On January 7, 2026, the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the advisory agency meant to assist and advise the President on environmental matters including the administration of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) announced its official repeal of its NEPA implementing regulations and published its final rule the following day (January 8, 2025) in the Federal Register. The published Final Rule (FR) is largely a formality as it is identical to CEQ’s Interim Final Rule (IFR), which was published on February 25, 2025, and came into effect on April 11, 2025.

NEPA requires federal agencies to review the environmental impact of “Major Federal actions” such as issuing permits, providing federal funding, and issuing regulations. When in effect, CEQ’s regulations acted as a uniform guide to this process for other agencies to follow. With these regulations repealed, agencies are now individually promulgating their own regulations for the administration of NEPA.

In a White House press release accompanying the announcement, CEQ said the FR “fixes decades-long permitting failure through deregulation” and “delivers on President Trump’s promise to fix a broken permitting system.” CEQ Chair Katherine Scarlett was quoted as saying that under “this Administration, NEPA’s regulatory reign of terror has ended. Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, CEQ acted early to slash needless layering of bureaucratic burden and restore common sense to the environmental review and permitting process.”

CEQ largely rejected criticisms of the IFR made during the comment period regarding the legality of the rule and the potential for it to cause inconsistencies and uncertainties. However, it also aimed to reassure stakeholders that the transition to the new system would be smooth, noting that over a dozen departments and agencies had already published new or revised NEPA implementing procedures that are tailored to their unique statutory authorities, policies, and programs, resulting in improved efficiency. CEQ further stated that it “has taken steps to ensure consistency and efficiency across agency implementation of NEPA” in the absence of its rules, pointing to February 19, 2025, guidance it provided agencies with to guide agency actions before those agencies could update their own procedures. CEQ further highlighted other measures it has taken to ensure consistency across agency implementation, such as convening a working group to work with agencies coordinating the revision of agency-level implementing procedures, and providing a template for agency-specific regulations.

Outlook and Takeaways

As CEQ noted, since the IFR took effect, a handful of agencies have issued IFRs and related guidance putting forth their own NEPA procedures, including the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, and Transportation, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Most of these new rules and guidance documents have retained NEPA categorical exclusions and emergency procedures as regulations while moving the rest of their NEPA requirements into nonbinding guidance, so many aspects of the NEPA process remain similar.

A coalition of 18 Attorneys general from Democratic-led states has responded by warning those individual agencies that these rollbacks are unlawful, and last year sent letters to the heads of those agencies urging each to “refrain from implementing” the changes to withdraw the unlawful actions in their entirety. While the presence of this coalition signals some potential threat of future litigation, thus far, these efforts have had no measurable effect on the new regulations.

These regulatory rollbacks and decisions from high courts seem to have laid out a trend of reducing NEPA’s power; however, a decision at the end of 2025 illustrates that NEPA still plays a large role in the approval process for federal projects and cannot be overlooked in the planning process. In Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, ruled that the U.S. Forest Service could defer conducting NEPA-required reviews until after project approval and vacated approvals for a condition‑based forest treatment project near Yellowstone National Park because the administrative record did not contain the specific analyses needed under NEPA, the National Forest Management Act and the Endangered Species Act.

Center for Biological Diversity serves as a reminder that even though judicial and executive actions may soon narrow NEPA analyses, NEPA remains in effect. Accordingly, careful attention to the agency record, including ensuring the correct, present-tense analyses are included, can help in the event of any challenge. Sophisticated parties navigating programs across all industries, including forest management, infrastructure development, and energy, should ensure that the administrative record includes robust analyses tied to statutory requirements when pursuing federal project approval. The failure to address these requirements from the beginning cannot be mitigated with vague commitments to remedy process defects and ensure compliance in the future.

For assistance with navigating these new regulations or other environmental matters, contact CMBG3 Law and our environmental team. Our team is ready to provide guidance on regulatory issues, policy changes, compliance concerns, and litigation.