Washington quietly did something unusual today: it acknowledged reality.
The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) released new emergency guidance for how federal agencies should operate under the National Environmental Policy Act—better known as NEPA—when the country is facing an actual emergency. Not a theoretical one. A real one.
For decades, NEPA has been the procedural backbone of federal environmental decision-making. It was built for deliberation, analysis, and public input—important things in normal times. But emergencies, by definition, don’t wait for perfectly formatted paperwork. Wildfires don’t pause. Disease outbreaks don’t reschedule. Economic shocks don’t politely stand by while agencies draft impact statements.
That’s the gap this guidance is meant to address.
According to CEQ, the new framework gives federal agencies clearer direction on how to comply with NEPA while responding to emergencies like catastrophic wildfires, imminent threats to species and habitats, infectious disease outbreaks, economic crises, and national emergencies formally declared by the President. In plain English: it’s an attempt to keep environmental law from becoming a bottleneck when speed actually matters.
CEQ Chair Katherine Scarlett put it bluntly. Agencies, she said, need to be able to act fast when Americans need help—without getting buried under layers of internal process that were never designed for crisis response. The goal isn’t to suspend environmental responsibility, but to prevent paralysis.
That distinction matters.
The guidance lays out step-by-step instructions for agencies to use existing NEPA tools more effectively during emergencies, ensuring legal requirements and environmental considerations are still addressed—but in a way that matches the urgency of the situation. It’s not a rollback. It’s a clarification. A reminder that the law already contains flexibility, if agencies are willing to use it.
CEQ points out it has more than 50 years of experience helping agencies navigate NEPA during emergency conditions. In other words, this isn’t new territory—it’s institutional memory being written down before someone forgets it again.
Whether this guidance actually speeds things up in practice remains to be seen. Washington has a talent for announcing efficiency while preserving inertia. But acknowledging that emergencies require different operational rules than routine governance is at least a step toward competence.
In a system that often confuses process with progress, that alone is worth noting.