The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA) enacted the first legislative amendments directly to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) statute in approximately 50 years. These new provisions have been both touted as meaningful permitting reforms and downplayed as generally codifying existing best practices. The FRA also has implications for the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) pending plans to revise its federal government-wide regulations implementing NEPA, including expected walk-backs of revisions to those regulations enacted in 2020. In this session we will distill what has changed under NEPA and identify opportunities and challenges that engineering and legal practitioners can realistically expect in implementing NEPA’s new provisions going forward.
Among Questions to be Discussed:
- How does the FRA aim to accelerate NEPA reviews, and how effective will it be?
- What types of federal agency actions now trigger NEPA?
- How will the FRA “reasonably foreseeable” standard affect the scope of NEPA reviews?
- What is the role of project proponents and contractors in preparing NEPA documents?
- What constraints or flexibility does the FRA create for CEQ and agency regulations and initiatives, including around environmental justice and climate change efforts?
- Does the FRA alter legal risks for projects challenged in courts?
Presenter:Jamie Auslander and Eric Christensen, Beveridge & Diamond