I. Introduction

The National Environmental Policy Act, if the legislative history which Congress left behind is to be believed, was aimed at the jugular of federal policymaking. The Act sought to alter the very personality of government; the national environmental policy was supposed to permeate every other policy pursued by government. Thus, Congress sought much more than the modification of specific multi-million-dollar construction projects. The objective was profound and lasting policy changes through the introduction of environmental considerations to the earliest and highest levels of agency decisionmaking. The key device to achieve these reforms is the now well-known impact statement process.

Until recently, agency officials and environmental litigants have used impact statements to concentrate almost solely on the details of specific projects and localized impacts, as opposed to programs and policies.¹ Highway projects have been challenged in numerous cases, but the highway program has not been evaluated in any meaningful way. The impact of specific coal mines has been discussed ad nauseum, but the broader issues raised by coal leasing policy have not been seriously evaluated.² Integrating environmental values into agency programs and policymaking poses numerous practical problems; the nature of bureaucracies is to resist radical change. Policy analysis must therefore be anti-bureaucratic or, as seems more likely, directed toward incremental change.³ Pressure for widening agency horizons must be supplied by forces outside the agency, by the public through the courts. But judicial review can only indirectly confront the substance of agency policies because of the traditional judicial concern for avoiding interference with the discretionary or political functions of executive agencies.