SPEED Act
The SPEED Act (Standardizing Permitting and Expediting Economic Development Act) is proposed NEPA reform that emphasizes a strictly procedural approach to federal environmental review. It states NEPA is meant to ensure agencies consider environmental impacts during decision making but does not mandate environmental outcomes or create substantive rights. The bill tightens and clarifies how environmental analyses are produced and reviewed, aims to shorten timelines, and introduces new limits on how potential environmental effects are identified and evaluated. It also scales up programmatic environmental analyses, adds new definitions (including a stricter notion of what is “reasonably foreseeable”), expands certain exclusions, and creates a new judicial review framework intended to speed up court handling of NEPA-related challenges. Overall, the bill is designed to reduce delays in permitting and approvals by limiting scope, limiting the consideration of certain post-application information, expanding the use of categorical exclusions, and imposing tighter timelines for courts to resolve NEPA disputes. Critics might argue these changes could weaken environmental review and public input, while supporters would say it reduces procedural clutter and accelerates economic development.
Key Points
- 1Procedural nature and scope clarification: NEPA is reframed as a purely procedural statute; it does not require specific environmental outcomes or confer substantive rights, and agencies must follow defined process steps in their analyses.
- 2Narrowing the scope and timing of review: The proposed rule allows consideration only of effects with a close causal link to the immediate project; it excludes speculative or remote effects and those related to separate future projects. It also restricts requiring new scientific research unless essential and not unduly costly or time-consuming.
- 3Timely and unified federal reviews: The act streamlines coordination among agencies, limits comments to only relevant matters within jurisdiction, and prohibits duplicative environmental documents when a lead agency has determined an environmental document is not required. It also curbs delays based on new information that becomes public after certain deadlines.
- 4Programmatic and categorical exclusions: Programmatic documents would increase from 5 to 10 allowed instances. The bill also expands categorical exclusions (pre-approved types of actions that do not require full NEPA documents) and adds clarifications around when exclusions may apply.
- 5Judicial review and enforcement framework: A new provision (SEC. 113) sets a high standard for overturning NEPA procedural decisions, emphasizing agency deference. It creates specific remand procedures with time-bound deadlines and imposes strict filing and timing requirements for challenges, while preserving a court’s ability to expedite review but limiting how it can second-guess environmental effects.
- 6Definitions and scope changes: The bill expands definitions to include statute-based clarifications and adds a new “reasonably foreseeable” standard for environmental effects, with explicit limits to speculative or attenuated consequences. It also broadens exclusions, including certain agricultural financing and related agency actions.