The shutdown is paralyzing work to develop required environmental analyses for energy projects, highways and other infrastructure.

The Fish and Wildlife Service isn’t able to work on fresh court-ordered analysis of Dominion Energy Inc.’s $7 billion Atlantic Coast pipeline, designed to ferry natural gas across 600 miles of West Virginia, Virginia and North Carolina.

The shutdown also is creating further delays for TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline. The State Department, one of the agencies without federal funding, has been developing a new review of the $8 billion project: a supplemental environmental impact statement analyzing Keystone XL’s potential effects on greenhouse gas emissions, cultural resources and the energy market.

The Environmental Protection Agency, Interior Department and Council on Environmental Quality are deeply involved in analyzing the consequences of major government actions, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act. Their shutdown can spill over to other departments too.

“With the broad shutdown at all of those agencies, certainly there is plenty of NEPA work that has slowed or been halted, and it will affect the timing of decisions,” said Ann Navaro, a Bracewell LLP partner who previously worked at the Interior and Justice departments. If the shutdown “continues into next week or longer, I would think we would start to see a pretty significant impact in terms of slowing analyses and other decisions.”