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Supreme Court Changes the Game on Federal Environmental Reviews
Whether the effects are good or bad depends on the viewer’s perspective. Either way, there is a new interpretation in place for the law that is the centerpiece of the debate about permitting – the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, known as NEPA.
Taking a big-picture look
NEPA requires federal agencies to document and describe the environmental effects of any proposed action, including construction of oil pipelines, renewable energy and other infrastructure projects.
Only after completing that work can the agency make a final decision to approve or deny the project. These reports must evaluate direct effects, such as the destruction of habitat to make way for a new highway, and indirect effects, such as the air pollution from cars using the highway after it is built.
Decades of litigation about the scope of indirect effects have widened the required evaluation. As I explain it to my students, that logical and legal progression is reminiscent of the popular children’s book “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,” in which granting a request for a cookie triggers a seemingly endless series of further requests – for a glass of milk, a napkin and so on. For the highway example, the arguments went, even if the agency properly assessed the pollution from the cars, it also had to consider the new subdivisions, malls and jobs the new highway foreseeably could induce.
The challenge for federal agencies was knowing how much of that potentially limitless series of indirect effects courts would require them to evaluate. In recent litigation, the question in particular has been how broad a range of effects on and from climate change could be linked to any one specific project and therefore require evaluation.
With the court’s ruling, federal agencies’ days of uncertainty are over.
The cover image of the 637-page environmental impact assessment shows a view of the region where a railway is proposed to be built. U.S. Surface Transportation Board
Biggest NEPA case in decades
On May 29, 2025, the Supreme Court – minus Justice Neil Gorsuch, who had recused himself – decided the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado, the first major NEPA dispute before the court in 20 years.
At issue was an 85-mile rail line a group of developers proposed to build in Utah to connect oil wells to the interstate rail network and from there transport waxy crude oil to refineries in Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere. The federal Surface Transportation Board reviewed the environmental effects and approved the required license in 2021.
The report was 637 pages long, with more than 3,000 pages of appendices containing additional information. It acknowledged but did not give a detailed assessment of the indirect “upstream” effects of constructing the rail line – such as spurring new oil drilling – and the indirect “downstream” effects of the ultimate use of the waxy oil in places as far flung as Louisiana.
In February 2022, Eagle County, Colorado, through which trains coming from the new railway would pass, along with the Center for Biological Diversity appealed that decision in federal court, arguing that the board had failed to properly explain why it did not assess those effects. Therefore, the county argued, the report was incomplete and the board license should be vacated.
In August 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit agreed and held that the agency had failed to adequately explain why it could not employ “some degree of forecasting” to identify those impacts and that the board could prevent those effects by exercising its authority to deny the license.
The railway developers appealed to the Supreme Court, asking whether NEPA requires a federal agency to look beyond the action being proposed to evaluate indirect effects outside its own jurisdiction.
Petroleum-drilling equipment stands in the Uinta Basin in eastern Utah.AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
A resounding declaration
Writing for a five-justice majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh delivered a ringing, table-pounding lecture about courts run amok.
Kavanaugh did not stop to provide specific support for each admonition, describing NEPA as a “legislative acorn” that has “grown over the years into a judicial oak that has hindered infrastructure development.” He bemoaned the “delay upon delay” NEPA imposes on projects as so complicated that it bordered “on the Kafkaesque.”
In his view, “NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents.” He called for “a course correction … to bring judicial review under NEPA back in line with the statutory text and common sense.” His opinion reset the course in three ways.
First, despite the Supreme Court having recently reduced the deference courts must give to federal agency decisions in other contexts, Kavanaugh wrote that courts should give agencies strong deference when reviewing an agency’s NEPA effects analyses. Because these assessments are “fact-dependent, context-specific, and policy-laden choices about the depth and breadth of its inquiry … (c)ourts should afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness.”
Second, Kavanaugh crafted a new rule saying that the review of one project did not need to consider the potential indirect effects of other related projects it could foreseeably induce, such as the rail line encouraging more drilling for oil. This limitation is especially relevant, Kavanaugh emphasized, when the effects are from projects over which the reviewing agency does not have jurisdiction. That applied in this case, because the board does not regulate oil wells or oil drilling.
