New Act Mandates Annual Federal Reports on NEPA Lawsuits, Project Costs, and Timelines Starting 2026

This bill, titled the “Studying NEPA’s Impact on Projects Act,” doesn’t change environmental rules, but it does mandate a massive new data collection effort across the entire federal government. Starting in July 2026, every major federal agency must submit an annual report to the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) detailing exactly what happens when a project triggers the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

Essentially, the government is building a huge public database to measure the administrative cost and legal risk associated with environmental reviews. This effort targets four specific areas: tracking every lawsuit alleging a NEPA violation, measuring the length of Environmental Impact Statements (EIS), estimating the cost to prepare them, and mapping out how long the approval timelines actually take. The CEQ must then publish all this data online for everyone to see, broken down by sector—everything from broadband and renewable energy to surface transportation and mining.

The Litigation Scorecard

For anyone involved in large projects, the most interesting part might be the new litigation report card. Agencies will have to catalog every active lawsuit from the prior year claiming a NEPA violation. This includes naming the agency, the plaintiff, the court, and the project sector. Crucially, they must report the outcome: Did the court stop the project? Did it send the agency back to the drawing board for more work? Was the case settled? They even have to track if the plaintiffs won any awards for costs or attorney’s fees. This is the government pulling back the curtain on how often NEPA lawsuits succeed and what those wins actually look like.

Measuring the Paperwork Mountain

Another major requirement focuses on the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)—the lengthy document required for major federal actions. Agencies must now analyze the length of all final EIS documents published over the previous five years, calculating the average and median page counts, including appendices and citations. They also have to estimate the cost to prepare these documents, covering full-time staff hours, contractors, and other direct expenses. They are even asked to try and track the costs incurred by project sponsors and their contractors, though getting accurate numbers there might be tricky for the agencies.

The Clock Is Ticking: Tracking Project Timelines

Perhaps the most practical metric for everyday people—especially those waiting for new infrastructure—is the timeline analysis. The bill requires agencies to track the full lifecycle of EIS projects started over the previous ten years. This means recording the specific dates for every major milestone: when the permit was applied for, when the EIS process started, when the final EIS was published, and when the project got the final notice to proceed. This data will reveal the average and median time it takes to get through each stage, providing hard numbers on exactly how long the federal review process takes for different types of projects, like a new highway or a utility line.

What Does This Mean in the Real World?

This bill doesn’t change the substance of NEPA, but it creates a massive administrative lift for federal agencies, who will now have to dedicate significant staff time and resources to data collection rather than environmental review itself. For the rest of us, it means unprecedented transparency. If you’re a developer trying to build a solar farm, or a community group concerned about a new pipeline, you will soon have publicly available data showing the historical cost, time commitment, and legal risk associated with similar projects. This data is also explicitly required to compare timelines before and after the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, which aimed to speed up these reviews, allowing Congress and the public to judge whether those changes actually worked.