There was a lot going on during the last Friday in June. A shaken nation was reacting to the prior evening’s Biden-Trump debate; tensions were escalating in the Middle East; and the Supreme Court issued several important decisions as its term ended.
Almost lost in the shuffle was a consequential ruling that sharply curtailed the power of federal agencies to regulate wide segments of American life. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court overturned a 40-year-old legal precedent that the government has relied upon to defend thousands of rules on everything from the environment to finance, to health-related issues to employment laws.
In its 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the court overturned the historic “Chevron deference” doctrine, set in 1984, in a case involving the oil company, that directed judges to defer to the reasonable interpretations of federal agency officials in cases that involve how to administer ambiguous federal laws and where lawmakers had given interpretive authority to an agency.
Chevron deference was not a perfect solution. But it addressed a serious problem. Critics felt Chevron went too far in ordering deference to regulatory authority whose direction could change with each successive administration.
But like many other carefully crafted court standards designed to respond to societal needs in a manner that Congress could change if it chose to do so, Chevron deference became the accepted rule even with its warts. That is, until conservative forces focused their efforts on rolling back the federal government’s regulatory power. In recent years, Chevron deference fell out of favor with the court’s conservative majority, which has neither cited nor relied on Chevron for some time.
The Loper Bright opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, argued that Chevron “is misguided,” because “agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.” In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan responded “Congress knows that it does not — in fact cannot — write perfectly complete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities” that will need to be resolved or filled, “and it would usually prefer that [to be done by] the responsible agency, not a court.”
As a result of the ruling, more federal rules will be challenged in the courts and judges will have much greater discretion to invalidate agency actions. So now, rather than having specialized federal agencies seeking to conform ambiguous provisions in laws to historic positions of regulatory authority, it will be the job of each of the 677 individual U.S. District Court judges to make those decisions.
That could create serious problems, as different judges reach different and incompatible decisions about what a federal statute means, leaving litigants exposed to a patchwork of interpretations that will be difficult to navigate or understand.
Congress may try to write more explicit instructions in its laws to tell agencies how to implement them. Or Congress could consider codifying some form of Chevron deference with enhanced protections to address legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, no one expects the dysfunctional Congress to do anything about this, at all.
