“New NEPA”

Setting the stage for the more recent developments, on June 3, 2023, President Biden signed the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which included NEPA amendments focused on streamlining the environmental review process and setting time and page limits for NEPA reviews.

Then, on November 12, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that the White House Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”) lacked authority to issue binding regulations governing how all federal agencies comply with NEPA.¹ While the Court went through a lengthy analysis concerning the invalidity of CEQ’s NEPA regulations—which have been in place for over 50 years—such discussion was dicta as the Court based its decision on the Agencies’ acting arbitrarily and capriciously.² Since then, at least one district court has explicitly held that CEQ lacked authority to issue binding regulations and vacated the 2024 amendments to its NEPA regulations.³

Earlier this year, President Trump issued several Executive Orders (“EOs”) calling on various agencies and other governmental entities (including CEQ) to simplify their respective permitting processes and amend or rescind their NEPA implementing regulations.  These include EO 14154, Unleashing American Energy, which called for CEQ to rescind its existing NEPA regulations and provide “guidance” to simplify the permitting process, and, as an agency-specific example, EO 14301, Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy, which tasked the Department with reforming its NEPA regulations.

Finally, on May 29, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, holding NEPA was a purely procedural statute that did not mandate specific results or require review of the effects of projects other than the one that resulted in the NEPA review.⁴ Justice Kavanaugh, writing for a unanimous Court, explained that the “goal of the law is to inform agency decision making, not to paralyze it.” After Seven County, courts must give “substantial deference” to the agency's determination as to the length, content, and level of detail of the environmental impact statement prepared for a project, including “(i) how far to go in considering indirect environmental effects from the project at hand and (iii) whether to analyze environmental effects from other projects separate in time or place from the project at hand.” The Court also reaffirmed that agencies are not obligated to (but may) consider the environmental impacts of separate, foreseeable projects over which they have neither responsibility nor regulatory authority.

As a result of the above changes and directives, many federal agencies issued new NEPA regulations in late June and early July 2025. These include the Departments of Defense, Energy, Transportation, Agriculture, and Interior, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Most recently, on July 4, President Trump signed into law the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, creating an avenue for even more expedited NEPA review. Under new NEPA Section 112, project sponsors that pay 125% of the estimated cost of preparing or supervising an environmental assessment (“EA”) or environmental impact statement (“EIS”) can accelerate timelines to 180 days or less for EAs and one year or less for EISs.

This post is the first in a series of analyses by our experts of the “New NEPA” as reflected in these midyear regulations. 

The Hogan Lovells team is prepared to assist in navigating this New NEPA landscape.

Authored by Stewart Forbes, Hilary Tompkins, Jim Banks, and Phil Sandick.