A Court Just Broke America’s Most Divisive Environmental Law. Here’s What Happens Next.

A moment of profound uncertainty for many of America’s environmental laws has just become even more uncertain-er. This week, as President-elect Donald Trump considers how to revise or repeal the country’s bedrock climate laws, one of the country’s oldest environmental laws has been thrown into jeopardy.

A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled earlier this week that key rules governing the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions, do not carry the force of law. The ruling might — might — lay the groundwork for a massive revolution in the country’s environmental permitting regime. But for the time being, they guarantee a lot of chaos.

Whenever the federal government wants to build a new piece of infrastructure — and to some degree, whenever it wants to do anything significant — it has to go through NEPA. That sounds great in theory, but NEPA studies — which were originally meant to be just a few pages long — have now swelled in length, running into the thousands of pages and taking years to complete. They have become the subject of criticism from conservatives and some liberals.

That’s because NEPA doesn’t actually require the government to take the most environmentally friendly action. It only mandates that the government study the alternatives and arrive at a decision. Many critics, including progressives, now argue that NEPA has become a great bulwark of the status quo — a way for wealthy NIMBYs to slow down and block virtually any project they don’t like, including the large-scale solar, wind, and transmission projects necessary for the energy transition.

Other progressives argue that NEPA still serves a purpose — that it’s the only way environmental groups can provide a check on factory farms, new federal construction projects, or other big pieces of infrastructure. They say Congress should reform NEPA by affirmatively expanding parts of the permitting regime, adding new requirements to the process. The NEPA process is so time-consuming today not because it has become unwieldy, they say, but because the federal government does not employ enough civil servants to conduct the required studies on time. (NEPA’s critics reply to this, in essence: Sure, but why does NEPA require all those studies in the first place?)

At the heart of the case is a small federal agency called the Council on Environmental Quality. Since its creation in 1970, the Council on Environmental Quality has issued guidelines about how federal agencies should comply with NEPA. These rules have been treated as legally binding — that is, quasi-law on the same tier as federal regulation — since at least 1977.

In the ensuing decades, presidents from both parties have acted under the impression that the Council on Environmental Quality’s NEPA rules are binding. That’s why the first Trump administration went through the hassle of rewriting the council’s rules, subjecting them to the same notice-and-comment process other federal regulations must go through before they can be changed. The Biden administration later replaced the Trump administration’s rules with its own version.

But that actually isn’t the case, the judges ruled. The Council on Environmental Quality was never allowed to issue binding regulations about NEPA in the first place, they decided.

The Council on Environmental Quality can issue guidelines about how agencies should follow NEPA, the judges said. But these will have the same legal authority as executive orders, which can guide agency decisionmaking but provide no outside legal recourse. Executive orders are sort of like internal corporate policies for the government: They’re supposed to be followed by employees, but nobody can appeal to a court that a company got them wrong. What the council cannot do, the court said, is issue rules, quasi-laws that outside groups can appeal to and claim aren’t being obeyed in court.

If upheld, the ruling would throw virtually the entire body of law around NEPA into question — hundreds of cases, thousands of pages of rules, and hundreds of thousands of analyses all premised on the idea that the Center on Environmental Quality is the final NEPA arbiter. It could also vastly weaken NEPA, allowing the government to build projects quickly while giving Americans and nonprofit groups little recourse to stop them.

“It’s a very big deal,” James Coleman, an energy law professor at the University of Minnesota, told me. “NEPA by itself is a very limited piece of text. When it was adopted, no one imagined that it would lead to this comprehensive permitting system where it would take five years to get a permit.”

Over time, court cases and White House regulations have turned NEPA into the juggernaut that it is today. But now that’s exactly what is up in the air — potentially. “If a judge thinks that the decades of cases we’ve had are misconceived, then they don’t have to follow it any more,” Coleman said.

What’s odd about the case is that neither side intended to get this ruling in the first place. Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the Marin Audubon Society, a San Francisco-area birding group, set out to strike down the entire body of NEPA regulations. The FAA had relied on the Council on Environmental Quality’s rules when it approved a plan for tourism flights over national parks, saying that the regulations didn’t require it to conduct a NEPA study. The Marin Audubon Society argued that the air tours didn’t fall under an exemption created by the rules.

Two Republican-appointed judges on the panel then essentially took the case into their own hands, using the dispute as an opportunity to throw modern NEPA procedure into question. In fact, they said, the Council on Environmental Quality never had the authority to issue rules in the first place — so the claimed exemption didn’t matter. (Judge Sri Srinivasan, who dissented from part of the ruling, criticized the judges for opening such big legal questions when they didn’t need to do so.)

The outcome doesn’t mean that the federal government will immediately move faster to approve infrastructure projects — in some cases, it might move slower. As part of its rules, the Council on Environmental Quality has approved a list of “categorical exclusions,” federal actions that do not require a NEPA review. These can include activities like holding a small meeting or taking out a federal farm loan. The judges have now rejected the council’s ability to create categorical exclusions altogether, meaning that many more federal actions may — at least at first — be subject to NEPA oversight. (Congress has also told agencies to create some categorical exclusions — including for oil and gas drilling — and those are not affected by the case.)

For that reason, some environmental lawyers are doubtful that the argument will change NEPA in the way its opponents hope. “What the ruling does is deeply complicate things for both sides,” Sam Sankhar, the senior vice president at Earthjustice, an environmental legal group, told me. “The NEPA regulations are a body of law that has developed over years to guide the way that people do the NEPA process. The absence of those regulations does not mean the absence of NEPA — it means the absence of any guidelines about how to implement NEPA in the future.”

If the NEPA regulations get tossed out, he said, then it will “really be up to each individual judge to wing it” when interpreting the law, he added.

Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor who has written critically about NEPA and other liberal laws that focus on procedure, tends to agree with that view. “When you go to court, agencies and challengers both would look at these regulations as a sword or a shield,” he said. Challengers used the White House rules as a weapon, asserting that the government needed to look at some question but failed to do so. But the federal government used those same rules “as a shield,” he said, showing that it faithfully followed the rules, and therefore that judges didn’t need to get involved.

If the rules are gone, then each side has lost a tool — and judges will have much more power. That means federal agencies, which are hesitant to run afoul of the courts, may now become even more timid in their decision-making, Bagley said. What’s more, the White House’s regulations would still act as executive orders, binding agency action. “They just won’t be enforceable in court,” he said. (The Trump administration could also respond by chucking out the White House regulations altogether, he said.)

It’s unclear what happens next. If the FAA appeals, the D.C. Circuit could choose to hear the case again en banc, meaning the full panel of judges — a majority of whom were appointed by Democrats — would consider the questions. But eventually a higher court may weigh in. “I would not be surprised at all to find this eventually find its way to the Supreme Court,” Coleman told me. In the past, the Supreme Court has ruled that the Council on Environmental Quality’s regulations carry the force of law. But the new, arch-conservative court — and the incoming Trump administration — might push for a different approach.