The US Environmental Protection Agency is implementing a sweeping overhaul of its National Environmental Policy Act review procedures, targeting faster timelines and narrower assessments.
The changes follow the US Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, which endorsed a narrower vision of NEPA focused on informing agency decisions rather than producing exhaustive analyses of indirect, cumulative, or policy-related impacts.
In June, the EPA undertook two significant actions designed to align its NEPA procedures with executive orders, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025.
The first action was a memorandum from Deputy Administrator David Fotouhi directing EPA reviewers to focus their assessments of other federal agencies’ Environmental Impact Statements strictly on EPA’s own statutory responsibilities.
The second was a proposed rule to amend 40 C.F.R. Part 6, which governs EPA’s own NEPA procedures, incorporating hard page limits, completion deadlines, and recent statutory and judicial developments.
The Fotouhi Memo represents a formal policy shift, limiting EPA’s comments on other agencies’ Environmental Impact Statements to issues within EPA’s statutory authorities rather than broader environmental expertise.
The memo establishes three guiding principles for EPA comment letters: be focused, limiting comments to authority under statutes such as the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act; be succinct; and be helpful by providing constructive guidance to the lead agency.
The memo expressly prohibits comments referencing policy preferences not substantiated by an enumerated statutory authority and directs EPA to refrain from suggesting analysis not required by law.
For project sponsors, this means EPA is far less likely to raise broad environmental justice, climate, or cumulative-impact objections during review of another agency’s Environmental Impact Statement.
EPA’s proposed rule, titled “Update of Procedures for Implementing the National Environmental Policy Act and Assessing the Environmental Effects Abroad of EPA Actions,” was issued for public comment on June 25.
Environmental Impact Statements, which currently average 661 pages, would be capped at 150 pages, or 300 pages for actions of extraordinary complexity, and must be completed within two years.
Environmental assessments would be limited to 75 pages with a one-year completion deadline, forcing EPA to concentrate on decision-relevant impacts rather than exhaustive cataloguing of downstream effects.
The proposed rule also creates a simplified process for establishing and adopting categorical exclusions across agencies, potentially allowing infrastructure projects to benefit from exclusions already established by other bodies such as the USDA.
It permits project sponsors to prepare their own environmental assessments and Environmental Impact Statements under agency supervision and authorises payment of fees for expedited review deadlines under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The rule also formally removes references to rescinded Council on Environmental Quality NEPA regulations and eliminates environmental justice overlays, codifying the Seven County principle that agencies need not trace attenuated chains of causation beyond their statutory responsibilities.
Together, these actions represent what lawyers at ArentFox Schiff LLP describe as the most sweeping overhaul of EPA’s NEPA implementation framework in decades, promising shorter timelines and reduced regulatory uncertainty.
The proposed rule will be subject to a 30-day public comment period following its publication in the Federal Register, and project sponsors and industry stakeholders are encouraged to submit comments during this window.
These reforms are part of a broader administration-wide push to streamline NEPA review processes, with the earliest related effort involving a major consolidation of USDA’s NEPA procedures currently being challenged in the US District Court for the Northern District of California in Center for Biological Diversity v. USDA.
Project sponsors with developments in the NEPA pipeline should review whether the new procedures, once finalised, may accelerate their timelines or reduce review scope, and engage early with EPA during the scoping process.