For about 55 years, the National Environmental Policy Act, commonly known as NEPA, has served as the bedrock of environmental protections and policy. Now, a probable rule change from the Trump administration is raising concerns over how it could disrupt the policy’s future. 

On Feb. 25, the Council on Environmental Quality issued an interim final rule withdrawing its regulations that implement NEPA policy across the federal government. The rule will require that agencies adopt their own regulations in compliance with one of President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive orders that promised to “unleash American energy.” 

“I’m horrified and scared about what this could mean for our state, for our country and environmental policy moving forward,” said Sen. Dylan Roberts, a Frisco Democrat. 

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What is NEPA?

The National Environmental Policy Act was signed into law in 1970 by Republican President Richard Nixon. 

At a high level, it established a national policy geared toward protecting the environment at a time when public concern over environmental quality was rising, said Becca Schild, executive director of Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers. Schild has a Ph.D in environmental studies from the University of Colorado Boulder.  

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“The degradation of the environment was a result of unchecked actions from corporations and other entities that had not been regulated much up to this point,” Schild said. 

“It kicked off the environmental decade,” said Jonathan Skinner-Thompson, an associate professor at the University of Colorado Law School where he specializes in administrative and environmental law. 

At a more granular level, NEPA is a piece of procedural law that requires federal agencies to assess what the environmental impacts of proposed actions will be. These actions can include issuing development permits, adopting federal land management actions, building highways and publicly-owned facilities and more. 

Adrienne Saia Isaac, Summit County’s communications director, said the act provides critical checks and balances, to “ensure that disparate goals and desires are considered equally when a project is presented.” 

“It is a critical tool to achieve balanced and sustainable land use,” Saia Isaac said.  

It has also become a “powerful tool” for groups to block projects that could have a negative impact on the environment, Skinner-Thompson said.

Today, NEPA serves as the “bedrock for the country’s approach to environmental policy,” Schild said, adding that it “ensures government accountability and citizen participation in decision-making.”

This law is critically important in Colorado’s rural resort communities that are “like islands surrounded by an ocean of national public lands,” said Kim Langmaid, Vail’s former mayor. Langmaid has a 
Ph.D in environmental studies from Antioch University New England. 

“It has given us cleaner air and safer drinking water, improved countless acres of wildlife habitat, and provided critical protections for the vital ecosystems our Western communities depend on to thrive,” said Anna Peterson, executive director of The Mountain Pact. 

Breaking down what the rule says

The Council on Environmental Quality was established in the same breadth of law that created NEPA, forming a group meant to coordinate and implement the law. It created the first round of NEPA regulations by 1978, giving federal government agencies “default rules” with which to interpret the policy, Skinner-Thompson said. 

Some agencies adopt the council’s rules entirely, while others use them as a foundation for adopting regulations that fit their unique needs. Skinner-Thompson said that the latter includes agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Army, Bureau of Land Management and more. 

The extent of the council’s authority to issue regulations and bind federal agencies to their interpretation of NEPA has been questioned by courts and judges in recent years, Skinner-Thompson said. 

While the rule published in February does not issue an official stance on the council’s authority, it makes it clear the council is removing its regulations, he added.

The interim final rule posted to the Federal Register includes a 30-day public comment period ending on March 27. However, the council has indicated that the rule withdrawing its authority will go into effect regardless of the substance of these comments on April 11. 

This puts the rule on pretty shaky legal ground, according to Skinner-Thompson. While there are exceptions to how the federal government complies with public notice and comment opportunities, many legal experts are uncertain if this meets the necessary standards.

“It’s going to put this interim final rule at risk of being overturned because people are going to challenge it,” Skinner-Thompson said.   

As the council prepares to pull back its regulations, it also issued a memo on Feb. 19 — three days before the interim final rule — on how government agencies should interpret NEPA to comply with Trump’s new energy policy directives. 

“The memo tells federal agencies that they need to adopt new regulations that conform with essentially, and ironically, the 2020 Trump-era (Council on Environmental Quality) regulations,”  Skinner-Thompson said. “One of the big things with the 2020 Trump-era CEQ regulations was that they were doing away with this term called cumulative effects.”

