HR4776-119

What This Bill Does

The SPEED Act rewrites the National Environmental Policy Act's review process and the remedies available when agencies violate it. It emphasizes NEPA's procedural role, limits analysis to closely caused effects of the immediate project, broadens circumstances in which no new federal environmental document is needed, and gives applicants more influence over schedules and completed documents. It also limits who may sue, when they may sue and whether a successful case can stop a project. The House-passed bill was referred to the Senate on December18,2025; Congress.gov listed no enactment when checked.

The bill is not simply a restatement of current law. The Supreme Court's May2025 Seven County decision already emphasizes procedural review, agency deference and the distinction between a project and separate upstream/downstream projects. The bill additionally restricts later research, fixes deadlines and removes specified judicial remedies. Its wording about effects separate in time or place is broader than treating every delayed or geographically extended effect of the project itself as automatically irrelevant under that decision. Other permitting laws are not generally repealed, and a faster final decision is not necessarily an approval.

Who Benefits and How

Energy developers, transportation builders, mining project sponsors and other federal authorization applicants gain opportunities to avoid duplicate analysis, reuse documents and reduce delay and litigation risk. Eligible Farm Service Agency borrowers receive an express major-federal-action exclusion for specified farm ownership loans and operating loan guarantees. Federally recognized Tribal governments gain recognition of qualifying Tribal environmental policies, a presumption against no-action alternatives for their own trust-resource proposals, and protection from some third-party NEPA challenges. Applicants generally must consent to review-deadline extensions and to voluntary agency changes to their completed documents. These benefits do not apply to actions covered by the bill's broad exception for ongoing administrative corrections.

Who Bears the Burden and How

Residents and conservation organizations may receive less analysis of some effects and less consideration of new research, face more demanding participation and harm requirements, and lose NEPA injunction/vacatur remedies even after proving specified errors. Federal lead and cooperating agencies gain some reduced documentation burden but must meet new coordination and decision deadlines and have less freedom to reopen completed work. Courts face expedited schedules and constrained remedies. Tribal governments retain their own review rights and exceptions for off-trust effects, so the bill is not an unconditional ban on all litigation involving Tribal resources. Project sponsors whose actions were reopened or subject to correction between January20,2025 and enactment would not get this Act's new protections. The bill provides no general appropriation or guaranteed cost savings.

Key Provisions

• Allows no new NEPA document where an agency determines another federal statute serves the compliance function, or where the lead agency accepts a qualifying state or Tribal review. Tribal reviews may rest on statutes, ordinances, resolutions, regulations or formally adopted policy; acceptance is not automatic.
• Limits effects analysis to a reasonably close causal relationship and proximate cause from the immediate action, excluding specified speculative, attenuated, time/place-separated or separate-project effects. Changes the environmental-assessment threshold from does-not to not-likely-to have reasonably foreseeable significant effects.
• Limits duties to conduct new research and does not require research after application receipt. Agencies need not consider research released after the earlier application/notice-of-intent cutoff and cannot delay waiting for it; the specified Administrative Procedure Act comment-information obligation is preserved. This is not a ban on all voluntary consideration of later information.
• Prevents changes to completed documents for applicant-backed actions absent court order or written applicant agreement. Restricts authorization interference with exceptions for court orders, material breach or legal violation, fraud, specified immediate serious harms or holder/sponsor requests; retains existing-law authority and requires notice and appropriate feasible evidentiary support.
• Requires authorization completeness notice or a written additional-information request within60days, then a review-level determination generally within60days after completeness or receipt of requested information. Sets21day cooperating-agency invitations/responses and subsequent7/14day coordination steps; federal cooperating comments are limited to legal jurisdiction.
• Requires final agency action within30days after the assessment or impact statement, including a schedule for outstanding authorizations. Preserves existing general one-year assessment/two-year impact-statement deadlines, with extensions requiring applicant approval and limited ability to challenge an approved extension before the new deadline. Other-law reviews run concurrently under their own applicable requirements.
• Extends the programmatic-analysis reliance period from five to ten years, retaining the substantial-new-circumstances/information exception and later reevaluation requirement. Authorizes reuse for substantially similar actions/effects and public modification or augmentation for dissimilar actions, rather than automatic reuse of every old document.
• Expands use of congressionally enacted categorical exclusions and specified financial-assistance exclusions; federal funding alone does not make an action a major Federal action. Prior-review authorization relief requires effects previously evaluated by another agency, not just a review still underway. Adds energy to the Council on Environmental Quality's appraisal duties.
• Requires substantial judicial deference and, for covered arbitrary-and-capricious NEPA violations, remand without vacatur or injunction while the action stays effective. Correction schedules generally cannot exceed180days, including the stated treatment of pre-enactment remand orders; this does not eliminate remedies under every other environmental statute.
• Limits ordinary NEPA claims to150days after public final action unless a shorter legal deadline applies; requires direct harm or imminent direct harm, and, when there was a comment period, a timely substantive unique comment identifying the same issue. Bars challenges to establishment of categorical exclusions. The reported bill removes the introduced requirement to prove a different agency result and the blanket declaration that environmental documents are not final agency actions.
• Requires the agency record within60days of a claim, judgment within180days after filing the record, appeal notice within60days and appellate decision within180days. Agencies and applicants may appeal during remand. Supplemental-document claims are limited to newly added information; the text sets the filing deadline to publication of the new final action without expressly adding a new150day period, creating a drafting ambiguity.
• Presumes no action harms a Tribe for qualifying Tribe-initiated trust-resource proposals with a reviewed no-action alternative. Generally bars other NEPA administrative/judicial review of trust-resource actions but preserves claims by the beneficiary Tribe and claims involving reasonably foreseeable off-trust effects.
• Excludes from the entire Act actions for which a federal agency moved for voluntary remand, reopened, reconsidered or initiated statutory correction between January20,2025 and enactment, whether or not the correction is finished. This exception is not textually limited to a named technology or project.