Sponsors (3)
Requires CEQ to produce an annual, public report (starting July 1, 2025) detailing NEPA litigation, EIS/EA counts and lengths, costs, timelines, and categorical exclusions, disaggregated by agency, project type, and sector.
The bill increases transparency and data-driven oversight of NEPA reviews—helping governments, developers, and the public plan and spot reform opportunities—but raises administrative costs, short-term project overhead, privacy concerns, and a risk that metrics-driven pressure could weaken environmental review quality.
State and local governments, federal agencies, and project developers get standardized, transparent NEPA timeline, cost, and litigation data so they can plan, budget, and schedule infrastructure projects more accurately.
Taxpayers and the public gain access to underlying NEPA data and litigation citations, improving oversight, accountability, and independent analysis of federal environmental review performance.
Congress and agencies can identify sector- and project-type bottlenecks and trends from the dataset, enabling targeted reforms to speed reviews or reduce unnecessary costs.
Rural and urban communities (and environmental advocates) could see weaker environmental review if the published metrics are used politically to pressure agencies to narrow NEPA reviews or expand categorical exclusions to improve performance numbers.
State and local governments, agencies, and developers may face higher project overhead and short-term delays because agencies could reallocate staff to recordkeeping and litigation tracking rather than project work.
Taxpayers may bear higher administrative costs if CEQ needs more staff or funding to prepare and maintain the required detailed annual dataset.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Official title: Amend the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 to require the Council on Environmental Quality to publish an annual report on environmental reviews and causes of action based on alleged non-compliance with that Act, and for other purposes.
Introduced March 27, 2025 by John R. Curtis · Last progress March 27, 2025
Requires the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to publish and submit an annual, data-driven report starting July 1, 2025, describing how NEPA reviews affect federal projects during a 12‑month covered year. The report must include litigation inventories, counts and page-length distributions for EISs and EAs, preparation costs, timelines with milestone dates and duration statistics, and a catalog of categorical exclusions, with results disaggregated by lead agency, project type, and specified sectors and accompanied by the underlying data and citations. Makes a conforming change to existing CEQ duties in the U.S. Code to add this new report requirement to CEQ’s statutory responsibilities.