The Council on Environmental Quality has once again proposed revisions in its guidelines.¹ ELR subscribers were sent Federal Register reprints of the proposed guidelines as an insert with the regular monthly mailing of the April 1973 issue, to enable them to respond to CEQ within the brief 45-day comment period. Here, ELR will simply summarize the major changes and provisions in the guidelines.

By way of background, CEQ published interim guidelines not long after NEPA became law.² From the beginning, CEQ called upon the separate agencies to prepare their own NEPA procedures with the assistance of CEQ staff and with guidance afforded by the Guidelines. ELR's first issue, in fact, carried the NEPA procedures of 20 agencies.³ CEQ's second set of guidelines were published in late April 1971.⁴ Most agencies responded by revising their internal procedures, albeit slowly,⁵ and released them to the public in some form, although not necessarily through the Federal Register. In a laudable action that went unchallenged, CEQ itself undertook to place in the Federal Register for comment those procedures that some agencies had neglected to publish themselves.⁶ As users of ELR know, ELR has published all available agency procedures since the commencement of NEPA's implementation. A complete listing is contained in the Table of Contents to the Statutory & Administrative Materials tabular section.