On May 29, 2025 the Supreme Court issued its decision in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County. The case addressed a proposal considered by the U.S. Transportation Board by a group of seven counties in Utah for the construction and operation of an 88-mile rail line in northeastern Utah. The proposed rail line would facilitate the transportation of crude oil from Utah to the gulf states, and elsewhere. While the project was approved in December 2021 following review of a 3,600-page Environmental Impact Statement (“EIS”), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit faulted the EIS for not sufficiently considering the upstream effects of increased oil drilling in the Uinta Basin, and downstream environmental effects of increased oil refining along the Gulf Coast, outside of the railroad line itself. As a result of this, the D.C. Circuit ultimately vacated the EIS and the Board’s approval, pausing construction indefinitely.
In its May 29 decision, the Supreme Court reversed the D.C. Circuit’s decision on the basis that the D.C. Circuit “did not afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required” under NEPA, and faulted the D.C. Circuit for ordering “the Board to address the environmental effects of projects separate in time or place from the construction and operation of the railroad line.” Ultimately, the Court concluded that under NEPA, the Board’s EIS did not need to address the upstream or downstream effects of the proposed project, and instead only need concern itself with the effects of the 88-miles of railroad line itself.
In the majority opinion, authored by Justice Kavanaugh, the Court emphasized that NEPA imposes no substantive environmental obligations or restrictions, and instead is purely a procedural statute that requires an agency to prepare an EIS weighing environmental consequences of a proposed action as the agency reasonably sees fit under its governing statute and any substantive environmental laws. Put simply, the Court expressed that NEPA “does not mandate particular results but simply prescribes the necessary process’ for an agency’s environmental review of a project.” The Court expressed its view that NEPA had transformed from a simple procedural requirement, into a “blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents” to try and stop or slow down new infrastructure and construction projects. To address this perceived overgrowth of NEPA from its original procedural purpose, the Court called for a “course correction of sorts” to “bring judicial review under NEPA back in line with statutory text and common sense.” Thus, the Court held that “the bedrock principle of judicial review in NEPA cases can be stated in a word: Deference.” Thus, under this ruling, agencies will be given large judicial deference in reviewing EIS and decisions, with those decisions only being reversed in cases where the agencies decision was wholly unreasonable in light of the fact-dependent and context-specific analyses.
To this end, the Court held that requiring the EIS to consider the upstream and downstream effects of the 88-mile project was outside of the scope of the necessary considerations for an EIS and held that an EIS “need not address the effects of separate projects.” Thus, the Court held that EIS need not consider the effects a proposed project could lead to on the periphery, but instead only need to consider the environmental impact of the project itself.
While the exact impact of this change in the requirements of EIS and judicial review of decisions made under NEPA remains to be seen, this decision will undoubtably lead to agencies being required to follow less strict requirements in considering the potential wide-ranging effects of proposed projects. It can be expected that this limiting of the scope of EIS requirements under NEPA will lead to both increased approval of proposed infrastructure and construction projects, while also carrying the risk of increased environmental impacts resulting from these projects.