By: Saatvik Amravathi
Volume IX – Issue I – Fall 2023
I. Introduction
The Inflation Reduction Act coupled with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act has been touted as the largest green energy investment in United States history, a laudable achievement considering the often delayed and feeble responses associated with Congress and the American legislative system. [1] While the Act's passage is in its own right a significant achievement in the battle against climate change, the success of the legislation hinges on its implementation which, according to supporters, needs to occur in a rapid fashion. Understanding the scale of what the White House and climate advocates seek to achieve is a rather difficult feat since the response to climate change has largely been understood as a personal one, penciled out in the form of actions such as pushing consumers to adopt existing “green” technology such as electric cars, heat pumps, and solar panels. However, as Ruhl and Saltzman point out in the Emory Law Journal, meeting even the most lukewarm climate targets requires the United States to rapidly build out a large amount of energy infrastructure. [2] Ruhl and Saltzman cite that the largest solar facility in the United States is currently generating 585 megawatts. [3] According to the authors, a solar facility like this, which takes up 2,000 acres of land, must be built every week for the next 30 years to achieve what the authors describe as “a middle-road renewable energy scenario.” [4] New infrastructure needs only begin here since supporting infrastructure such as transmission lines, substations, battery storage, and much more also require a rapid build out. In short, in order to achieve our climate targets and the future the White House lays out, America needs to start building a lot and quickly , an endeavor we have struggled with in the past.
But how did a country that once produced two-thirds of the Allies’ military equipment reach a situation where it now struggles to build a handful of miles of rail without costs reaching to the billions and completion being set a decade out? [5] This question elicits a variety of responses which are mostly reflective of individual beliefs and backed by anecdotes rather than quantitative data. However, legal scholars, think tanks and politicians across the partisan spectrum have come to lay the blame on one law, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The novel spotlight placed on this law and its perceived malignant consequences has led to a flurry of activity both by the White House and by members of Congress. Over the past few years, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the body in the Executive Office of the President that is in charge of implementation of NEPA, has ramped up its efforts on issuing guidance relating to the law in an effort to identify and fix common roadblocks. In Congress, Senator Joe Manchin, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, twice inserted NEPA reforms in legislation. The largely bipartisan reforms eventually found their way into the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, commonly known as the act that raises the debt ceiling. This paper seeks to outline and critically examine these recent reforms made to NEPA by presenting both legal analysis on NEPA-related litigation and quantitative research on the issue. This paper does not seek to make a definite judgment on the effectiveness of these newly enacted reforms due to their recency and the lack of available data; it instead seeks to discuss the expected potential benefits and shortcomings of this regulatory reform.
II. Components of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA)
NEPA, which is commonly referred to as the “Magna Carta of Environmental Law,” was signed into law by President Richard Nixon and was emblematic of the early environmental movement during the 1960s and 70s. Following Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, rising pollution and environmental damage threatening the nation's land, air, and water drew national political attention. [6,7] Unlike the Clean Water Act and other similar environmental regulations that were byproducts of this environmental consciousness, NEPA was statutorily written to be broad and ambiguous. This means that the way NEPA reviews are undertaken varies between agencies, with the Forest Service conducting reviews that are about 50 pages long and the FAA conducting reviews that span thousands of pages. [8] Statutorily, NEPA is divided into Title I and Title II which identify the purpose of the regulation and set up the governing body respectively.
