A Two-Page Law From 1970 Now Produces Studies Longer Than a Novel

Somewhere in Washington there is a document about a road. The document is longer than a novel. It has appendices. The appendices have appendices. Nobody has read all of it, including the people who signed it, and it took longer to produce than it will take to pour the concrete.

Now, I have nothing against books. But when a stack of paper takes five years to write about a project that takes two years to build, I think a reasonable person is entitled to ask who the paper is for. The honest answer is lawyers. Let me explain how a law you could read over a cup of coffee became one of the most powerful brakes on building in America.

The law that started small

On January 1, 1970, President Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, known as NEPA. It was the first major environmental statute of the decade, and it was dramatically short. The heart of the law is only a few pages of text, and its operative provision is a single paragraph inside Section 102.

NEPA did two things. Title I declared a national policy to encourage harmony between people and the environment. Title II created the Council on Environmental Quality, a small office in the White House. And Section 102(2)(C) set the requirement that has launched ten thousand lawsuits. It directed all federal agencies to include, in "every recommendation or report on proposals for legislation and other major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment," a "detailed statement by the responsible official" on the environmental impact of the proposed action, on alternatives to it, and on a few related matters.

Read that again. It does not say the agency must choose the environmentally best option. It does not forbid any project. It says: write down the effects, consider alternatives, and let the public see. It is a procedural statute. The Supreme Court said exactly that in Robertson v. Methow Valley Citizens Council (1989): NEPA prohibits uninformed action, not unwise action. An agency may go ahead with a project that does real environmental damage, so long as it has looked at the damage first.

If the story ended there, I would have no complaint. A requirement that the government think before it builds is an easy thing to like, and many conservatives, who dislike waste, like it. The problem is what came next.

From statement to saga

The document NEPA calls a "detailed statement" became known as the environmental impact statement, or EIS. How did a detailed statement become a library shelf? Three forces did it.

First, the courts read the procedure strictly. Within two years of the law, the D.C. Circuit, in Calvert Cliffs' Coordinating Committee v. AEC (1971), took the law's procedural duties seriously and told the Atomic Energy Commission it had to do the work, not skip it. That was the correct reading of the text. But it taught every agency in Washington that a court would check their homework, and that a gap in the statement could kill the project.

Second, the regulations hardened the process. In 1978, the Council on Environmental Quality issued regulations meant to bind all agencies. The CEQ regulations, which ran through several parts of the Code of Federal Regulations, specified when an EIS was required, how an agency should scope it, how it should respond to comments, and how it should structure alternatives. Many of these were sensible. Together, they turned a one-paragraph duty into an industry.

Third, lawsuits. This is the engine. An EIS is a record, and a record can be attacked. An opponent who sues does not have to prove the project is bad. He has to prove the document is incomplete: that it did not analyze some alternative, did not study some effect, did not respond to some comment. Agencies understood this, and responded the way anyone responds to a hostile reader. They wrote more. If an opponent can win by showing a gap, then closing every conceivable gap becomes the agency's strategy. That means studying alternatives nobody would pick, effects nobody could measure, and cumulative impacts stretching into the horizon.

Think of it as the logic of a defensive crouch. A federal official who writes a short, clear statement risks a court calling it inadequate. A federal official who writes a thousand pages is very difficult to attack, and the extra cost lands on someone else: the taxpayer, the builder, the town waiting for the road. Length is insurance. The cost of the insurance is time.

What it looks like in practice

I promised not to quote numbers I cannot verify, so let me describe the pattern. A highway or transmission line that needs federal approval may require an EIS that takes years of study, then a comment period, then a final statement, then a record of decision, and then, often, a lawsuit that can send the whole thing back to the start. Projects that cross federal land, need a federal permit or receive federal money all trigger the review. Mines, pipelines, transmission lines, ports and power plants fall into that net.

The consequences reach well beyond any single project. This is why the question belongs on a site that cares about the electric grid and the data centers that depend on it. New transmission lines to carry power from where it is made to where it is used usually cross multiple jurisdictions and often some federal land, and every one of them can face NEPA review and challenge. The more the country wants electricity, the more the review process becomes the bottleneck. A country that built the interstate highway system in decades, a story told in We Raised the Empire State Building in About a Year, So Why Not a Power Line, now takes longer to approve a power line than the Army Corps once took to dam a river.

And here is a cost the lawyers do not mention: what does not get built. We count the delay on projects that go ahead. We do not count the project that was abandoned because the developer could not wait six years and the financing fell through. NEPA's most expensive effects are the ones that never appear in a document.

The reforms Congress made

In 2023, Congress finally acted. The Fiscal Responsibility Act, signed on June 3, 2023, which was mostly about raising the debt limit, also amended NEPA. The changes were modest but real.

• Page limits. An environmental impact statement is limited to 150 pages, or 300 pages for projects of extraordinary complexity, not counting appendices. A shorter review, called an environmental assessment, is limited to 75 pages.
• Time limits. The EIS must be completed within two years of the agency's decision to prepare it. An environmental assessment must be completed within one year.
• A lead agency. When several agencies are involved, one is designated to take the lead, so that a project need not satisfy a separate set of reviewers one after another.
• Clearer definitions. The amendments clarified what counts as a major federal action and what an agency need consider.

