How NEPA became a litigation machine

Much of NEPA’s power to slow down project timelines comes from the lawsuits it enables. Litigation doesn’t just slow down projects directly - it also incentivizes agencies to spend time “bulletproofing” their environmental documents before projects can even start, and the threat of lawsuits makes all projects riskier, keeping some potential developers out of the market altogether. In a recent piece, Samuel Roland offers a fascinating historical deep-dive into how NEPA – which never explicitly provides for private lawsuits – turned into a litigation machine.