And third, Kavanaugh created something like a “no harm – no foul” rule, under which “even if an (environmental impact statement) falls short in some respects, that deficiency may not necessarily require a court to vacate the agency’s ultimate approval of a project.” The strong implication is that courts should not overturn an agency decision unless its NEPA assessment has a serious flaw.
The upshot for the project at hand was that the Supreme Court deferred to the board’s decision that it could not reliably predict the rail line’s effects on oil drilling or use of the oil transported. And the fact that the agency had no regulatory power over those separate issues reinforced the idea that those concerns were outside the scope of the board’s required review.
A train rolls along a stretch of track in Utah that could be connected with a proposed railway to carry oil to market. AP Photo/Rick Bowmer
A split court
Although Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that she would have reached the same end result and upheld the agency permit, her proposed test is far narrower.
By her reading, the federal law creating the Surface Transportation Boardrestricted it from considering the broader indirect effects of the rail line. But her finding would be relevant only for any federal agencies whose governing statutes were similarly restrictive. By contrast, Kavanaugh’s “course correction” applies to judicial review of NEPA findings for all federal agencies.
Though the full effects remain to be seen, this decision significantly changes the legal landscape of environmental reviews of major projects. Agencies will have more latitude to shorten the causal chain of indirect effects they consider – and to exclude them entirely if they flow from separate projects beyond the agency’s regulatory control.
Now, for example, if a federal agency is considering an application to build a new natural gas power plant, the review must still include its direct greenhouse gas emissions and their effects on the climate. But emissions that could result from additional gas extraction and transportation projects to fuel the power plant, and any climate effects from whatever the produced electricity is used for, are now clearly outside the agency’s required review. And if the agency voluntarily decided to consider any of those effects, courts would have to defer to its analysis, and any minor deficiencies would be inconsequential.
That is a far cry from how the legal structure around the National Environmental Policy Act has worked for decades. For lawyers, industry, advocacy groups and the courts, environmental review after the Eagle County decision is not just a new ballgame; it is a new sport.
Supreme Court Changes the Game on Federal Environmental Reviews was originally published by The Conversation and is republished with permission.
J. B. Ruhl is an expert in environmental, natural resources and property law, and also studies the legal industry and legal technology.
Scams Targeting Immigrants Take Advantage of Fears of Immigration Status and Deportation
Just a few hours later, I received another call from an unknown number, this time with a New York area code. Curious to see if the previous caller was trying to reach me from another number, I picked up. An automated message, claiming to represent the Consulate General of India, informed me my Indian passport was “blacklisted due to unresolved legal issues,” and asked me to connect with a representative for more information. Then they called me again the next day and left the same message on my voicemail. The scammers knew I was Indian, but it was clear they didn’t think I was a U.S. citizen.
What I learned in the next few days was that I was targeted by a scam that was directed at Indians in the U.S., regardless of their legal status, and had already raised concerns at the Indian Embassy. In fact, the embassy’s website immediately opened to a pop-up announcement declaring that they were aware of the issue and directing people on how to report it. Callers to the Indian Embassy were greeted by an automated message about scam calls. The Indian embassy did not respond to my multiple requests for comment.
Scammers have long targeted immigrant communities in the U.S. However, federal law enforcement has seen a recent surge. Scammers pretending to be embassies or other foreign officials have “been happening for about three years now but [is] increasing in frequency in the last year,” hence a recent press release and podcast to warn the public of this growing scam, the FBI told the Fulcrum.
This increase coincides with the U.S. government’s crackdown on immigration, both in the tail end of the Biden administration, where asylum was halted at the Southern border, and throughout the Trump administration’s multipronged deportation campaign. This includes ICE raids, threats to international students’ legal status, and removing the protected legal status of multiple groups, including Venezuelans.
Juan Pedroza, a sociology professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said uncertainty and rapid changes to immigration laws and regulations “opens up new opportunities for scam artists to get creative.”
“We do see anecdotal data that when you see rapid changes at the federal level in terms of immigration policies, there does seem to be these new incentives for scam artists to get creative,” Pedroza said. “It makes sense intuitively to me that in the absence of clear pathways to legalization, clear protections for asylum seekers, or something like amnesty, we're just going to keep seeing these scams come back again and again.”
Telemarketing scams in which people pose as embassy officials date back at least as far as 2011, Pedroza said. He conducted the first nationwide study on immigration scams that target noncitizens in 2023. He said immigration scams are underreported and therefore hard to quantify because “there are groups being targeted precisely because they're especially vulnerable and because they're very unlikely to come forward.”