i. Title I
Title I outlines the Act's purpose as part of a “Declaration of National Environmental Policy.” Section 102 outlines the regulatory power given to the NEC specifically in making sure that the environmental impacts of major federal actions are considered. This section distinctly outlines the type of information required to create these analyses indicating that agencies should ensure that the best scientific and technical information is collected and used in these evaluations. [9] Specific subsections require the lead agency conducting this review to consider:
“(i)...foreseeable environmental effects… (ii) any reasonable adverse environmental effects… (iii) a reasonable range of alternatives to proposed agency action (iv) the relationship between local short-term use of man’s environment and maintenance and enhancement of long term productivity (v) any irreversible and irretrievable commitments of Federal Resources.” [10]
Prior to the amendments, NEPA lacked definite procedures on how to conduct this assessment, merely asking CEQ to study and develop the consequences and alternatives to a project. Amendments to the law passed in 2023 layed out in statute a more definite account of how these procedures should be undertaken. [11]
Newly added Section 106 outlines the procedures through which Section 102 would be implemented, identifying thresholds that trigger review and the levels of review agencies can conduct. [12] This section lays out the important and highly controversial “categorical exemptions” provision which allows individual agencies to exclude certain projects from NEPA review. [13] While categorical exemptions were established by agencies outside the textual scope of NEPA prior to the reforms, the amendments codify agency-driven exemptions and standardize already granted exceptions as generally applicable NEPA exceptions. However, if a review is triggered two levels of review are conducted: an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) and an Environmental Assessment (EA). Of these two statements, only the EIS is considered by the agency in decision making. [14] The EIS under the amended guidelines would need to outline the negative environmental impacts that a project may have and is now limited to 300 pages along with a maximum time frame of two years to produce. [15]
Subsequent sections added to Title I add further specificity to the NEPA process and address many challenges and ambiguities faced after the passage of the initial regulation. Enacted reforms now provide guidance on multi-agency EIS reports mandating a designation of a lead agency. [16] It also mandates that exceptions granted by one agency also apply to other agencies, standardizing the controversial categorical exceptions set by agencies. [17] The reforms also outline additional redress given to developers of projects held up by agencies giving them the power to sue an agency if it believes that the review process is being delayed. [18]
ii. Title II
Title II is largely overshadowed by Title I of NEPA since it merely creates and provides the required power for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) which governs the whole process. A common misconception held by those with a rudimentary knowledge of NEPA is that the CEQ directs the research behind the Environmental Impact Statements. Even though the CEQ can lay out guidance relating to how agencies should go about their NEPA review procedure, the agencies hold substantial power over how they go about conducting the review process. In the reforms made, Title II is largely untouched besides the substantial allocation set for the CEQ to study the implementation of an e-NEPA process which will digitize the whole procedure in the future. [19]
III. The Empirical Case for NEPA Reform
The actions required to combat and mitigate global warming and its effects run counter to the mainstream approach to orthodox public policy issues. The American democratic system has been cited by all political factions as a messy and cumbersome process but has been valued at least in theory for its ability to produce consensus-driven outcomes that protect fundamental liberties. Those who advocate for NEPA reform hold that the emphasis on democratic participation in environmental law has gone too far, suppressing the United States’ ability to respond to climate change. Public participation under NEPA occurs in various forms including agency-mandated public comment periods, community consultations in the form of town halls, and the terminal option of citizen suits against the agencies for impropriety during the NEPA process. At the crux of supporters' arguments is the idea that climate change is a timely issue in which the delay as a result of these public outreach and support efforts can have potentially disastrous consequences. They argue that this requires administrative and regulatory barriers to be set aside to make way for a rapid and scrappy approach that allows for the necessary renewable infrastructure to be built. Additionally, advocates contend that the current system already provides an unfair regulatory advantage for non-renewable energy projects through categorical exemptions passed into law decades ago. [20] Reformers argue that these dual disadvantages that clean energy projects face - heightened democratic input and regulatory requirements - help contribute to the slow roll-out of clean energy projects. Supporters usually highlight these delays in action by pointing to the countless climate-positive infrastructure projects held up and halted through litigation, contending that each project is a testament to the failures of a NEPA process that is largely still a fossil of the 1970s.
i. NEPA Carve Outs
NEPA provides a singular route to bypass review: categorical exemptions. Categorical exemptions allow projects that would otherwise require a federal action to be approved in a streamlined manner facing no environmental impact review process and as a result erasing subsequent threats of litigation by outside parties. According to analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center, the EIS process alone took an average of 4.5 years to complete prior to the 2023 reforms. [21] While the two-year cap set by the new amendments will shorten average completion time, adding any substantial time to a project completion can result in a project’s death since it can hold up critical funding or turn political tides against a project.
