in effect
This is an interim final rule from the Department of Energy (DOE), effective July 3, 2025, that rewrites how DOE carries out its environmental review obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). It took effect immediately without prior public comment, though DOE accepted comments through August 4, 2025.
Most of DOE’s NEPA review procedures have been removed from the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR Part 1021) and moved into a non-binding guidance document published on DOE’s website rather than in law. What stays in the CFR is narrower: the list of categorical exclusions (project types that skip full environmental review), an emergency-action provision, and a relabeled list of routine administrative tasks that DOE says fall outside NEPA’s reach entirely. Separately, NEPA procedures are stripped from the Presidential permit regulations governing cross-border electric transmission lines (10 CFR Part 205, subpart W), on the basis that those permits derive from presidential rather than congressional authority. Because the guidance document sits outside the CFR, DOE can update it without a formal rulemaking each time.
Developers and companies seeking DOE approvals for energy projects will now navigate a streamlined review process governed by guidance rather than codified regulation, which reduces the procedural steps DOE must follow and narrows the regulatory basis for legal challenges to those reviews. Applicants for Presidential permits to build or operate cross-border electric transmission facilities no longer face a separate NEPA procedure within that permitting process. Members of the public and organizations that previously used DOE’s detailed CFR-codified procedures to participate in or contest environmental reviews will find fewer enforceable procedural hooks in federal regulation going forward.