What blocks the project from continuing is the local environmental lobby and the national environmental lobby that has pushed for laws like NEPA that the group of projects was exempted from requiring individual approvals for.

Effectively the project required the exemption that allows them to group things together because regulation that some environmentalists lobbied for that is supported by the majority of environmentalists in America is used by some environmentalists to block all projects. Consequently, the cost for the projects is high and the certainty of their completion is low.

These make the projects risky. The federal government revoked this exemption so that the projects have to go through the same environmental review as every other project, because that is what many environmentalists have argued for and the most powerful environmentalists have won.

Therefore many things are simultaneously true:

* the dept of the interior did not cancel the projects

* they returned them to normal conditions

* normal conditions make the projects hard to do

* they de-facto canceled them by making them hard to do