The White House continues its momentum to modernize permitting technology, launching a tool to aid the finding of categorical exclusions across Federal agencies.

Today, the White House Council on Environmental Quality unveiled the Categorical Exclusion Explorer (CE Explorer), a technology tool that will increase transparency and streamline environmental reviews and permitting processes by providing a digitized public database of each Federal agency’s existing categorical exclusions established under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The CE Explorer is the first tool developed by the Permitting Innovation Center, established in response to President Donald J. Trump’s Memorandum, Updating Permitting Technology for the 21st Century, and supports the implementation of the White House Permitting Technology Action Plan that was released May 30, 2025.

The CE Explorer’s search functionality will provide states, tribal officials, project sponsors and stakeholders with seamless access to view Federal agencies’ categorical exclusions. This digitized, searchable list will enhance interagency coordination by enabling agencies to quickly identify relevant categorical exclusions established by other agencies. The tool will also support other agencies’ adoption of categorical exclusions, as encouraged by Congress in its 2023 amendments to NEPA, helping to accelerate environmental reviews and permitting processes.

The data in the CE Explorer is available to download in a machine-readable format, allowing interested parties to leverage this technology and data source to build tools to modernize their own NEPA or permitting review processes.  

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The post CEQ-led Permitting Innovation Center Debuts Tech to Streamline NEPA Reviews – CE Explorer appeared first on The White House.

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