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The National Environmental Policy Act is facing reform. Environmental and recreation advocacy groups have concerns that the changes could rid NEPA of some of its essential functions.

Chris Dillmann/Vail Daily archive

The National Environmental Policy Act has not been immune to changes since President Richard Nixon signed it into law 55 years ago. Under the direction of President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress, however, it is facing significant reforms in the name of efficiency that environmental advocates say could erode the act’s effectiveness.

Multiple actions — including Trump’s executive orders around energy, changes to regulations and guidance, the May Supreme Court decision on the Uinta Basin rail project and Republicans’ budget package — could mean big changes for the act.

Since its passage in the 1970s, NEPA has been lauded as the bedrock for environmental policy in the United States.

“Although we have substantive statutes like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, these are all siloed approaches to addressing the environment,” said Jonathan Skinner-Thompson, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School, where he specializes in administrative and environmental law. “Only NEPA requires a comprehensive and holistic review of environmental impacts.”

NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of proposed actions such as issuing development permits, adopting federal land management actions, creating new recreation opportunities, building highways and publicly-owned facilities, and more.

Does NEPA need to change or modernize?

The Republican proposals, directives from the Trump administration and recent court decisions suggest that the act has grown beyond its initial intent and requires reforms to increase the efficiency of environmental reviews.

“NEPA today is used to stonewall any project opposition groups want to deny,” said Melissa Simpson, the newly appointed president of the Western Energy Alliance. “It’s not what Congress envisioned 50 years ago. NEPA needs to be reformed and every producer of energy, regardless of form, recognizes that fact.”

The Western Energy Alliance is a trade group representing oil and gas companies in 13 states, including Colorado, and has supported many of the recent directives around NEPA.

Project 2025 — a conservative playbook written ahead of Trump’s election and inauguration — referred to NEPA as a “tree-killing, project-dooming, decade-spanning monstrosity” that has been abused to “advance a radical climate agenda.”

The plan recommended the administration and Congress make “common sense” reforms to the policy and return it to the initial intent, which it argues was “a short, succinct, timely presentation of information regarding major federal action that significantly affects the quality of the human environment so that decision makers can make informed decisions to benefit the American people.”

One of the reforms recommended in Project 2025 is to eliminate judicial review of NEPA actions, which is targeted in the proposed changes to the policy in the reconciliation bill passed by the House. Environmental advocates argue NEPA could also be impacted by the Supreme Court’s Uinta Basin decision.

The recent proposals and changes have led to rising concerns from lawmakers, communities, and environmental advocates that NEPA could lose some of its most important functions, namely public input, and lead to less rigorous and holistic reviews of proposed actions.

“You really see actions being taken that will weaken NEPA to the point where it won’t have any of its desired effects anymore,” said Paul Sanford, director of equitable access policy at The Wilderness Society. Sanford runs the NEPA team at the advocacy organization focused on public land protection.

What’s happening with NEPA would “obliterate both of the purposes” of the act, he said, adding that first, it ensures that a government agency “bases its decisions on sound science and a careful analysis of the potential impacts” of any action, permit, or decision being made. And second, it provides a mechanism for private citizens to have a voice in government processes.

Some changes to NEPA could have an outsized impact on Colorado’s mountain cities and towns, where public land surrounds communities and economies are centered on tourism and recreation.

Jamie Ervin, the senior policy manager at Outdoor Alliance, a coalition of 10 member-based organizations representing outdoor recreation interests, said the act is “core to how the outdoor recreation community interacts with the public lands agencies.”

“Environmental health is important to (the outdoor recreation) community because we love to get outside, and we don’t want to be in polluted landscapes and developed areas,” Ervin said. “The public comment and public input process that NEPA affords us is often the way that we come to understand what agencies are planning to do on public lands that are valuable for outdoor recreation.”

U.S. Forest Service employees clear timber from a trail in the White River National Forest. Aspen Times archive

Concerns about the effectiveness and timeliness of NEPA reviews come through on both sides of the argument about these policy changes. However, both sides offer different explanations for the cause.

“Most of the situations in which delays have occurred can be attributed to one of a number of things that really aren’t NEPA’s fault; there is a shortage of staff and staff time to complete analyses,” Sandford said.

To support this, Sanford cited a 2022 research study , which studied over 41,000 NEPA decisions completed by the U.S. Forest Service between 2004 and 2020. The Forest Service conducts more environmental impact statements than any other federal agency. It claimed that these statements represent less than 1% of all NEPA decisions, but that data on other decisions is limited. The study concluded that delays were most often attributed to staff turnover, inadequate budgets, delays in receiving information from applications and more.

Ervin called it a “myth” that projects always take multiple years, noting “a lot of things happen fairly quickly. However, he indicated that recent workforce reductions won’t help.

“The gutting of the federal land management agencies through budget cuts being proposed is going to severely limit their ability to do rigorous NEPA analysis at all,” he added. “We are open to making (NEPA) more efficient while keeping guardrails in place and achieving the environmental part of its mission.”

In the House Natural Resources Committee’s proposal for the budget reconciliation package, it claimed that NEPA’s environmental analyses have added significant time and cost burdens to development projects. The committee’s report claims that “constant litigation” is one of the main factors contributing to excessive bureaucracy, citing a study from Breakthrough Institute. The California think tank reported that NEPA-related litigation, on average, takes 4.2 years to resolve.

