By Timothy Puko

WASHINGTON -- President Trump has ordered federal agencies to use emergency authority to sidestep environmental reviews to expedite highways, pipelines and other major infrastructure projects as a way to boost an economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic.

The executive order Mr. Trump signed Thursday builds off a national-emergency declaration for the pandemic with a broad effort to, at least temporarily, suspend bedrock environmental laws. It orders agencies to find projects that could help an economic recovery and then work with senior administration officials identifying emergency exemptions and ways around standard requirements of the National Environmental Policy and Endangered Species acts, among others.

It is one of two moves the administration announced Thursday to restrain environmental regulators. Environmental Protection Agency leaders said they are proposing new standards for crafting Clean Air Act rules, limiting the ways the agency can use public-health benefits to justify major new air regulations.

A senior administration official says the environmental permitting process is broken and prone to political inaction, and the order says federal agencies need to further overhaul an "outdated" bureaucracy. That mirrors Mr. Trump's comments from January when he proposed a long-term overhaul of permitting under the National Environmental Policy Act, including two-year time limits on environmental reviews.

Waiving NEPA requirements would likely give developers a way around environmental assessments and processes designed to court community feedback and give some local control over major infrastructure projects. Mr. Trump is also ordering the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to speed up civil works projects, and the Interior, Agriculture and Defense departments to expedite projects on federal lands.

"Unnecessary regulatory delays will deny our citizens opportunities for jobs and economic security, keeping millions of Americans out of work and hindering our economic recovery from the national emergency," Mr. Trump says in the order.

Separately, the EPA said Wednesday it was looking to standardize how it calculated the human costs and benefits of clean-air regulations -- drawing support from some business groups, and opposition from environmentalists.

The EPA has been working on the proposal for a year, saying it is a Trump administration initiative to root out costly regulations. It will require a cost-benefit analysis consistent with White House protocols for all future, major clean-air rules, and prohibit new air rules from being justified primarily by public health benefits that are from improvements secondary to the purpose of the rule, known as co-benefits, the EPA said.

Administrator Andrew Wheeler said Thursday that he wants to implement standards in response to rule changes from the Obama era that used inconsistent cost estimates or that showed a public benefit only because co-benefits outweighed compliance costs.

"The agency has been inconsistent with its application, causing confusion and concerns that EPA rules may ignore costs or inflate benefits," Mr. Wheeler told reporters in a telephone briefing Thursday. "We are putting into place more consistent rules that balance the benefits of a reduction of a pollutant with the costs of limiting the creation of the same pollutant."

Business interests and conservative groups have repeatedly complained that Obama-era rules ascribed too much value to human health and environmental improvements, or unfairly relied on co-benefits. Major business groups including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute cheered on EPA's announcement.

The policy will bring "consistency and greater transparency in analyzing the benefits and costs of proposed rules," Frank Macchiarola, API's senior vice president of policy, economics and regulatory affairs, said in a statement.

Environmental groups say reducing the importance of co-benefits in these analyses will play down their importance in improving public health. It is also likely to raise the bar EPA will have to clear any time it wants to make more stringent rules in the future. The Sierra Club called it a disgrace to propose the change in the middle of a public health crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

"The public's anger is growing toward the Trump's administration's clandestine attempts to elevate polluters above our bedrock environmental laws like the Clean Air Act," Liz Perera, the group's climate policy director said in a statement. "We will not sit idly by while this happens."

Mr. Wheeler said the change isn't specifically related to climate, and part of an effort to broadly bring consistency to EPA rules. More proposals for land, water and chemical regulations will come next, he said.

The proposal for air rules will be out for 45 days of public comment after it is published in the Federal Register.

Write to Timothy Puko at tim.puko@wsj.com