New REPAIR Act Imposes 120-Day Limit on Project Lawsuits, Speeds Up Infrastructure Approvals

The Revising and Enhancing Project Authorizations Impacted by Review Act of 2025—or the REPAIR Act—is a major proposal aimed squarely at speeding up how quickly big infrastructure, energy, and development projects can move forward once they face a legal challenge. Think of it as a massive regulatory fast-pass system designed to cut down on the time projects spend in court and regulatory limbo.

The 120-Day Clock and the Court’s Leash

If you’re a group or individual concerned about a new pipeline, highway, or factory, this bill dramatically shortens your window to challenge it. Under Section 3, anyone wanting to sue over an agency’s initial project approval now has a tight 120 days to file that lawsuit. If you file a claim, but then need to file a follow-up action—like asking a judge for an emergency halt (a preliminary injunction)—you must do that within 120 days of your original filing, or your entire case is tossed. This is a huge constraint, especially for complex projects where gathering evidence and legal support takes time. For the average person, this means if a major project breaks ground near your community, you’ll need to act incredibly fast.

Perhaps more significantly, the bill puts a leash on what judges can do when they find an agency messed up. If a court rules against the government, the judge generally can’t cancel or block the project outright. Instead, they must send the authorization back to the agency to fix the error (a process called 'remand'). A judge can only completely stop a project if they find it will cause "immediate and serious harm to people's health or the environment," and there's no other way to fix it. This fundamentally shifts the balance, making it much harder to halt a project based on procedural or long-term environmental concerns.

The 'Sponsor Wins' Button for Remanded Projects

If a project is sent back for fixes, Section 3 creates a mandatory, high-speed mediation process overseen by the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council. This process is designed to ensure the project gets back on track, and it gives the project sponsor—the company or entity building the project—a massive advantage.

Within 60 days of the court action, both the agency and the sponsor must submit proposals on how to fix the court’s concerns. Here’s the kicker: If the agency fails to submit its fix proposal on time, the Council automatically accepts the project sponsor’s proposal. Furthermore, if the Council itself fails to finalize a plan within its 60-day review period, the sponsor’s proposal also automatically becomes the final plan. This structure is a huge win for developers, effectively allowing the party seeking approval to dictate the terms of the fix if the government agency drags its feet.

Once that final plan is in place, the agency has just 15 days to reauthorize the project. If the agency misses that 15-day deadline, the sponsor can legally start working anyway, relying on the authorization as if it were approved. And once that final remediation plan is issued, no one—except the project sponsor—can sue over the plan itself.

The End of NEPA-Only Lawsuits

Section 4 contains a provision that will be a game-changer for environmental law. It states that just because the government performs an environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), that process alone does not give anyone the right to sue. Historically, many successful environmental challenges were based on arguing that the agency’s environmental review (the paperwork) was flawed or incomplete.

Under this new rule, you can no longer sue based solely on the claim that the environmental paperwork wasn’t done perfectly. To challenge an approval, you must prove that the project will cause you a "direct, real-world problem" that the agency failed to consider in its initial decision. This raises the bar significantly for public interest groups and local communities, tying their ability to sue directly to tangible harm rather than procedural failures in the environmental review process.

The Watch List for Slow Judges

Finally, the bill introduces a new layer of judicial scrutiny. The Council must create a public database tracking any project lawsuit that hasn't been decided within 90 days of being assigned to a judge. If a case stalls past that 90-day mark, the Director of the U.S. Courts must report details about the delay, and the Council must publish an annual report detailing which courts and judges have handled the most delayed cases. This mechanism is clearly intended to pressure the judiciary to move these project cases along quickly, adding a public accountability angle to the judicial review process.