CEQ's NEPA regulations were rescinded: what a screen cites now

If you prepare environmental screens, the reference shelf behind your National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis has changed. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) rescinded the government-wide regulations that almost every NEPA document has cited for decades. The duty to analyze environmental effects did not go away. The specific regulations you cite to support that analysis did. A screen written today needs to rest on authorities that are still in force.

What CEQ and its regulations did

The National Environmental Policy Act is the federal law that requires an agency to consider the environmental effects of its actions before it acts. Congress passed it in 1970, and it is still in force today at 42 U.S.C. 4321 and the sections that follow.

The statute itself is short. For most of its history, the detail that practitioners actually worked from lived in a separate set of regulations issued by the Council on Environmental Quality, the White House office that coordinated NEPA across the federal government. Those regulations sat at 40 C.F.R. Parts 1500 through 1508, and they defined the terms everyone used. They set out when an action qualified for a categorical exclusion, when it required an environmental assessment, and when it required a full environmental impact statement. Because the CEQ regulations applied across the whole government, a consultant could cite them and expect any federal reviewer to recognize the reference.

What changed

The CEQ regulations at 40 C.F.R. Parts 1500 through 1508 were rescinded, meaning they were formally withdrawn. They are no longer in force as government-wide rules.

The authority behind a NEPA analysis did not disappear. It moved to two places, and a current screen should rely on those instead.

The first source is the statute itself. NEPA remains law at 42 U.S.C. 4321 and the sections that follow, including procedural provisions that Congress added in 2023. A screen can cite the statute directly for the core requirement that an agency weigh environmental effects before it acts.

The second source is each agency's own NEPA procedures. Federal agencies carry out NEPA through their own regulations and orders, and those agency-specific procedures are now the operative detail for the categorical exclusion, environmental assessment, and environmental impact statement pathways. The lead agency for a given project is the agency whose procedures apply to it.

Why this matters for a screen

A screening memo is only as reliable as the authorities it rests on. A citation to a rescinded regulation is a defect even when the analysis above it is sound, because a reviewer who checks the reference will find that it is no longer in force. That single dead citation undermines confidence in the rest of the document.

The correction is straightforward, and it comes down to three habits.

• Do not cite 40 C.F.R. Parts 1500 through 1508 as live authority. Reference those parts only as historical context, and state plainly that they were rescinded.
• Cite the statute at 42 U.S.C. 4321 and the sections that follow for the general NEPA obligation.
• Cite the lead agency's own NEPA procedures for the document-type pathway, because that is where the operative process now lives.

How Avow handles it

Avow checks every screening memo against a versioned regulatory corpus before the memo is delivered. When the CEQ regulations were rescinded, those citations were moved to a rescinded list, and the citation validator now flags them instead of allowing them through as live authority. The result is a memo whose references reflect the framework in force on the date the screen was generated, and which states the rescission rather than ignoring it.

The purpose of a screen has not changed. It identifies the regulations that may apply to a project and the studies that resolve them, and the licensed professional of record remains responsible for the conclusion. What changed is the reference shelf behind the analysis, and a current screen has to be built from the authorities that are actually in force.