This bill amends the National Environmental Policy Act to require the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to publish an annual report beginning July 1, 2025. The report must be posted on the CEQ website and sent to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the House Committee on Natural Resources. The report must include: (1) details on each active court case alleging NEPA noncompliance during the covered year, including defendants, plaintiffs, courts, case counts by lead agency, alleged legal basis, and case status or outcome; (2) length (page counts) of draft and final environmental impact statements (EIS) and environmental assessments (EA) published in the Federal Register, with averages, medians, quartiles, and trends; (3) total costs to prepare those EIS and EA documents, including full-time equivalent personnel costs, contractor costs, and other direct costs, and, if practicable, costs by cooperating agencies, applicants, and contractors; (4) timelines for completing EIS documents for major Federal actions, including dates for application submission, scoping start, notice of intent, draft EIS publication, final EIS publication, record of decision, and notice to proceed, plus average and median timelines and trends; and (5) a comprehensive list of categorical exclusions in agencies’ NEPA regulations, the total number of such exclusions, and the number established, adopted, or revised during the year. The report must disaggregate information by project type and by a list of covered sectors (for example: aviation and space; broadband; carbon capture; conventional and renewable energy; electricity transmission; manufacturing; mining; pipelines; ports and waterways; surface transportation; information technology infrastructure; water resources; forestry; and other sectors the Council identifies). The CEQ must publish the underlying data and provide citations or other information needed to find court records. The bill also updates CEQ’s duties to include preparing this report.
If you follow federal project reviews, permitting, or court cases over NEPA, this bill would create one annual public source that summarizes who sued, why, and what happened. It would show how long EIS and EA documents are, how long they took to finish, how much they cost to prepare (to the extent agencies report those costs), and which categorical exclusions agencies use. The report would be broken down by project type and sector and would include links or citations to the underlying court records and data the CEQ used.
The bill requires the CEQ report to list total costs to prepare EIS and EA documents during the covered year. Those cost categories include full-time equivalent personnel hours, contractor costs, and other direct costs of the lead agency, and, where practicable, costs by cooperating agencies, participating agencies, applicants, and contractors. No publicly available information on the federal cost to prepare and publish the CEQ annual report itself is included in the bill text.
No publicly available information.
No publicly available information.