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Widely available clean drinking water is something that we usually take for granted. One of the main reasons is that the vast majority of the U.S. population has access to public water systems, which are in charge of providing safe drinking water to their users. However, in many parts of the country, particularly rural communities, people rely on private wells for sourcing their drinking water, which broadly lack regulatory safeguards for public health and well-being. This is particularly striking in Virginia, where 22 percent of the population relies on water supplied by a private well, with the share of private well use reaching upwards of 80 percent of the population in the Commonwealth’s most rural counties. As we explore in a new report, there is little comprehensive information on the distribution and severity of nitrate contamination in private well systems in Virginia.

President-elect Donald Trump’s picks for office provide a strong hint of what the next year will look like. In Trump’s first term, government actions were often overturned by the courts. Agencies made basic mistakes: skipping mandatory procedural steps, ignoring important evidence, or failing to address opposing arguments. Many people thought he had learned his lesson and would pick competent, experienced administrators this time. They were mostly wrong.

The Center for Progressive Reform was founded during the George W. Bush era when Republicans won the White House and controlled both houses of Congress. As a candidate, Bush threatened to put in the crosshairs the nation’s social safety net, public protections, and the government’s role to protect civil rights, consumer rights, the environment, and the common good. The circumstances were similar to those we currently find ourselves in. Then, as now, our job was to secure the system of rules and regulations critical to protecting people from harm and the environment from degradation. Still, we now face challenges that are entirely new.

They say that history never repeats itself, but it often rhymes. As in many sequels, there will be many things we’ve seen before. Much of that consisted of an all-out attack on environmental law. If you hated the original, you won’t enjoy watching the same thing the second time around. But there are a few additions to the cast and some new backdrops on the set. Today, I’m going to talk about some areas of continuity.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overruled Chevron, one effect was to raise a crucial question about how courts should apply the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). For decades, courts have deferred to regulations issued by the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). The basis for that deference was a bit fuzzy, but now it is much fuzzier. 

This is the final installment in our series of posts about the causation issue under NEPA. In our previous post, we laid out NEPA’s purposes and why analogies to tort law can misfire because that area of law has very different purposes. Today, building on our recent working paper, we explain the functional approach to causation that we believe courts should apply.

Overall, the Supreme Court has articulated a functional approach that is based on the purposes of NEPA, based on the structure and text of the statute. Today’s post will lay the foundation by discussing NEPA’s purposes and how they differ from those of another area of law often used as an analogy, tort law.

NEPA requires that agencies consider the environmental effects of their projects, but the petitioners in the Seven Counties case raise hairsplitting arguments to exclude obvious effects due to technicalities. We consider their arguments one by one.

In what could turn out to be another loss for environmental protection in the Supreme Court, the Court is about to decide a major case about the scope of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). The case, Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, has important implications for issues such as whether NEPA covers climate change impacts. The same groups that succeeded in drastically cutting back on federal wetlands jurisdiction a few years ago are hoping to do the same thing to environmental impact statements. This post will provide the key background on the case.