Reengineering the federal planning process: A total federal planning strategy, integrating nepa with modern management tools

Congress established the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) more than a quarter of a century ago, yet there is a surprising lack of specific tools, techniques, and methodologies for effectively implementing these regulatory requirements. Lack of professionally accepted techniques is a principal factor responsible for many inefficiencies. Often, decisionmakers do not fully appreciate or capitalize on the true potential NEPA provides as a platform for planning future actions. New approaches and modern management tools must be adopted to fully achieve NEPA's mandate. A new strategy, referred to as Total Federal Planning, is proposed for unifying large‐scale federal planning efforts under a single, systematic, structured, and holistic process. Under this approach, the NEPA planning process provides a unifying framework for integrating all early environmental and nonenvironmental decisionmaking factors into a single, comprehensive planning process. To promote effectiveness and efficiency, modern tools and principles from the disciplines of Value Engineering, Systems Engineering, and Total Quality Management are incorporated. Properly integrated and implemented, these planning tools provide the rigorous, structured, and disciplined framework essential to achieving effective planning. The goal of a Total Federal Planning strategy is to construct a unified and interdisciplinary framework that substantially improves decisionmaking, while reducing the time, cost, redundancy, and effort necessary to comply with environmental and other planning requirements. At a time when Congress is striving to re‐engineer the governmental framework, and process, a Total Federal Planning philosophy offers a systematic approach for unifying the disjointed and convoluted planning process most federal agencies use. This philosophy has widespread implications in the way federal planning is approached.