“Activist groups are using federal courts to force limitless environmental reviews that go far beyond the scope of a project,” Simpson said.

She claimed that “on average, it takes 4.5 years to complete an environmental impact statement.”

What changes is NEPA facing?

Concerns that NEPA processes have become increasingly complex, costly and lengthy are leading to proposals and changes from Republicans and the Trump administration. Ali Longwell/Vail Daily

Pulling back the Council on Environmental Quality’s NEPA regulations

The current administration — aligning with recent court decisions that concluded the Council on Environmental Quality does not have the legal authority to issue regulations and bind federal agencies to their interpretation of NEPA — issued a rule earlier this year removing the council regulations for the act. These regulations historically gave federal agencies a baseline set of rules to adopt.

“The rescission is final and CEQ has reportedly directed agencies to consider updating their existing NEPA rules instead of replacing them with nonbinding guidance as CEQ originally instructed,” Skinner-Thompson said, adding that any regulation changes would be subject to public review and still need to comply with NEPA as written.

It’s too early to tell how this could change NEPA processes, but there are some concerns that it could decrease its potency.

“The (CEQ) regulations ensured a relatively consistent application of NEPA across the federal family,” Sanford said. “I think we’re going to see a greater degree of inconsistency, a greater degree of variance in the way that agencies fulfill their NEPA obligations, and we’re going to see less science and less opportunities for public participation.”

Simpson said the Western Energy Alliance is waiting to see how this changes interagency coordination on projects.

“The implications for a small project like a specific well pad are not as significant as with a major infrastructure that involves multiple agencies,” Simpson said.

The May 2025 Supreme Court ruling on the proposed 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway narrowed the scope of what environmental impacts an agency is required to analyze under NEPA. Ali Longwell/Vail Daily archive

Supreme Court narrows scope of NEPA

In late May, a Supreme Court ruling on the proposed 88-mile Uinta Basin Railway narrowed the scope of what environmental impacts an agency is required to analyze under NEPA.

“The decision stressed that NEPA is ‘purely procedural’ and that NEPA does not require agencies to consider upstream/downstream impacts from projects that are separate in time or place from the action that is subject to NEPA review,” Skinner-Thompson said.

In the case, the plaintiffs (Eagle County and five environmental groups) argued that the review of the railway failed to study downstream impacts such as how increased rail traffic would impact wildfire risk and impacts on water resources and other biological resources.

Simpson said the ruling affirms that NEPA has “limits that have been far exceeded by opposition groups and numerous judges.”

“The court made clear NEPA must be limited to the scope of the project at hand and not every potential impact that could be possibly imagined,” she said.

The ruling also reaffirms that courts should defer to agencies on things like “the appropriate scope of analysis under NEPA (and where it should reasonably end),” Skinner-Thompson said, adding that this contrasts with the 2024 Supreme Court Loper Bright ruling that said the opposite.

Sanford warned that the ruling could have significant consequences.

“What’s going to happen is agencies are now sort of authorized to look at things in isolation without taking a look at what’s going to happen down the road,” Sanford said. “That’s going to really open the door to a lot of potential environmental effects that will have adverse effects on people and on communities that will go unidentified and unanalyzed.”

Sanford argued that this will also curtail the ability of individuals to challenge NEPA actions in court.

“It will be more difficult to prove that an agency’s NEPA analysis was insufficient and too narrow to adequately evaluate the environmental impacts of an agency decision,” he said. “A right without a remedy is no right at all, and this has the effect of taking away the public’s remedy.”

Trump’s one big bill proposes big changes to NEPA

Legal review is also threatened in the NEPA changes proposed in Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.”

As proposed, project sponsors could pay a fee to fast-track the NEPA process: one year for an environmental impact statement and six months for an environmental assessment. When sponsors pay the fee — set at 125% of the costs to prepare the assessment — it would also shield the review from judicial review.

The changes were included in the bill that was passed by the House in May and mirrored in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee proposal for the reconciliation package as it now makes its way through the chamber.

The House committee Republicans claimed in a memo that the changes would streamline a NEPA process that has become “increasingly complex, resulting in unwieldy NEPA documents and timelines and increased frivolous litigation.”

As proposed, Simpson said it would “prevent abuse by opposition groups who seek endless judicial reviews as a means to halting economic development.”

However, there are concerns that these changes would dismantle the intended purpose of NEPA.

“If the House bill becomes law, it would essentially neuter the NEPA process (by preventing parties from being able to go to court over a NEPA analysis),” Skinner-Thompson said. “If parties can’t go to court, and if they can’t get an injunction, NEPA won’t really mean anything.”

The fee model would “advantage big developers and companies with a lot of money,” Ervin said.

“And it’s just not how the process is intended to work,” he added.

The fight for the heart of NEPA isn’t over, Sanford emphasized.

“We’re going to continue to fight for those principles and try to ensure that the purposes of NEPA are fulfilled, that agencies make sound decisions based on valid science and that the public has the opportunity to play a role in the process of deciding what happens in their communities,” he said.