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Courts have applied Seven County to limit the scope of judicial review and give more deference to the government in NEPA cases.

By Devin O’Connor, Janice Schneider, Stacey VanBelleghem, and Lia Barrett

On May 29, 2025, the US Supreme Court decided Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County1 (see this Latham blog post) which narrowed the scope of environmental review required under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Now, a year later, we have seen courts repeatedly emphasize a deferential standard of review in NEPA cases and decline to require analysis of effects from projects that are beyond an agency’s jurisdiction or are separate in time and place. Courts have also extended Seven County principles beyond environmental impact statements (EISs) to environmental assessments (EAs). 

Seven County Infrastructure Coalition

Seven County involved a railway project to connect oil fields in Utah to refineries in other states. The federal Surface Transportation Board prepared an EIS that acknowledged the potential environmental effects of follow-on upstream drilling projects and downstream refining projects but did not analyze those effects in detail. For that reason, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EIS and project approval for failing to analyze the reasonably foreseeable impacts of the proposed project.

The Supreme Court unanimously reversed that ruling, finding that NEPA did not require the federal agency to consider the effects of separate projects that may follow from the proposed railway project. The Supreme Court made two significant holdings. First, it directed reviewing courts to provide “substantial deference” to agency environmental reviews so long as the reviews are reasonable and reasonably explained.2 Courts must not “micromanage” agency decisions regarding the level of detail in an EIS and what alternatives are analyzed.3 Second, in an extension of the Court’s prior ruling in Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen,4 the Supreme Court held that agencies do not have to consider effects from other projects outside the agency’s regulatory authority or in a separate time and place.5

In the past year following Seven County, courts have begun to apply these key holdings to uphold agency decisions based on a more limited scope of NEPA review.

Implementing the “Bedrock Principle” of Substantial Deference

Courts have relied on Seven County to emphasize the substantial amount of deference courts owe to agency decisions regarding alternatives and the overall scope of environmental impact review under NEPA.

The D.C. Circuit, for example, adopted the “course correction” directed by Seven County.6 It rejected the Sierra Club’s arguments challenging the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC’s) downstream emissions analyses for a pipeline project, noting: “Could FERC have taken a different approach? Perhaps. But we must ‘defer to agencies’ decisions about where to draw the line’ in their analyses of ‘indirect environmental effects.’”7 And in addressing the challenge to the no-action alternative, the D.C. Circuit explained that “[p]erhaps FERC’s no-action analysis could have been clearer about [the relevant] assumption,” but because that assumption was based on “predictive or scientific judgments,” the court was at its “most deferential.”8

The Ninth Circuit — which has often been open to groups raising NEPA challenges — has also followed Seven County’s heightened deference principle. In Cascadia Wildlands v. U.S. Bureau of Land Mgmt.,9 for example, environmental groups argued that the Bureau of Land Management did not include sufficient detail in its NEPA review regarding a resource management plan’s potential effect on a threatened species. Drawing on Seven County, the Ninth Circuit concluded that the agency’s EA satisfied NEPA, explaining that the “question of how detailed a report must be ‘requires the exercise of agency discretion’” and that agencies do not need to “compose the Aeneid” to produce a sufficiently reasoned and detailed report.10

Limiting Consideration of Indirect Effects

Seven County’s holding that agencies are not required to assess the effects of projects outside their regulatory jurisdiction effectively overruled the D.C. Circuit’s approach in Sierra Club v. FERC,11 which had required FERC to consider downstream power plant emissions beyond FERC’s jurisdiction. The D.C. Circuit acknowledged the abrogation in Sierra Club.12

Following Seven County, courts have also underscored that agencies are not obligated to evaluate the effects of projects “separate in time or place” from the project at hand because they “break[] the chain of proximate causation.”13 Rather, an agency need only draw “what it reasonably concludes is a manageable line.”14

For example, in Gas Transmission Northwest L.L.C. v. FERC,15 the Fifth Circuit addressed FERC’s choice to exclude previously approved compressor replacements from its NEPA review of a pipeline expansion project. The Fifth Circuit held that FERC had drawn a “manageable line” in concluding that the replacement compressors constituted a separate project that could be excluded from the environmental review of the pipeline project.16 The Ninth Circuit adopted similar reasoning in Arizona Mining Reform Coalition v. U.S. Forest Service,17 explaining that the Forest Service was not required to evaluate the effects of a separate housing development project in addition to the effects of the mining project at hand.

District courts have followed suit as well. The District Court for the District of Columbia upheld a Forest Service decision based on a NEPA analysis that did not consider the nationwide carbon emission effects of a timber harvesting project as “clearly the sort of reasonable and manageable line-drawing” contemplated by Seven County.18

Applying Seven County Beyond the EIS

The NEPA analysis at issue in Seven County was an EIS, which generally involves a longer process and more detailed environmental analysis than an EA. Following Seven County, courts have also extended deference principles to agency preparation of EAs. For example, the Ninth Circuit in Cascadia Wildlands found Seven County to be “fully applicable” when evaluating challenges to EAs.19 The Eighth Circuit went further, holding that “Seven County’s emphasis on deference has even greater force” for EAs than EISs because EAs are “concise” documents that “demand a less onerous analysis” than EISs.20

Looking Forward

The application of Seven County in recent NEPA case law development is also playing out in the context of substantial recent changes in the NEPA regulatory regime. This includes the rescission of the Council on Environmental Quality’s NEPA regulations (by interim final rule in early 2025, followed by a final rule in January 2026) and the adoption of new NEPA guidance by various federal agencies across the government. The collective effects of Seven County and these regulatory changes are not yet fully realized in the case law, as it takes time for NEPA reviews to be completed under the new regulatory landscape and then be challenged in court. Following Seven County, litigants bringing NEPA challenges now face higher hurdles, particularly with respect to consideration of upstream and downstream effects when the agency lacks regulatory authority over those activities, as well as the Supreme Court’s clear direction for deference to agencies in the context of NEPA reviews.

Latham & Watkins will continue to monitor and report on developments in this area.

This post was prepared with the assistance of summer associate Aditi Sridhar.

  1. Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, 605 U.S. 168 (2025). ↩︎
  2. Id. at 180, 183. ↩︎
  3. Id. at 182–83. ↩︎
  4. 541 U.S. 752 (2004). ↩︎
  5. Seven County, 605 U.S. at 187–91. ↩︎
  6. Sierra Club v. FERC, 153 F.4th 1295, 1305 (D.C. Cir. 2025). ↩︎
  7. Id. at 1306 (quoting Seven County, 605 U.S. at 182). ↩︎
  8. Id. at 1307. ↩︎
  9. 153 F.4th 869, 904 (9th Cir. 2025). ↩︎
  10. Id. at 904–05. ↩︎
  11. 867 F.3d 1357 (D.C. Cir. 2017). ↩︎
  12. 153 F.4th at 1308, 1311. ↩︎
  13. Seven County, 605 U.S. at 187, 189. ↩︎
  14. Id. at 189. ↩︎
  15. 157 F.4th 674 (5th Cir. 2025). ↩︎
  16. Id. at 711. ↩︎
  17. 172 F.4th 641 (9th Cir. 2026). ↩︎
  18. Chattanooga Conservancy v. USDA, No. CV 24-518, 2026 WL 865760, at *10 (D.D.C. Mar. 30, 2026). ↩︎
  19. 153 F.4th at 903. ↩︎
  20. Badger Helicopters Inc. v. FAA, 154 F.4th 902, 913 n.2 (8th Cir. 2025). ↩︎