The FBI concurred that such scams are underreported, in a statement responding to questions from the Fulcrum. In fact, the FBI recorded fewer than 100 cases through its Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, portal in the last three years.
“Though the FBI is aware of additional victims not reported to IC3. Some victims report the scam before they lose money, but around half of the victims reported financial losses,” the FBI statement said.
I posted about the scam on my professional social media. In just a week, 10 people in the Indian American community told me they had also been recipients of this scam call in recent months. Aneri Patel, a friend from my undergraduate college, UC Santa Barbara, got in touch with me via Instagram after seeing my post and said she also received the scam call.
“I laughed because I was born in Bakersfield, California, so I do not have a visa or a green card, but I'm curious how they knew I was of Indian descent,” Patel said.
According to the FBI, scammers can get intimate details such as the phone numbers of Indians in the U.S. via “a variety of sources, including data breaches, purchasing data on the dark web, purchasing commercial/advertising data, publicly available data, and social engineering.” Some scammers are using “spoofing” technology, which disguises the caller ID of scammers and masquerades the phone number as that of the embassy on the recipient’s end.
Another friend on a green card, kept anonymous so her immigration status wouldn't be threatened, also received the scam call from someone claiming to represent the Indian embassy. He stated her full name and asked if she was familiar with an Indian phone number that the New Delhi police had traced back to her. He said the number was associated with the perpetrator of scam calls in India, which 27 people reported.
“He was like … the New Delhi police are looking for you, and we've sent your identity to the embassy, and you have to call them and talk to them,” she said. “He was just going on and on about how they were going to come after me, how the embassy was going to come after me, how my immigration status was at risk.”
My friend, who grew up in the U.S., received immigration scam calls a few years prior when she was on a visa. Both previous experience and awareness that “you are basically never going to get a call that is regarding [immigration status]” quickly alerted her that the call was a scam. After she hung up, the scammer tried to contact her via WhatsApp, so she changed her profile photo and name.
“And then he texted me more, and he was like, ‘You changed your name and your profile photo. Why are you not responding to me?’”
Though she knew it was a scam quickly, she said the experience was still frightening.
“It was just the threat of deportation. Even if you know logically that something is not real, when you hear your stability being questioned like that,” she said. “Any sort of instability there can feel really scary. So even if you logically know it's not real, my heart races. My heart definitely started racing just because this guy was threatening me, living in America.”
Pedroza said in some states, like New York, there are stronger laws inhibiting scammers from advertising their services. In states with fewer protections and elected representatives unwelcoming to immigrants, victims may be less likely to come forward.
“[Immigration scam protections] might be less of a priority precisely where the context is turned against immigrants the most,” Pedroza said.
The FBI issued a press release on May 13 that Middle Eastern international students in the U.S. are being targeted by “scammers impersonat[ing] US and foreign government officials claiming there is an issue with the student's immigration status and exploit[ing] this for financial gain.” The FBI also released a podcast on May 19 about how scammers posing as Chinese law enforcement are targeting Chinese international students in the U.S., claiming they’re wanted by law enforcement for illegal activity and extracting large sums of money from their victims, claiming it will resolve the issue.
In a statement to the Fulcrum, the FBI said, “government impersonation scams include a variety of government agencies, and scammers have evolved based on current events to ensure their scams are relevant and convincing,” regarding scammers targeting international students while posing as the Department of Homeland Security. These scammers are attempting to capitalize on the fear that international students have regarding visa revocations.
And while some, such as Patel and I, figured the calls were a scam, we are both U.S. citizens. We are at less risk than people with Indian citizenship. For some immigrant communities, such calls can hold more legitimacy. As my anonymous friend said, especially immigrants new to the U.S. might be more likely to fall for such scams to secure their ability to stay.
“Even for me, it was definitely a little scary, even though I've been raised here, and even though I know exactly what to look out for and what the signs are,” she said. “Getting a call like this, they would definitely do anything that the person asked them to do just to ensure that they can stay in this country.”
Atmika Iyer is a graduate student in Northwestern Medill’s Politics, Policy, and Foreign Affairs reporting program. Atmika is also a journalism intern with the Fulcrum.
To read more of Atmika's work, click HERE.
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