Although the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been widely acclaimed as an instrument of decisionmaking reform, doubts have periodically been expressed regarding its effectiveness.¹ No legislation, however well intentioned or successful, should be exempt from periodic reexamination. Some criticisms of NEPA have been well-founded—prompting improvements in its implementation—but other criticisms have faulted the Act itself, claiming it to be counter-productive in relation to the purposes for which it was enacted. Suggestions that the benefits of NEPA have been illusory and that it has obstructed rather than advanced the cause of environmental protection would, if valid, bring into question the wisdom of retaining NEPA as statutory law.

This Article examines the contention that NEPA is so constituted as to defeat its stated purposes. It advances the thesis that much of the criticism in this vein misinterprets the Act by focusing on misuses of the environmental impact statement (EIS) to the neglect of the impact of the Act as a whole. It also contends that the critics fail to credit the constructive efforts of the federal agencies and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in making the EIS the effective instrument of policy and planning that its drafters intended.