With significant developments in all three branches of the federal government, 2025 ushered in fundamental changes to implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Executive action reshaped agency procedures. The Supreme Court clarified the limits of judicial review. Congress continued to push statutory time limits.
While the changes create opportunities for faster, more focused NEPA reviews, they also introduce new complexity. As agencies adopt differing implementation approaches and courts signal increased deference to agency decision-making, questions of consistency, scope, and long-term defensibility take on greater importance.
What is NEPA?
NEPA is a procedural statute that was signed into law on January 1, 1970. While NEPA does not dictate what action must or should be taken, it does require federal agencies to consider the environmental effects of their actions. The depth of this analysis and the associated documentation generally depends on whether the environmental effects are expected to be “significant.” Agencies may apply a categorical exclusion (CE) if the proposed action is one that normally does not have significant effects and no site-specific extraordinary circumstances are present. An environmental assessment (EA) may be prepared for actions that have no reasonably foreseeable significant effects or if the significance is unknown. And, absent a legal exemption, NEPA requires an environmental impact statement (EIS) for proposed actions with reasonably foreseeable significant effects.
NEPA also established the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) within the Executive Office of the President to guide implementation of NEPA’s national policy. In the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter issued an Executive Order (EO) directing the CEQ to establish government-wide regulations for the application of NEPA and requiring federal agencies to follow those regulations. First promulgated in 1978, the CEQ regulations were the playbook for NEPA implementation across the federal government for over 40 years.
Executive Branch Reforms to NEPA Implementation Procedures
Shortly after taking office in January 2025, President Donald Trump issued an EO titled Unleashing American Energy, which revoked President Carter’s EO directing CEQ to issue regulations. President Trump’s EO further directed CEQ to propose rescinding its government-wide NEPA regulations and issue non-binding guidance on how agencies should implement NEPA. In February 2025, CEQ followed through with an interim final rule0F[1] rescinding its regulations alongside guidance1F[2] directing all federal agencies to revise (or establish for the first time) their NEPA implementation procedures no later than February 19, 2025. Agencies across the government have responded with revisions to their NEPA procedures.
However, approaches to the revisions vary considerably from agency to agency. The Department of the Interior, for example, rescinded many of its own implementation regulations, opting to maintain the majority of its NEPA procedures in a non-binding departmental guidance. The Department’s remaining regulations now cover only a few discrete parts the NEPA process—identifying lead and cooperating agencies, applicant-prepared environmental documents, emergency procedures, and categorical exclusions. The Army Corps of Engineers, by contrast, chose to codify comprehensive NEPA implementation procedures for multiple programs, including the Army civil works regulatory program that implements the Corps’ permitting authority under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The Department of Agriculture and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission have likewise decided to maintain their comprehensive implementation regulations with adjustments reflecting recission of the CEQ regulations and recent amendments to NEPA itself. The resulting diversity of NEPA implementation approaches presents a fluid new landscape for agency staff, project proponents, and the public.
Emissions transparency and climate risk accountability continue to be driven by state policy, international regulation, and capital markets.
NEPA in the Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado on May 29, 2025, has been widely cited by CEQ and other federal agencies as a justification for reforming their NEPA procedures. The decision centered on a 3,600-page EIS evaluating the environmental effects of a proposed 88-mile railroad line in Utah’s Uinta Basin. The Court held that a lower court erred in concluding that the EIS was inadequate because it did not sufficiently address separate, future projects that could be facilitated by the railroad—primarily increased oil drilling “upstream” in the Uinta Basin and increased oil refining “downstream” along the Gulf Coast. Writing for the Court, Justice Brett Kavanagh reaffirmed that NEPA has always been “purely procedural,” ensuring that the federal agency and the public are aware of the environmental consequences of “the project at issue.” He then called for a “course correction” away from “overly intrusive (and unpredictable)” judicial review that had “transformed” a “modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool” for slowing or altogether stopping projects.
The Seven County decision signals a shift in how courts are expected to review NEPA analysis. Specifically, the decision instructs lower courts to afford greater deference to agency choices about the scope and content of their NEPA documents. The Court emphasized that the judicial role in NEPA cases is not to “micromanage” those choices but to instead defer when the agency’s choices are “reasonable and reasonably explained.” Further, the Court explained that NEPA does not require agencies to evaluate the environmental effects of geographically and temporally separate projects, particularly when the agency lacks regulatory authority over the separate projects. In this case, the relevant environmental effects were those of “the project at hand,” the proposed railroad line, and not separate, independent projects that may later utilize the railroad. Current CEQ guidance underscores the Court’s course correction, directing all federal agencies to focus their NEPA reviews on “the proposed action at hand and that action’s effects.”
Congressional Reforms
The 119th Congress has shown interest in building on the NEPA process reforms in the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA). Although the FRA was the first comprehensive amendment to NEPA since the statute’s enactment in 1970, it largely codified practices that had developed under CEQ’s now-rescinded regulations. For example, the FRA brought into the statute the established practice of using CEs and EAs to document NEPA compliance for federal actions without reasonably foreseeable significant effects on the quality of the human environment. However, the FRA’s page limits and judicially enforceable deadlines for environmental documents also signaled that lawmakers were serious about speeding up the NEPA process.
That policy trend continued with the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which President Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025. This budget reconciliation bill added a new Section 112 to NEPA. The new section gives project sponsors the option to pay 125% of the anticipated cost of preparing an EA or EIS, as determined by CEQ, in exchange for shorter deadlines—compressing the FRA’s 1-year deadline for an EA to 180 days, and the 2-year deadline for an EIS to 1 year. As of this writing, Congress is considering additional NEPA amendments as part of a broader push to reform federal permitting. One leading example, the SPEED Act, passed the House of Representatives on December 18, 2025, and is pending in the Senate as of this writing.
Key Takeaways
With new direction from CEQ, the shift to agency-specific implementation procedures, Seven County’s call for course correction, and persistent congressional focus on process reforms, 2025 was one of the most memorable, and perhaps pivotal, years in NEPA’s 50+ year history. All three branches of government have pushed for faster, more focused NEPA reviews. But NEPA continues to require a “hard look” at the reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of major federal actions. Indeed, Seven County acknowledges that reasonable and reasonably explained agency action remains a baseline requirement for NEPA implementation.
Success in this new environment will come not simply from meeting deadlines and page limits, but from ensuring environmental documents present rigorous, well-reasoned environmental analysis. Speed does not guarantee defensibility, and defensibility is the key to advancing projects beyond the NEPA process.
In this evolving NEPA landscape, success will depend on more than acceleration. It will depend on disciplined scope management, clear documentation, and analysis that can withstand scrutiny. At Spheros Environmental, we pair regulatory fluency with science-forward environmental expertise – helping clients develop focused, defensible environmental documents aligned with both project realities and legal standards.
About the Author
Mark Cecchini Beaver is Regulatory Policy Lead for Spheros Environmental’s Northwest Division. He holds a Juris Doctor with emphasis in natural resource and environmental law and a master’s degree in water resources science and management. He has represented federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the Idaho Department of Water Resources, and brings over a decade of experience at the intersection of science, policy, and environmental law.