Published 4:47 pm Monday, June 2, 2025
Logging and grazing on public land are expected to reap benefits from a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that has limited the scope of a proposed railroad’s environmental review.
Beyond its implications for a Utah railroad, the decision broadly clarifies how federal courts should enforce compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act — a statute affecting timber sales, grazing contracts and natural resource projects that rely on federal property or funding.
The nation’s highest court has reversed a ruling that ordered federal regulators to scrutinize the railroad’s potentially far-reaching indirect environmental effects, such as its capacity to boost oil drilling and refining.
The Supreme Court has determined the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals failed to defer to the Surface Transportation Board’s analysis of the 88-mile Utah railroad proposal.
The appellate court wrongly required the agency to consider impacts on “projects separate in time and space” from its construction and operation, the ruling said. “In other words, agencies are not required to analyze the effects of projects over which they do not exercise regulatory authority.”
Though the environmental review mandated by NEPA is meant to be “a modest procedural requirement,” some federal courts have transformed it into “a blunt and haphazard tool” that’s used by opponents of certain projects to derail their development, according to the Supreme Court.
“Simply stated, NEPA is a procedural cross-check, not a substantive roadblock. The goal of the law is to inform agency decisionmaking, not to paralyze it,” the ruling said.
Organizations representing the timber and livestock industries argued in favor of constraints on NEPA analysis that have now been adopted by the nation’s highest court, claiming that expansive environmental reviews have been “weaponized” to harm their businesses.
Environmental litigants and others routinely “abuse” NEPA by demanding “exhaustive analyses of every remote alternative and impact” involving uses of federal land or property, often causing such proposals to grind to a halt despite their public benefits, according the American Forest Resource Council, a nonprofit representing timber interests.
“Even the most diligent agencies suffer flyspecking for supposed flaws and omissions. All the while, the litigation paralyzes needed infrastructure, energy development, forest-health projects, and resulting economic productivity,” AFRC said in a court brief.
In the case underlying the Supreme Court’s recent decision, several county governments in Utah sought federal approval for an 88-mile railroad, which is meant to link an oil-rich basin with the national rail network, allowing oil shipments to refineries along the Gulf Coast.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided the federal government’s NEPA review of the plan was inadequate because it didn’t sufficiently examine the impacts of increased oil drilling in Utah or oil refining in Louisiana and Texas.
The Supreme Court has now overturned that ruling, finding the federal government properly analyzed habitat disruption, soil erosion and other factors but was not required to turn the railroad into a “scapegoat” for upstream and downstream activities by the oil industry.
“The effects from a separate project may be factually foreseeable, but that does not mean that those effects are relevant to the agency’s decisionmaking process or that it is reasonable to hold the agency responsible for those effects,” the opinion said.
AFRC said the railroad dispute was an example of how NEPA is being reshaped into a “de facto national energy and climate ‘policy’ overseen by federal courts,” meant to further emissions reduction goals that haven’t been approved by Congress.
Forest management projects on federal land frequently get bogged down in NEPA litigation even when the federal government successfully defends its proposals, which has a cumulative effect, according to AFRC.
“Serial litigation has made it impossible for the Forest Service to increase the pace and scale of management, with the agency conducting an average of just 2.87 million acres of restoration work annually in recent years, compared to the 20 million acres it has identified as needing restoration,” the organization said.
Similarly, ranchers who depend on public lands grazing allotments can be devastated by unfavorable NEPA decisions affecting their U.S. Bureau of Land Management permits, according to the Wyoming Stock Growers Association and others who submitted a court brief supporting the railroad’s position.
“Because complying with NEPA is getting increasingly difficult based on the massive amount of litigation that is filed, the BLM is behind on their renewal process and litigation has been filed alleging the court must order the BLM to rectify the backlog and complete the NEPA process for grazing permit renewal,” the organizations said.
Several federal appeals courts limit the scope of NEPA reviews, requiring them to evaluate only the impacts under a government agency’s authority, the brief said. However, the D.C. Circuit and the 9th Circuit — which has jurisdiction over much of the West — expect the analysis to include virtually any effect that’s “reasonably foreseeable.”
This “circuit split” has resulted in a lack of uniformity across the U.S., with litigants rushing to file lawsuits in the D.C. Circuit or 9th Circuit when they want to improve their odds of blocking a project under NEPA, the groups said.
“For agriculturalists, whose livelihoods depend on being able to use their federal lands grazing allotments, this split in interpretation causes a ‘race to the courthouse’ once the NEPA review of their term grazing permits is released,” which can result in the litigation occurring thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., the brief said.
In its recent decision overturning the D.C. Circuit’s interpretation, the Supreme Court noted that, “some courts have assumed an aggressive role” in regard to NEPA while others have been “more restrained.”
In light of this divergence, the nation’s highest court said it’s important to reiterate that federal agencies must be allowed to draw a “manageable line” for evaluating the effects of a project under NEPA review.
“Citizens may not enlist the federal courts, ‘under the guise of judicial review’ of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand,” the ruling said.
