The Supreme Court’s Seven Counties decision narrows NEPA’s scope by limiting required environmental reviews to impacts within an agency’s regulatory authority. This decision will likely shift, rather than eliminate, litigation risk and reinforces the role of state and local laws in shaping project outcomes.

Considered the “magna carta” of environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires that agencies incorporate environmental considerations into major federal actions.  While NEPA does not impose substantive environmental constraints on federal projects, it does require that agencies take a “hard look” at the potential impacts of projects and engage in a transparent decisionmaking process.  Over time, litigation has expanded the scope and complexity of environmental reviews, which has prolonged the process and elevated compliance costs. This has raised the question of whether NEPA has evolved from a public disclosure law to a tool used to block projects altogether. This tension was central to the May 2025 decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County in which the Supreme Court addressed the question of how far agencies must go when evaluating the environmental effects of major federal infrastructure in the NEPA review process.

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GW Regulatory Digest, Finn Dobkin