Unlike most major pieces of legislation that make it through Congress these days, the bill to raise the federal government's debt ceiling was not larded up with hundreds or thousands of pages of unrelated policy.
But while most of the relatively trim Fiscal Responsibility Act was focused on the debt ceiling and a variety of associated provisions, like the non-defense discretionary spending caps imposed for the next two years, there was still room for a few unrelated items. Most significant among them: minor changes to federal environmental review processes aimed at reducing the absurd obstacles often placed on private and public infrastructure projects.
