Todd Pappasergi, PIOGA General Counsel and VP of Governmental Affairs 5.29.25

“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decision-making, not to paralyze it.” ~ Justice Brett Kavanaugh

On May 29, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, unanimously ruling 8-0 to limit the scope of environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The case concerned the Uinta Basin Railway, an 88-mile proposed rail project in Utah intended to transport crude oil to refineries and other strategic locations.

Writing for the Court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stated that NEPA imposes only procedural requirements on federal agencies and does not compel them to assess indirect or speculative environmental consequences, especially ones that arise outside their regulatory authority. He stated, “NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock.” The ruling reverses a lower court decision that had blocked the project on the basis that the Surface Transportation Board (STB) failed to fully assess downstream environmental impacts, such as increased oil extraction and refining, which would result from the railway’s completion, despite them not being part of the actual railway construction itself.

Kavanaugh emphasized that agencies are only required to consider environmental effects that are “reasonably foreseeable” from the project before the STB and within their jurisdiction to regulate. In this case, the STB had analyzed the direct impacts of the railway—such as construction disturbance, habitat disruption, and localized pollution—but did not delve into speculative consequences stemming from market responses or unrelated third-party activities. The lower courts found this failure to be fatal to the STB’s NEPA review; the High Court unanimously disagreed. This decision reinforces prior precedent that NEPA does not expand an agency’s statutory authority or force it to reject projects based on broader environmental policy goals.

This outcome has the potential to significantly reduce the legal risks for major infrastructure projects by curbing challenges based on secondary or indirect environmental effects. Going forward, federal agencies may feel empowered to approve energy and transportation projects more quickly, knowing that NEPA obligations are procedural rather than predictive. The decision marks a turning point in the balance between environmental review and development facilitation, and how it is applied by federal agencies during the Trump Administration will bear watching.