Categorical exemptions are largely set by agencies with the approval of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and are hard to come by. Currently, only 25 categorical exemptions are made by the Department of Energy resulting in a vast amount of projects being subjected to review. Advocates point to the fact that the set-in-stone nature of the agency's categorical exemptions means that critical infrastructure such as offshore wind or transmission lines are subject to review while extraction of oil sands and shale gas are categorically exempted from this review. [22,23] On a state level, advocates point out how stadiums have largely been exempted from state-level environmental review while lengthy NEPA reviews have been applied to public housing projects and university construction projects, a stark contrast that advocates say highlights misaligned priorities. [24,25]
While the newly enacted reform package does not streamline the categorical exemption process, it does increase the number of categorically exempted project categories. By allowing categorical exemptions to carry over between agencies, an agency must now categorically exempt types of projects from NEPA review that have received categorical exemptions from any federal agency. [26] However, many of the advocates' demands of completely rehashing the process through which categorical exemptions are granted is not achieved through these reforms. Furthermore, it is uncertain whether Congress will ever remove the dated categorical exemptions that allow for destructive drilling infrastructure and other nonessential projects to skip NEPA review since many of those would require a significant change in the political headwinds that govern Congress.
ii. Weaponized Judicial Review
Outside of the legal sphere, advocates of NEPA reform who range from public policy experts to casual observers regularly cite the growing graveyard of projects killed by NEPA review as the imperative behind regulatory streamlining. The extensive NEPA process coupled with resulting cost-consuming court battles has been cited as fully killing or significantly delaying beneficial projects such as offshore wind. The judicial review process embedded in NEPA has turned from a tool to empower marginalized communities to a tool used by deep-pocketed actors to upend projects they personally distaste. [27]
One of the most striking cases of NEPA being weaponized to stop clean energy projects has been the delay and death of many offshore wind projects. Offshore wind is hailed by many as a clean and renewable source of energy that would avoid many of the shortcomings of on-shore wind such as low wind speeds and significant land footprints. Recently, the US District Court in Massachusetts in a summary judgment rejected the claim made by an environmental advocacy group representing the residents of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard Islands that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management failed to consider the Endangered Species Act and more specifically the GHG-mitigating effects of whale populations in their EIS issued on the Vineyard Wind project. [28] While in ACK Residents Against Turbines v. U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Vineyard Wind was able to prevail; it still faces three pending lawsuits challenging the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management’s NEPA review. [29] This litigation along with the time-consuming NEPA review process has already delayed the project by a decade, a potentially fatal blow if it were not for the utility behind the project, Avangrid’s, deep pockets.
In a case like ACK Residents Against Turbines v. U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the reforms would have a substantive but not a totally transformational impact. While the amendments passed by Congress do not propose any streamlining method for energy projects such as Vineyard Wind, a provision initially included in the now-dead bill by Senator Manchin, enacted reforms would mitigate some of the delay by creating a page and time limit on the Environmental Impact Statement. [30] Furthermore, by requiring agencies to consider positive environmental effects and ignore downstream environmental consequences such as changes to the whale population, these reforms could help tilt outcomes made by both agencies and the judiciary in favor of project developers. [31] While the 2023 reforms will not eliminate frivolous lawsuits that weaponize NEPA, the statutory amendments create significant roadblocks for bad actors who seek to delay environmentally beneficial projects.
IV. Quantitative Rebuttal of NEPA Reform
The strongest defenders against NEPA reform claim that reform advocates are misguided in their efforts, incorrectly fueling their desire for reform on fringe cases and a failure to associate lengthy timelines to the true culprit, the federal staffing shortage. Similar to NEPA reformers, support for NEPA ranges from amateur environmentalists to environmental defense and justice organizations.
