Less than four years after its creation, the Council on Environmental Quality stands at a crossroads. Several officials have left the Council, including Chairman Russell Train, who has been nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency. The Office of Management and Budget has stepped up an attack that if successful will strip CEQ of much of its power and responsibility. At the same time, Congress has moved to exempt the Alaskan Pipeline from NEPA, a damaging blow to the statute that is the legal underpinning of the environmental movement and that established CEQ. Clearly, more than the power and prestige of CEQ is at stake; at issue is whether the national commitment to preservation and reclamation of the environment will be strengthened or eroded.

This month's ELR includes two articles that explore the ways in which the two governmental units primarily responsible for protecting the environment, CEQ and EPA, have discharged the NEPA duties assigned to them by Congress.In the first, Richard Liroff, formerly a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, reviews and analyzes the development of CEQ from its inception to the present. In the second, Martin Healy examines EPA's implementation of §309 of the Clean Air Act, which gives that Agency responsibilities for overseeing governmental compliance with NEPA that complement those of CEQ. These timely articles hint at the directions in which governmental efforts for environmental protection may now turn. The current challenge to CEQ may be withstood; on the other hand, a serious curtailment of the Council's functions may portend a marked increase in EPA's responsibilities as environmental ombudsman in general and guardian of NEPA in particular. The CEQ functions that Mr. Liroff describes may well pass in part to EPA. The medium of this transfer, as Mr. Healy suggests, could be §309.