The Trump administration came into office in 2025 promising to speed federal environmental permitting by, among other things, streamlining compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). In the whirlwind of the first months of the administration, there have been multiple executive orders, rulemakings, and changes to agency procedures related to NEPA. Congress has also added a new section to the law, and the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a ruling on how courts should review agency compliance. This article looks at whether these developments are actually making environmental reviews move more quickly. Initial signs are that legal challenges based on NEPA are becoming more difficult, but agencies’ NEPA reviews are speeding up only for certain types of projects.
NEPA Compliance Drives Permitting Timelines
NEPA is a procedural law that requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their proposed actions, including issuing permits. Most agency actions are subject to “categorical exclusions” or “short environmental assessments,” but major federal actions with significant effects are reviewed in longer “environmental impact statements.” Environmental assessments typically take months or longer to prepare. For example, a recent Department of Transportation report indicates that its recent environmental assessments took an average of 9.6 months. Environmental impact statements take much longer, with the most recent government study showing that the median time to complete one is 2.8 years. Since agencies have to complete their NEPA reviews before making final decisions, the time to complete these reviews typically drives permitting timelines. Agencies’ compliance with NEPA also can be the subject of lawsuits — approximately 100–150 NEPA cases are filed each year — and when courts order agencies to do more analysis, it can dramatically slow permitting timelines. A June 2025 Congressional Research Service report, an academic study reviewing 1,499 federal court cases, and an August 2025 analysis of renewable energy projects found that, historically, about 16% of environmental impact statements and less than 1% of all NEPA actions have faced court challenges.
Recent Changes to NEPA Procedures and Judicial Review of Agency Compliance
In 2025, there have been a number of major developments aimed at least in part at speeding NEPA reviews. The Trump administration has taken a number of actions, including:
- Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” directs the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to rescind governmentwide regulations that specified how agencies should conduct their NEPA reviews. Most federal agencies, including the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Department of Energy, Department of Transportation, Department of the Interior, and Department of Agriculture, have issued interim final rules that also rescind their agency-specific NEPA regulations and leave guidance documents in their place.
- Several executive orders direct agencies to speed up the permitting of certain types of projects. Executive Order 14156, “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” directs federal agencies to use “any lawful emergency authorities available to them” to facilitate the permitting of conventional energy projects — fossil fuel, nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric. In response, the secretary of the interior issued a departmental order directing that environmental assessments for such projects be completed within 14 days and environmental impact statements within 28 days. Executive Order 14318, “Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure,” directs federal agencies to develop new categorical exclusions to cover qualifying data center projects, limits the types of projects subject to NEPA, and generally streamlines environmental permitting.
- Other executive orders seek to make permitting more difficult for other types of projects. Executive Order 14315, “Ending Market Distorting Subsidies for Unreliable, Foreign-Controlled Energy Sources,” orders the elimination of “preferences” for wind and solar energy projects and directs the secretary of the interior to “revise any identified regulations, guidance, policies and practices … to eliminate any such preferences for wind and solar facilities.” In response, the secretary of the interior issued a departmental order that requires his or her personal sign-off on 67 different types of agency actions for wind and solar projects, including issuance of NEPA documents and even Federal Register notices related to implementation of NEPA.
- A presidential memorandum, “Updating Permitting Technology for the 21st Century,” ordered technical improvements to permitting procedures, including NEPA reviews, and created a permitting innovation center.
In addition to the Trump administration’s actions, Congress added a provision to NEPA that allows permit applicants to pay agencies 125% of the cost of preparing NEPA documents in exchange for a 180-day deadline to complete an environmental assessment and a one-year deadline to complete an environmental impact statement. Finally, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a major ruling in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, which emphasized that courts must give agencies substantial deference in how they conduct reviews pursuant to NEPA.
How Recent NEPA Policy Changes Are Impacting Federal Environmental Reviews
These developments should have major effects on NEPA compliance and litigation in future years. The biggest changes relate to NEPA lawsuits, which challenge a small subset of NEPA documents (approximately 100–150 cases a year) out of tens of thousands prepared. For the majority of projects that never go to court, the effects so far are more muted, and whether the NEPA process gets faster depends on the type of project being reviewed.
NEPA Lawsuits: Why Winning Challenges Is Becoming More Difficult
Legal challenges based on NEPA have never been easy for plaintiffs, but they are clearly becoming more difficult. The Supreme Court’s recent Seven County decision limits the scope of environmental effects that agencies must consider when evaluating a project, instructs lower courts to treat deference to agencies as “the central principle of judicial review in NEPA cases,” and indicates that violations of NEPA should not necessarily be grounds for vacating an agency’s decision. The effect of the decision on future NEPA cases will depend on the nature of the project under review and the district judge assigned to the case, but the clear signal is that courts should not “excessively second-guess” agencies’ NEPA compliance.