A trio of professors from the University of Utah conducted one of the most detailed analyses of the NEPA review process, using regression models to test the validity of the claims made by NEPA reform advocates. In their analysis they studied over 41,000 NEPA decisions made by the US Forest Service looking at all forty-three actions undertaken as part of the NEPA process and controlling for factors such as the 9 geographic regions that the Forest Service operates in. [32] They found that the median EIS drafted by the Forest Service takes about two years, making it the most time intensive component of the whole NEPA process, a claim that reformers also emphasize. Comparing projects that required different levels of NEPA review, the authors found that time to complete a median categorical exclusion was higher than the time required to complete a more thorough and detailed environmental assessment. This means that the level of environmental analysis conducted on a federal action does not explain the length of a project’s NEPA review. [33]
While it seems counterintuitive that time spent conducting an assessment does not correspond to difficulty and length, a paper in the UC Davis Law and Policy Journal by Trevor Salter explains these differences by placing the blame on staffing issues. [34] Salter in his paper looks at the Bureau of Land Management’s fast track program which was established to meet the influx of projects following the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009. Salter believes that the BLM fast track program is a model of the future NEPA reform advocates desire,where streamline review is granted to every project. The fast track program solely applied to renewable energy projects, mainly solar fields, and promised a speedy 1-year review to get projects started during the Great Recession. However, BLM regulators discovered that speeding up these reviews did not require them to reduce the level of analysis undertaken, the initial motivation behind the program and NEPA reform. Instead, they found they could speed up timelines better by reassigning more staff to the program, eliminating bottlenecks. [35] Regulators also found that making sure that developers were in a more advanced planning stage helped reduce back and forth and prevented delays in fieldwork. [36]
If the quantitative claims made by opponents of NEPA reform hold true, this may be a troubling sign for the effectiveness of recent amendments made to NEPA. The amendments mainly focus on enacting strict parameters to analysis conducted under NEPA and lack any funding mechanism to support agencies in achieving the timelines required by the amendments. If the analysis outlined in the two papers holds true, the recent NEPA reforms might actually end up harming the government, opening them up to litigation without providing any of the tools required to maintain compliance.
V. Hypothetical Analysis of the Effects and Shortcomings of NEPA Reform
While it is too early to explicitly define the impact of these reforms, analysis of the arguments made and data used by opponents and proponents of NEPA reform reveals that current reforms do not go far enough since they ignore real issues around staffing and misuse of judicial remedies made by each side. Although some advocates of NEPA reform, mainly those who oppose most environmental laws, have a reductionist view of NEPA, advocates for reform raise genuine concerns over ceding power to a vocal minority through the judicial review process and providing categorical exemptions to competing fossil-fuel projects. On the other hand, advocates of a strong NEPA review fail to acknowledge the less than ideal optics of the law but point to real issues surrounding staffing and maintaining scientific rigor in the analysis conducted on federal actions.
NEPA does need real reforms. Future actions should shift from limiting NEPA review as undertaken by the 2023 amendments to addressing the more troubling part of the law which allows for litigants to tie up projects in the courts using the law’s unrestricted judicial review. While the judiciary should always have an important role in reviewing agency actions, unrestricted litigation harms both agencies and courts by creating clog. Additionally, dependence on the courts runs counter to the ethos of democratic participation that NEPA supporters cherish, since judges are unelected. While the ability to challenge projects using NEPA has led to the creation of and empowerment of environmental defense organizations such as the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), the ACK Residents Against Turbines v. U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management case has highlighted how the judicial remedy mechanism has also empowered some of the least environmentally-minded actors. The case against Vineyard Wind was largely pushed by a front-group funded by the oil industry’s American Energy Association along with a handful of rich homeowners such as the Koch brothers and the Kennedy family who were more concerned about the negative aesthetic rather than any real environmental effects. [37,38] The judicial remedies allowed by NEPA have transformed what was once thought of as a tool for environmental justice into nothing but a tool for deep-pocketed opponents to hinder beneficial projects.
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) in a report drafted last year made the case for judicial remedies citing that there have been fewer than 20 injunctions granted annually for the countless lawsuits made against projects. The handful of successful injunctions granted as a result of countless lawsuits highlights how many plaintiffs weaponize the judicial review process to delay projects that have no substantial environmental shortcomings. The CRS identifies a few remedies that Congress might take to curtail this abuse such as reducing the statute of limitations for appeal, placing an exhaustion doctrine for appeal, and placing barriers to achieving necessary standing to bring a suit. [39] The CRS makes the claim that many of these plausible actions that Congress can undertake are not novel since they are found in other infrastructure acts in order to avoid delays. [40] If the status quo of litigation remains, Congress should broaden its analysis beyond the hurdles relating to the creation of EIS and listen to reformers’ concerns over the real danger of litigation threatening and delaying critical environmentally-friendly projects.
