The specific numbers tell the story better than any press release could. Federal agencies have adopted 195 categorical exclusions — a technical term for project types that no longer require full environmental review because their impacts are well understood. Interior has rescinded over 80% of its own internal regulations that were layering additional review requirements on top of what NEPA already required. The department also established 28-day emergency NEPA procedures for domestic energy projects, turning what used to be a months-long process into something that moves faster than most cable installations.
The EPA, historically the most aggressive regulator in the permitting space, now caps Environmental Impact Statements at 150 pages — 300 for projects of "extraordinary complexity" — with a hard two-year deadline to finish. For context, EIS documents under previous administrations routinely ran thousands of pages and took five to seven years to complete. A 150-page cap with a two-year clock isn't deregulation. It's telling agencies to do their jobs on a timeline that doesn't outlast the project itself.
Beyond drilling, the Interior Department has opened 13.1 million acres of federal land for coal leasing and issued 76 coal-related permits. The department has also offered 748,000 acres of geothermal resources in the first year and a half — a figure that matters for the "all of the above" energy crowd who want nuclear, geothermal, and natural gas alongside oil and coal.
Critics will argue that faster reviews mean weaker environmental protection. The administration's counter is structural: the environmental laws haven't changed. NEPA still applies. What changed is the paperwork — the page counts, the timelines, the redundant internal reviews that agencies had stacked on top of the statutory requirements over 50 years of bureaucratic accretion.
Doug Burgum's Interior Department has been the most aggressive mover in the reform effort, but this isn't a single-agency story. When 60-plus departments are simultaneously overhauling the same process under the same executive order, what you're looking at isn't a policy tweak. It's a structural change in how the federal government processes the permits that determine whether anything actually gets built.
Six thousand drilling permits. Thirteen million acres. A hundred and ninety-five categorical exclusions. Sixty agencies reformed.
Turns out the boring stuff is where the big wins hide.