Another factor that should make it harder for plaintiffs to win is the rescission of federal NEPA regulations by CEQ and individual agencies. Those regulations provided the detailed minimum requirements for NEPA reviews, and plaintiffs typically rely on them to show that an agency’s review was procedurally deficient. Plaintiffs have a much harder time basing a challenge on guidance documents, which by definition are not legally binding and can be ignored by agency staff. Over time, the lack of binding requirements should make it harder for plaintiffs to fault agencies’ NEPA documents.
Since the Supreme Court’s Seven County decision was issued, there have been 17 lower court decisions that reach the merits of NEPA claims (as of August 6, 2025). In every case, the plaintiffs cited CEQ or agency NEPA regulations as at least partial bases for their claims. The plaintiffs prevailed on the NEPA claims in three of those cases, a win rate of approximately 18% for plaintiffs and 82% for agency defendants. Although this is a small sample size and consists primarily of challenges to projects approved under the Biden administration, this plaintiff win rate appears consistent with long-term averages. Over time, however, we expect the plaintiff win rate to decrease as courts decide cases involving projects not subject to NEPA regulations and after the implications of the Seven County decision sink into lower courts. That effect could be offset by rushed and deficient NEPA reviews, as occurred in the first Trump administration. NEPA is still the law, and there is a limit to how cursory a review courts will accept.
How Administration Policies Are Affecting the Speed of NEPA Reviews
By some estimates, there are more than 50,000 NEPA reviews each year and less than 1% result in a court challenge. This means that for most people, what matters is how fast agencies prepare NEPA documents and complete their reviews. The effect of the new developments on the speed of agency NEPA reviews is more mixed so far.
For a subset of projects, agencies’ implementation should move more quickly. Congress amended NEPA to allow project proponents to pay 125% of the estimated cost to prepare NEPA documents in exchange for completion deadlines (six months for environmental assessments and 12 months for environmental impact statements). For those who take advantage of this provision, the NEPA review process should be faster if agencies meet the required deadlines.
Proponents of conventional energy projects and projects related to data centers also should get faster NEPA reviews. The Trump administration has ordered agencies to move more quickly for those types of projects, and presumably they will. There is no comprehensive public database that allows one to see nationwide trends in the pace of NEPA reviews across the federal government, but anecdotally, the reviews of at least some conventional energy projects are moving much more quickly. For example, the Bureau of Land Management recently announced the completion of a final environmental impact statement for a coal mine in Utah, approximately 15 months after the notice of intent to prepare an environmental impact statement was published.
For another subset of projects, agencies’ NEPA reviews will get slower. President Trump has targeted alleged “preferences” for wind and solar projects, much of which were reform efforts from the previous administration designed to streamline permitting. The secretary of the interior now must approve every step in the permitting process for those projects, including those related to NEPA reviews. This is sure to slow down the NEPA process for those projects, making the situation worse. Anecdotally, this is exactly what is happening, but it is hard to obtain statistical data.
It is an open question what will happen to the great majority of NEPA reviews that are not related to energy or data centers. The Trump administration’s primary initiative has been to rescind CEQ and agency NEPA regulations, apparently based on the theory that removing procedural steps will make the process move more quickly. Whether this will work remains to be seen, for at least two reasons. First, most of the procedures formerly contained in the NEPA regulations remain in agency guidance memos. Agency staff typically follow guidance as if it were a regulatory requirement even if third-party litigants cannot rely on it, which means that the process may not change much in practice. Second, the NEPA regulations established minimum — not maximum — requirements for agency reviews. Agencies’ permitting processes are also driven by other factors, including the number of agency staff, the process by which staff conduct evaluations, priorities of the agency regarding the speed of reviews, and the requirements of statutes other than NEPA. NEPA reviews will not run faster if there are not enough agency staff to conduct them, if the review process at the staff level remains complex and arcane, or if agencies prioritize other tasks.
The most promising strategy is the technology modernization of the NEPA process required by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023. Congress required the executive branch to explore ways to use technology to speed NEPA reviews and then report back to Congress. The Biden administration took initial steps toward this in 2024, and the Trump administration appears to be running with it in 2025. It is not yet apparent whether this is having an effect, but this kind of systemic reform could make a real difference over time.
Conclusion
It is too early to fully assess the effect of recent NEPA developments, but to date the primary effect has been on NEPA lawsuits. The pace at which agencies prepare NEPA documents appears to be getting faster for certain types of projects, such as conventional energy projects and data centers, slower for other types of projects, such as wind and solar, and with no material change for the vast majority of projects — which is pretty much everything else.