Historically, the council’s regulations and courts have required federal agencies to assess the cumulative impacts — in addition to direct and indirect impacts — of the proposed actions. 

Skinner-Thompson gave the example of a new ski resort (the proposed action) being built on untouched U.S. Forest Service land. Taking into consideration cumulative impacts would require the NEPA process to take into consideration the impacts of development spurred by that ski resort, including hotels, new roadways, added traffic and more. Under the 2020 policy, only the ski resort impact would need to be evaluated, he said. 

What it could mean for NEPA 

The rule’s publication is fueling uncertainty about NEPA’s future. 

For one, requiring federal agencies to write new regulations could lead to a change in how NEPA is interpreted and applied, and could lead to less comprehensive environmental analyses of actions, Skinner-Thompson said. 

This upheaval will also likely lead to increased legal challenges as uncertainty rises “over what rules apply and how durable those rules are going to be,” he added. 

Schild said the rule appears to be “a way to gut the system without actually repealing the law.”

“My concern is that the administration is dismantling the system of environmental law and policy that has been in place for almost 50 years,” Schild said. “If NEPA is changed or repealed, it will mean that there is less government accountability and the public will have less power to weigh in on very important government actions that negatively impact our environment.”

The Council on Environmental Quality is only part of what’s fueling uncertainty around NEPA, Skinner-Thompson said. 

“Part of it is also because of what the Supreme Court is considering right now,” he added. 

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in December for a Colorado case over the proposed 88-mile Uinta Basin railway. The case, which includes Eagle County as the lead plaintiff, is looking at whether NEPA requires an agency to study environmental impacts beyond those that are immediate. 

Part of broader environmental policy changes

While amendments to NEPA came in the first Trump administration, they failed to remove it outright, Saia Isaac said. 

“With the actions of the administration so far, it seems no environmental protection is off the table for revocation, even one with a long, bipartisan history such as NEPA,” Saia Isaac said. 

In its interim final rule, the Council of Environmental Quality points to Trump’s order pushing domestic energy development — including on public lands — as part of the rationale. 

“If you have to look at that proposed change in the context of who’s now been put in charge of all these federal agencies — whether it’s the (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency) administrator or other cabinet secretaries — pretty public statements by them that they want to remove as many environmental protections as possible,” Roberts said. 

The “immense power and influence” of these individuals in power could mean that NEPA is repealed in effect, if not in name, Roberts said. 

The rule also follows other policies from the administration aimed at pulling back environmental and public land protections like national monuments, critical habitat designations, mineral withdrawals and more. 

“There’s absolutely a concern that this administration is not actually interested in environmental protection at all and is only interested in development, extraction or aiding and abetting polluting industries,” Skinner-Thompson said. 

Langmaid warned that the loss of alteration of NEPA would put mountain communities at great risk.

“Any future changes could really create a lot of risk for our mountain towns, our forests, our watersheds and our outdoor economy,” she said. “In some ways, it’s a death wish to our mountain towns and other rural communities that depend on national public lands around us.”

These concerns are only exacerbated by the federal job cuts ordered by Trump’s Feb. 11 executive order, which had the goal of “eliminating waste, bloat and insularity” at federal agencies. The order instructed departments to work with the new Department of Government Efficiency — led by Elon Musk — to increase federal efficiency and productivity. As a result, tens of thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs. 

“The big irony from what the Trump administration is doing, even though they’re calling this a streamlining efficiency type of change, is that federal workers are needed to comply with NEPA, both in permitting but also in revising the regulations,” Skinner-Thompson said. “Understaffing and underfinancing federal agencies is going to slow the NEPA process down pretty significantly. And now, every federal agency needs to adopt new regulations.” 

Langmaid — who said in her experience, drawn-out and lengthy NEPA processes were driven by a lack of resources — said that the reduction of Forest Service personnel would lead to a loss of local knowledge in producing the environmental studies as well. 

“It should be alarming to everybody, regardless of who you voted for in the presidential election,” Roberts said. “These series of decisions on revising the rule and removing federal employees from the Forest Service and a variety of other decisions all collectively could threaten the way of life that we all cherish in the mountains — being outdoors, having healthy streams and rivers and clean air.”