A pair of amendments to the National Environmental Policy Act has recently been signed into law. One of the acts, Public Law No. 94-83, seeks to clarify federal and state roles in preparing environmental impact statements, and will have a significant bearing on future litigation directed at NEPA statements on federal aid highway projects and other federal actions. The second act authorizes 1976 appropriations and several minor administrative changes for the Council on Environmental Quality, of interest primarily to the Council itself. The texts of both acts, and the full text of NEPA as amended, are printed elsewhere in this issue of ELR.¹ This comment addresses Pub. L. No. 94-83 only.

Public Law No. 94-83 is the enactment of H.R. 3130, a bill that was hotly debated both within and outside the environmental community from the time of its introduction by Congressman LaFalce (D-NY) in February, 1975.² The original impetus behind the bill was the desire to override judicial decisions by the Second Circuit and more recently the Seventh Circuit Courts of Appeals, which held environmental impact statements inadequate under NEPA solely because they were prepared in the first instance by a state agency rather than the responsible federal official.³ As enacted, the measure declares, with a number of important provisos and limitations, that a NEPA impact statement "shall not be deemed to be legally insufficient solely by reason of having been prepared by a state agency or official." Some, including CEQ officials, viewed the bill's provisions merely as a legislative recognition of existing CEQ Guidelines that, in line with holdings of the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tench Circuits, specify that significant and active participation by the federal agency is sufficient to satisfy NEPA.⁴ The CEQ Guidelines have long permitted state agencies, such as highway departments, to perform initial data collection on the environmental impacts of federally funded projects, and to transmit such data in the form of draft impact statements of the federal official responsible for circulating the impact statement for public and interagency comment and for ultimately filing the statement with CEQ.⁵