NO SPEED[ing]

The Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development (SPEED) Act wants to repeal NEPA without appearing to do so. The NEPA statute does not define or broach the subject of substantive vs. procedural reviews, the Supreme Court did that in a series of cases starting in 1973 and ending in 2025; 18 cases in all and the environmental litigants lost in every case. Chairman Westerman's post on the House Committee on Natural Resources site from July 25, 2025: Westerman and Golden Introduce Bipartisan Permitting Reform Legislation, House Committee on Natural Resources makes several dubious claims, such as "The SPEED Act will modernize NEPA to help streamline the permitting process and return the law to its intended purpose [which the authors want to change!]. The bill will shorten permitting timelines and reduce the frequency of frivolous litigation ["frivolous" would need to be determined by judicial review in the courts, which the SPEED Act intends to truncate.]." If we wanted to implement NEPA's original purpose we would recognize its substantive provisions (listed below) and reinstate the CEQ's regulations that served well for almost 50 years. The bill itself contains15 pages of sweeping changes to NEPA and its process. The bill wants to change the purpose of NEPA, Section 2, to read "This Act is a purely procedural statute intended to ensure Federal agencies consider the environmental impacts of their actions during the decisionmaking process. This Act does not mandate particular results, and only prescribes a process. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to mandate any specific environmental outcome or result, nor shall this Act be interpreted to confer substantive rights or impose substantive duties beyond procedural requirements." 

Actually, NEPA does mandate particular results, but in a meta-policy fashion meaning that whatever decision is made and implemented must protect the environment. While the above proposed change to NEPA's purpose appears to be grounded in the Supreme Court's rulings that NEPA serves a purely procedural function, it risks undermining one of the statute's foundational purposes. NEPA has substantive sections: 2, 101(a), 101(b), 101(c), 102(1), 102(2)(A), and 105, but the courts have mostly not found them, especially the Supreme Court, but it does not mean they are not there. Before NEPA's enactment in 1969, federal agencies routinely dismissed environmental considerations by claiming their statutory mandates contained no explicit environmental requirements. NEPA was specifically designed to reverse this practice, establishing environmental impact assessment (Section 102(2)(C)) as a default requirement for agency decision-making, with exemptions only where other statutory duties created direct conflicts. This is the law that the courts found in NEPA and what they named procedural. But the distinction between procedural and substantive review breaks down because a court cannot take a hard look to determine if an agency complied with NEPA's so-called procedural requirements in (102(2)(C), unless it also assesses the agency's final decision, which is substantive. The SPEED Act threatens to resurrect the pre-1969 paradigm. Under its framework, agencies could potentially return to systematically disregarding environmental consequences by asserting they lack explicit authority to weigh such factors. This would effectively restore the very regulatory blind spot that NEPA was created to eliminate, allowing agencies to sidestep environmental analysis whenever they determine it conflicts with their perceived primary mission.