At present, and for some time to come, the responsibilities of the federal agency with the duty to prepare an environmental impact statement will remain the key focus in the implementation of the National Environmental Policy Act. Important questions have not been satisfactorily answered, such as whether those agencies may continue to delegate preparation of early draft statements to private parties; whether agencies should ask the public through hearings or otherwise for facts and assessments of environmental impacts before agency drafts are written; whether agencies will be allowed to determine between themselves which of them is the "lead" agency; whether cost-benefit analyses and other non-environmental materials are part of the "§102 record"; and whether agencies are constrained to make final decisions which square with and evolve from the §102(2)(C) process. However, further attention to agencies' duties under NEPA will undoubtedly be accompanied by similar attention to the duties of agencies that under §102 must comment upon the agency's draft impact statements. NEPA clearly provides for interagency consultation at all levels of government before a potentially harmful federal action may be taken, so that the full resources of government—particularly federal government—are used to make possible a more informed, environmentally sound decision. Without the creative tension between sister agencies that NEPA envisions, federal agencies will develop, not one national environmental policy, as NEPA requires, but as many distinct policies as agency missions and agency environmental viewpoints suggest.

Congress added §309 to the Clean Air Act in 1971 in order to make explicit that the Administrator of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency has a duty to examine areas that his statutory authority directly or indirectly reaches and then to comment in writing upon the possible environmental impact in these areas of all legislative proposals developed by federal agencies, all proposed federal agency guidelines, all new federal construction projects, and all other proposed federal action to which §102(2)(C) of NEPA applies. After his review, the Administrator has to make his comments public, and if he finds the proposal environmentally "unsatisfactory," he has to publish this finding and "refer" the matter to the Council on Environmental Quality.