These are the first statutory limits in the law's history. They are not sweeping, and they leave the framework intact. Whether they will hold depends on whether courts treat missed deadlines as a reason to let a project go ahead or as one more thing to litigate.

The Supreme Court, too, has begun to rein in the excesses. In 2025, in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, the Court told lower courts to give agencies substantial deference on the scope and detail of NEPA review, emphasizing that the statute is procedural and that courts should not demand endless analysis. That decision was a turn away from the defensive crouch. It remains to be seen how far agencies and lower courts will follow it.

The argument, in numbered premises

Here is the case.

1. A procedural statute should produce a procedure, not a veto. NEPA says agencies must look before they leap. It does not say they cannot leap. The Supreme Court has said so.
2. Litigation has turned a procedure into a veto. An opponent who cannot defeat a project at the ballot box or in the legislature can defeat it by finding a gap in the paperwork. The paperwork grows to close every gap, and the delay becomes the weapon.
3. The cost lands on ordinary people. Delay raises the cost of roads, housing, power lines and factories. That cost shows up in taxes, rents and electric bills. It also shows up in jobs that go elsewhere.
4. The benefit does not scale with length. A well-done assessment of a few dozen pages can inform a decision as well as a thousand-page tome. The marginal page buys litigation insurance, not environmental protection.
5. So the right reform is a limit on length, time and the grounds for challenge, not an abolition of review. The 2023 changes are a start.

The objection: review protects communities

The best case against everything I have said goes like this. NEPA was passed because projects built without review did real harm. Highways that cut through neighborhoods. Dams that flooded valleys. Power plants whose emissions fell on the people who lived downwind and could not afford to move. A required statement gives those communities a voice and forces an agency to disclose what it intends to do. Time limits and page limits, the objection says, will rush agencies into approving projects without adequate study, and the people who pay are the poor and the powerless, who cannot hire lawyers.

That deserves a serious answer, and I do not dismiss it. Communities do deserve a voice. Government should disclose what it plans to do to people's neighborhoods. A conservative who believes in the property rights of the individual cannot be indifferent to a project that takes a person's land or fouls his air.

But look at who wins the lawsuits that NEPA makes possible. Often it is not the poor family in the path of the highway. It is the well-funded organization with the staff lawyer and the time, and sometimes it is a competitor or a neighborhood group that wants to block new housing. The delay machine is available to anyone with the resources to run it, and it is used as often to stop a solar farm or a rail line as a coal plant. A review process whose cost is years can be used by the wealthy against the poor just as easily as the reverse. A family that needs a new transmission line to keep its electricity affordable, or a town that needs a road to attract a factory, is a community, too.

And disclosure does not require a thousand pages. A short, plain statement, with the alternatives that matter and the effects that matter, serves a citizen far better than a mountain that nobody reads. The right test for a good environmental review is whether an ordinary person could read it and understand what is being proposed. By that test, many of today's documents fail.

The Founders' framework is relevant here as well. Article I vests lawmaking in Congress, and Congress wrote a short statute. The thousand-page practice grew up because courts and agencies filled in the gaps, and filled them in the direction of ever more process. When Congress sets page and time limits, it is not attacking the environment; it is exercising its constitutional duty to say what the law is. The broader story of how a short statute grows into a thick regulatory regime is in Agencies Write Thousands of Rules a Year While Congress Passes Hundreds of Laws, and the way agencies make rules by a process nobody voted on is in The Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 Was a Truce, and It Still Shows.

What a better system looks like

• Short, plain documents. A page limit that is real and enforced, with the technical detail available in referenced studies.
• A clock that runs. If an agency misses its deadline, the project proceeds, or the burden shifts, rather than the clock stopping while a new study is commissioned.
• A narrow door to court. Limit challenges to people who raised the issue during the public comment period, and set a short time to file.
• One lead agency. One decision-maker for a project, rather than a chain of them.
• Count the cost of delay. Require the agency to say what the delay costs, just as it must say what the project costs.

For a related idea, A Regulatory Budget Would Make Washington Count the Cost of Its Rules describes how to make the government count the costs it imposes, and A Thought Experiment on Requiring a Permit to Apply for a Permit takes the logic of the permit chain to a comic conclusion.

You can see the rulemakings and permits under way in the places where you live at the red tape page.

The case in brief

1. The National Environmental Policy Act, signed January 1, 1970, is a short procedural statute whose Section 102(2)(C) requires a detailed statement of environmental impact, and the Supreme Court has held that it prohibits uninformed action, not unwise action.
2. Strict court readings, the 1978 CEQ regulations and the threat of lawsuits led agencies to write ever longer statements as litigation insurance, and the cost of that delay falls on roads, power lines, housing and mines.
3. The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 added the first statutory limits: 150 pages for an impact statement (300 for the most complex), 75 for an assessment, and two years and one year respectively.
4. The best objection, that review protects communities, is answered by the fact that delay is available to anyone with resources, and that short, plain disclosure serves communities better than a thousand pages.
5. The fix is real page and time limits, a narrow door to court, one lead agency and an accounting of what delay costs.

What you can do: when a federal agency posts a draft environmental review for a project near you, read its summary, then file a short, specific public comment, and ask your representative whether she supports enforcing the 2023 page and time limits.