A Comment in last month's ELR¹ described the decision of the District of Columbia Circuit in New England Power v. Federal Power Commission,² which struck down the FPC's attempt to make itself self-sustaining under the 1952 Act by assessing a proportional share of the agency's costs to every company subject to FPC regulation. Since that time, the Supreme Court has granted certiorari to review that decision, as well as a decision of the Fifth Circuit that recently upheld an analogous fee schedule adopted by the FCC under the same statute.³ This Comment will further examine these two cases in light of ELR's earlier suggestion that under the 1952 Act, costs incurred by federal agencies in preparing NEPA impact statements could be billed to nonfederal parties.

The authority to charge costs to private parties derives from Title V of the 1952 Act, which states that it was the sense of Congress that

any work, service, publication, report, document, benefit, privilege, authority, use, franchise, permit certificate, registration or similar thing of value or utility performed, furnished, provided, granted, prepared, or issued by any federal agency . . . to or for any person . . . shall be self-sustaining to the full extent possible, and the head of each Federal agency is authorized . . . to prescribe therefor such fee, charge, or price, if any, as shall determine . . . to be fair and equitable taking into consideration direct and indirect cost to the government, value to the recipient, public policy or interest served, and other pertinent facts. . . .⁴