However, it's clear that delays and troubled implementations cannot be solely understood through a statutory lens but also must be understood by examining the failures of regulatory bodies that implement the law and their low staffing numbers. It is clear that the short-staffing of agencies has real consequences especially when it comes to conducting field work in a timely manner. The amendments passed as part of the debt ceiling bill largely focus on establishing strict parameters on review and timelines. Without any additional funding to agency staff budgets, there is a real threat many of these requirements will not be fulfilled or will be ignored. Hannah Pearls of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law program predicts that the outcome of these unfunded obligations will be subversion on the part of agencies. For example, instead of reducing the scope of review Pearls predicts that agency lawyers will advise staff to place the information in the citations bypassing the page requirements set by the new reforms in order to shield agency lawyers from litigation. [41] However, there are some changes made by the recent amendments, such as the streamlining and new coordination system of multi-agency NEPA reviews, that should successfully increase efficiency and reduce staffing requirements addressing reform opponents' concerns. [42] Additionally, the study of potentially implementing an e-NEPA process holds the promise of achieving what many NEPA supporters advocate for: a democratic but streamlined process to challenge the environmental consequences of government actions. Hence, it is evident that many of the reforms, while a great first step, will be moot on arrival due to the larger issues that the reforms fail to address.
VI. Conclusion
NEPA is emblematic of the numerous regulations that significantly impact the daily lives of countless Americans and govern some of the most contentious public policy issues we face, yet remain poorly understood or completely ignored by the public and more concerningly, by policymakers. While the term “permitting reform” can refer to countless regulations that govern building in the United States, NEPA not only has inspired many of those reforms but remains the prevailing regulation that governs some of the United States’ largest and most ambitious projects. The package of amendments passed into law through the 2023 debt ceiling bill are a hopeful indication of increasing political momentum to implement good-governance reform and to make sure environmental laws are updated to aid with the current challenges the United States faces. Current reforms mainly focus on setting limits and guidelines on the level of NEPA review required preeminently through the establishment of page and time limits. However, it is unclear if this will significantly expedite the review and permitting of clean energy projects since both advocates and opponents of NEPA reform point to extraneous issues that are not addressed by this package. While the data over the coming months and years will indicate the success of this package, it is clear that policymakers must do more to address untouched issues relating to permitting delays hindering clean energy buildout.
Endnotes
[1] The Inflation Reduction Act and U.S. Business Investment, U.S. Department of the Treasury, https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/the-inflation-reduction-act-and-us-business-investment. (last updated August 16, 2023)
[2] J.B Ruhl & James E. Saltzman, The Greens' Dilemma: Building Tomorrow's Climate Infrastructure Today, 73 Emory Environmental Law Journal 1. 14,15 (2023).
[3] Worley & Princeton E-Filliates Partnership, FROM AMBITION TO REALITY: WEAVING THE THREADS OF NET ZERO DELIVERY 13 (2022). https://www.worley.com/ourthinking/from-ambition-to-reality/from-ambition-to-reality-report.pdf.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Burns, Ken. “War Production.” PBS. https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/the-war/war-production.
[6] National Environmental Policy Act, U.S. Department of Energy, https://ceq.doe.gov/.
[7] The Birth of the EPA, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/birth-epa.html. (last updated November 1985).
[8] Hannah Perls, Carrie Jenks, Ari Peskoe, CleanLaw Quick Take: The Debt Ceiling Bill and NEPA Permitting Reform with Ari Peskoe and Carrie Jenks [Audio], Clean Law Podcast, https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2023/06/cleanlaw-quick-take-the-debt-ceiling-bill-and-nepa-permitting-reform/. (last updated June 8, 2023).
[9] 42 U.S. Code § 4332(a)(b) (1970).
[10] 42 U.S. Code § 4332(c) (1970).
