A chain of events that started on Inauguration Day culminated with the June 30, 2025, withdrawal of National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) regulations that have, since the 1970s, structured decision-making processes at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Transportation, and the Department of the Interior (DOI).
Since 1978, Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) regulations have provided federal agencies with a consistent framework for implementing NEPA, enhancing coordination, and providing greater certainty for project applicants.
In 2020, CEQ undertook a comprehensive update of its NEPA regulations to implement the first Trump administration’s policy of “establishing discipline and accountability in the environmental review and permitting process for infrastructure projects.” Agencies were directed to update their NEPA regulations accordingly by 2021. Despite two subsequent phases of CEQ rulemaking and codification of aspects of the 2020 regulation by the 2023 amendments to NEPA, agency NEPA regulations had yet to be updated at the start of the second Trump administration.
Executive Order 14154, issued on January 20, 2025, directed CEQ to propose rescinding its regulations and to “coordinate the revision of agency-level implementing regulations for consistency,” with the intent that such action would expedite environmental review for implementation of the administration’s energy policy. CEQ promptly rescinded its regulations and issued guidance for agencies to update their regulations in accordance with CEQ’s rescinded 2020 regulations. By directing federal agencies to use CEQ’s 2020 regulations as an “initial framework for the development of revisions to their NEPA implementing procedures,” CEQ seemed to indicate that agency NEPA regulations should preserve the interagency coordination framework created by the CEQ regulations.
Despite the executive order’s directive for CEQ to coordinate consistent revisions to agency-level implementing regulations and CEQ’s guidance for updating agency-level regulations, the agencies issued interim final rules on June 30, 2025, that largely reduce their longstanding NEPA regulations to non-binding guidance.[1] This move may undercut the likelihood that NEPA documents will withstand judicial scrutiny, as judicial deference to a guidance document “depends upon the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade.”[2] For the first time since President Jimmy Carter directed CEQ to issue regulations to “make the environmental impact statement process more useful to decisionmakers and the public, and to reduce paperwork and the accumulation of extraneous background data,” agencies now lack a unified regulatory framework for the environmental review and authorization of major federal actions.
The DOI’s interim final rule exemplifies this radical shift in NEPA implementation. DOI’s NEPA procedures were codified in 2008 under the Bush administration as part of a broader interagency effort to increase deference to agency-specific NEPA procedures and advance the Bush administration’s “cooperative conservation” policy with opportunities for public engagement and input in the NEPA process. These regulations have now been largely reduced to a section in the DOI manual, retaining only provisions for applicant-prepared environmental documents, emergency procedures, and department-wide categorical exclusions. The 2020 CEQ policy direction on the use of the NEPA process to ensure discipline and accountability is not reflected in DOI’s interim final rule. DOI’s detailed procedures for public involvement and interagency coordination, which were designed to foster efficiency and certainty based on a common set of standards, are now relegated to non-binding guidance. DOI has stated that the flexibility afforded by non-codified procedures outweighs the benefits of maintaining NEPA procedures as regulations. Addressing the interests of third parties that rely on the prior regulations, DOI states that "revised agency procedures will have no effect on ongoing NEPA reviews, where DOI, following CEQ guidance, will continue to apply the preexisting procedures to applications that are sufficiently advanced.” Notably, DOI did not appear to consider the implications of rapidly changing NEPA procedures on project developers and the public, who rely on regulatory certainty and consistency in environmental review.
Lost in this interim final rulemaking is CEQ’s direction on NEPA interpretation, which is entitled to deference under precedent reaffirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado. Aside from implementing the 2023 Fiscal Responsibility Act’s amendments to NEPA, other aspects of NEPA practice, including the identification of “significant” environmental effects, the requirements for “scoping” the environmental impact assessment, interagency coordination, and issue resolution appear to be open to various agency interpretations, potentially on a project-by-project basis, in the absence of CEQ regulations. As the Supreme Court noted in Seven County, “an agency will invariably make a series of fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry” when assessing significant environmental effects and feasible alternatives for NEPA purposes. Without a regulatory structure for NEPA analysis that is consistent across agencies, infrastructure development proponents and other users of the NEPA process will need to engage with agencies in a project-specific negotiation over the structure of a NEPA process that may fall in or out of a “broad zone of reasonableness.” This guidance-based set of fluid NEPA standards introduces significant risks of inefficiency, environmental conflict, and litigation. The resulting uncertainty may undermine the defensibility of environmental documents, as courts will no longer have a cohesive set of regulations to which they can defer and must now interpret guidance on a case-by-case basis. This unprecedented uncertainty could undermine progress and investment in major infrastructure projects. Rather than expediting energy project timelines as intended by Executive Order 14154, the transition to non-binding guidance could instead result in extended and more frequently litigated environmental reviews.
Ultimately, the full consequences of the interim final rules may take years to become clear. Interested stakeholders should consider submitting comments on the agencies’ interim final rules. The comment period will be open until August 4, 2025.
[1] The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission opted to simply excise references to the rescinded CEQ regulations from their regulations. Department of Transportation revisions are limited by the environmental review requirements of Section 139, and other agencies have yet to act.
[2] Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369, 388 (2024) (citing Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134, 140 (1944)
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