The NEPA Flowchart Everyone Shares Cites a Regulation That No Longer Exists

Where the Numbers Came From

For nearly five decades, the NEPA process ran on a single government-wide rulebook: the Council on Environmental Quality's implementing regulations at 40 CFR parts 1500 through 1508, first issued in 1978 under Executive Order 11991. The timing provisions in those regulations are where the familiar numbers lived, a minimum 45-day comment period on a draft EIS, and no decision until at least 30 days after notice of availability of the final EIS. In the original 1978 text that provision sat at 40 CFR 1506.10; CEQ's 2020 modernization renumbered it to 1506.11, where it stayed until the rest of the rulebook was removed.

Every agency procedure, every consultant template, every training deck built on that foundation. That is what made the flowchart universal: one rulebook, one process, one set of numbers.

What Happened to the Rulebook

The sequence matters, so here it is with the paper trail.

The NEPA statute itself is untouched. Agencies still must comply with NEPA. What ended is the single binding rulebook that told them how, uniformly, across the federal government, and as the timeline shows, the unwinding did not stop with CEQ. It kept moving through individual agencies for more than a year after the original rescission.

So Is the 45-Day Comment Period Still Required?

Here is where it gets interesting, because the honest answer is: it depends on which authority governs your project. The single question now has several different answers.

That last category is not a single answer. It is dozens of agencies, each moving on its own schedule, through its own instrument. Here is where a handful of them stand right now.

Why This Matters More Than It Looks

Nothing in the science of an environmental review changed on April 11, 2025. What changed is the defensibility layer underneath the process. A firm that schedules a comment window, calendars a decision date, or writes "as required by 40 CFR 1506.11" into a deliverable is now making a claim about authority. Whether that claim holds depends on which agency's procedures govern, what those procedures currently say, and whether they have been revised since the rescission.

That is the general pattern, and it extends well past timing provisions. Regulatory change is a document chain, not a single event. An executive order revokes an older order. A Federal Register rule removes CFR parts. A statute codifies some fragments. Guidance downgrades others to recommendations. Agency procedures preserve still others, unevenly, until they too get folded into something else. Any one document in that chain looks minor on its own. The chain is the change.

It is also worth noting what has not been forced. CEQ's initial February 2025 guidance advised agencies they could continue following their prior practices voluntarily during the transition. That memo cuts both ways. It explains why day-to-day practice still looks a lot like the old flowchart. It also confirms that following the old numbers is now a choice agencies are making, not a requirement binding on them.

The Question Worth Asking

So here is the practical takeaway, and it costs nothing to act on. Pick one active project. List the regulatory authorities your process assumptions rest on: the comment periods you are planning around, the procedures you cite in the document, the categorical exclusions you are relying on. For each one, answer a single question: when did we last verify that this authority still exists in its cited form?

If the answer is "before April 2025," the flowchart you are working from may be describing a process that no longer has the basis you think it does. If the answer is "sometime in the last few months," ask again anyway. As the 7 CFR 650.13 example above shows, "recently verified" currently has a shelf life measured in months, not years.

A permitting decision is only as defensible as the evidence and lineage behind it. That was true when there was one rulebook. It is more true now that there are many.