Seeking to shore up Democratic candidates ahead of the November midterms, President Biden hit the road this week to tout the investments his administration is making in rebuilding what he has described as America’s “crumbling” infrastructure.

Speaking in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Tuesday, Mr. Biden bragged about the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill passed last year that is helping pay for improvements to the harbor in that city, as well as repairs to the state’s bridges and 700 miles of new highways.

“The last fella that had this job kept talking about infrastructure week for four years,” Mr. Biden said, with Democratic members of New Hampshire’s congressional delegation by his side. “We have infrastructure decade.” He is scheduled to travel to Portland, Oregon, Thursday for more of the same.

Back in Washington, however, the administration is taking steps that will by most accounts make many of those same big infrastructure projects more difficult, time-consuming, and costly, often in the name of “environmental justice” or curtailing climate change.

This week, the White House Council on Environmental Quality issued new guidelines that effectively roll back some of the changes made by the Trump administration to a 1970 law that requires vigorous environmental impact studies before major infrastructure projects — everything from roads and bridges to pipelines, wind farms, and hydroelectric plants — can proceed.

Opponents of the law, the National Environmental Policy Act, commonly known as NEPA, say it adds as much as five years to the timeline of some projects and has been weaponized by environmental groups to defeat projects that they oppose, such as the Keystone XL pipeline.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Marty Durbin said new rules will only serve to “smother” some of the very projects Congress voted to fund last year.

“The last thing our country needs is unnecessarily extensive and duplicative bureaucratic red tape and delayed project approvals,” Mr. Durbin said. “It should never take longer to get federal approval for an infrastructure project than it takes to build the project, but that very well may be the result of the administration’s changes.” 

Environmentalists almost universally cheered the Biden administration’s actions. A senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, Rosalie Winn, called the move “a key step toward ensuring that the federal government is fully considering climate and environmental justice impacts for industrial projects and other decisions.”

Ms. Winn added that the administration needs to be more aggressive when it issues a second phase of the rulemaking later this year. “We must take more steps to fully embed climate and environmental justice into all federal decision making,” she said.

President Trump’s changes to the NEPA guidelines, made in 2020 in the name of reducing red tape, shortened the time it takes to get approval for large projects by limiting public comment periods. They also instructed regulators to consider only the direct effects or “reasonably foreseeable” ones on climate change.

Mr. Biden’s new rules state that a project’s “direct, indirect, and cumulative” impacts on climate change must be taken into consideration. Cumulative impacts must include the entire lifetime of a project, and indirect impacts could include, for example, an oil pipeline’s tendency to reduce the cost of oil and delay adoption of more climate-friendly technology like electric vehicles.

The rule changes provide Mr. Biden with a convenient way to appease members of the more progressive wing of his party, who see climate change as an existential threat to humanity, without the blessing of lawmakers in Congress, who have so far balked at some of his proposals on the issue.  

In some circles, the changes made during the Trump years were a welcome respite from the previous five decades, but still not enough to make building back better any easier. Mr. Biden, one said, is moving in the wrong direction.

The deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, a California think tank that focuses on technological solutions to human problems, Alex Trembath, said removing the bureaucratic hurdles that make clean-energy and other infrastructure projects possible will require a wholesale rethinking of the regulatory framework.

“It is overly onerous to build almost anything in this country,” Mr. Trembath said. “At best, the Biden administration is just rearranging the deckchairs on our regulatory Titanic. What we need are legal and legislative changes, not just tinkering around the edges.”