In 2025, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) entered the most consequential period of retrenchment in its 55-year history. In a single year, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Donald Trump Administration, and bipartisan lawmakers took coordinated steps to dramatically curtail NEPA, codifying a unique political convergence around the premise that environmental review bottlenecks progress. This Comment does not question the importance of addressing energy and infrastructure shortages. It instead argues that weakening NEPA as a mechanism to achieve those goals redistributes, rather than reduces, the costs of development. As a purely procedural statute, NEPA was designed to surface risks and force careful consideration of environmental and community impacts. It was born from an era defined by miles of oil-slicked beaches, rivers contaminated with radioactive waste, small towns devastated by disaster, and human lives lost. This history shows that the price of speed cannot be framed in economic terms alone.