[11] 42 U.S. Code § 4336 (2023).
[12] Ibid.
[13] 42 U.S. Code § 4336(a) (2023).
[14] 42 U.S. Code § 4336(b) (2023).
[15] 42 U.S. Code §§ 4336a(e,g) (2023).
[16]. 42 U.S. Code § 4336a(a) (2023).
[17] 42 U.S. Code § 4336c (2023).
[18] 42 U.S. Code § 4336a(g)(3) (2023).
[19] 42 U.S. Code § 4336d (2023).
[20] The Role of Categorical Exclusions in Achieving Net-Zero by 2050, Bipartisan Policy Center, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/categorical-exclusions/. (last updated September 27, 2022).
[21] The Role of Categorical Exclusions in Achieving Net-Zero by 2050, Bipartisan Policy Center, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/report/categorical-exclusions/. (last updated September 27, 2022).
[22] Ibid.
[23] Trevor Salter, NEPA and Renewable Energy: Realizing the Most Environmental Benefit in the Quickest Time, 34 UC Davis Environs Environmental Law and Policy Journal 2. 174. (Spring 2011)
[24] Gabe Branco, California’s Sport Venue Boom: A Weakening Of CEQA?, University of Minnesota LawSci Forum, https://mjlst.lib.umn.edu/2018/10/06/californias-sport-venue-boom-a-weakening-of-ceqa/. (last updated October 6, 2018).
[25] Alvin L. Alm, 1988 Article on NEPA: Past, Present, and Future, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Journal, https://www.epa.gov/archive/epa/aboutepa/birth-epa.html. (last updated January/February 1988).
[26] 42 U.S. Code § 4336a(a) (2023).
[27] Jerusalem Demas, Not Everyone Should Have a Say, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/environmentalists-nimby-permitting-reform-nepa/671775/l. (last updated October 19, 2022).
[28] Nantucket Residents Against Turbines v. U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Mgmt., Civil Action 1:21-cv-11390-IT (D. Mass. May. 17, 2023).
[29] Benjamin Storrow, 4 lawsuits threaten Vineyard Wind, E&E News by Politico, https://www.eenews.net/articles/4-lawsuits-threaten-vineyard-wind/. (last updated March 29, 2023).
[30] Manchin Moves the Ball Forward on Permitting Reform, Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, https://www.energy.senate.gov/2023/5/manchin-moves-ball-forward-on-permitting-reform. (last updated May 2, 2023).
[31] 40 CFR § 1508.7,1508.8 (2023).
[32] Ruple, J. C., Pleune , J. ., & Heiny, E. (2022). Evidence-Based Recommendations for Improving National Environmental Policy Act Implementation. Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, 47(S). https://doi.org/10.52214/cjel.v47iS.9479.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Trevor Salter, NEPA and Renewable Energy: Realizing the Most Environmental Benefit in the Quickest Time, 34 UC Davis Environs Environmental Law and Policy Journal 2. 174. (Spring 2011).
[35] Ibid.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Lee Fang, Oil-Backed Group Opposes Offshore Wind – For Environmental Reasons, The Intercept, https://theintercept.com/2021/12/08/oil-industry-wind-farm-prevent/. (last updated December 8, 2021).
[38] Stanley Reed & Ivan Penn, A Giant Wind Farm Is Taking Root Of Massachusetts, NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/business/energy-environment/marthas-vineyard-wind-farm-massachusetts.html. (last updated June 28, 2023)
[39] Nina M. Hart, Judicial Review and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, Congressional Research Service, https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47205. (last updated August 4, 2022).
[40] Ibid.
[41] Hannah Perls, Carrie Jenks, Ari Peskoe, CleanLaw Quick Take: The Debt Ceiling Bill and NEPA Permitting Reform with Ari Peskoe and Carrie Jenks [Audio], Clean Law Podcast, https://eelp.law.harvard.edu/2023/06/cleanlaw-quick-take-the-debt-ceiling-bill-and-nepa-permitting-reform/. (last updated June 8, 2023).
[42] 42 U.S. Code § 4336a(a) (2023).