Executive Order on Reducing Regulatory Barriers to Residential Development
The White House
This order directs multiple federal agencies to review, revise, and eliminate environmental, energy, and administrative regulations that restrict residential development and increase housing costs.
The directive mandates the rollback of specific federal permitting barriers while instructing departments to develop pro-development best practices for state and local governments.
The Secretary of the Army for Civil Works and the Environmental Protection Agency Administrator are required to revise water-related regulations to lower construction costs and streamline agency decision-making. This includes reforming the Construction General Permit for stormwater, Total Maximum Daily Loads, and federal standards for dredge and fill permitting under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act.
The Secretaries of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Transportation, along with the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) Director, must evaluate eliminating rules that impede suburban, exurban, and single-family home construction.
The Departments of Agriculture, HUD, Energy, and the FHFA must reform or eliminate costly energy-efficiency, alternative-energy, and water-use mandates for residential construction. This necessitates reviewing energy conservation standards for manufactured housing, HUD- and USDA-financed new construction, and residential building energy codes.
To streamline federal permitting, the Council on Environmental Quality must issue guidance maximizing categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act for housing and related infrastructure. Similarly, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation must develop guidance to minimize reporting burdens for housing projects under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.
Within 60 days of the order's signing, the HUD Secretary must promulgate regulatory best practices for state and local governments, such as capping permitting timelines, allowing by-right single-family development, and curtailing green-energy building mandates. Furthermore, federal agencies including Agriculture, HUD, Transportation, and the EPA are directed to align their grant requirements and technical assistance to advance these newly established municipal best practices.
The Treasury and HUD Secretaries are tasked with evaluating mechanisms to link federal grants and financing tools with Opportunity Zone tax incentives and the New Markets Tax Credit to spur single-family home construction in qualifying census tracts. Finally, the Department of Housing and Urban Development is legally required to bear all costs associated with the publication of this directive.
