The Supreme Court on Friday reduced the power of executive agencies by overruling long-standing legal precedent, jeopardizing numerous regulations and transferring executive branch power to Congress and the courts.
The precedent, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the most cited in U.S. law, requires courts to defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. There have been 70 Supreme Court decisions relying on Chevron, along with 17,000 lower court decisions.
The decision will almost certainly trigger challenges to the actions of a range of federal agencies, including those that regulate the environment, health care and consumer safety.
The vote was 6 to 3, divided along ideological lines.
“Chevron has been overruled,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote. for the majority. “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency acted within its legal authority.”
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the ruling amounted to a grab at judicial power. “A rule of judicial humility,” she wrote, “gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.”
Justice Kagan summarized her dissent from the bench, a rare move and a sign of deep disagreement. “The courts, especially this court, will now play a leading role” in setting national policy, she said.
The court has overturned major precedents in each of the last three terms: on abortion in 2022, on affirmative action in 2023 and now on the power of administrative agencies.
Chief Justice Roberts said Chevron should be overruled because it has “proven to be fundamentally misleading” and unworkable. “All that remains of Chevron,” he wrote, “is a rotting shell with bold pretensions.”
Judge Kagan responded that Chevron was vibrant and valuable until Friday. “It has become part of modern government,” she wrote, “to support all kinds of regulatory efforts — to name a few, keeping the air and water clean, keeping food and medicine safe, and keeping things fair of the financial markets.’
The decision was the latest in a continuing series of legal attacks on what critics call the administrative state. For example, on Thursday the court rejected the Securities and Exchange Commission’s use of administrative tribunals to combat securities fraud.
That decision jeopardized the ability of other regulators to bring enforcement actions before such tribunals. It was, Judge Kagan wrote Friday, “yet another example of the court’s determination to roll back the agencies’ authority despite congressional directions to the contrary.”
The chief justice wrote that the retroactive effect of Friday’s decision will be limited, and said the regulations upheld by the courts under Chevron could not be immediately challenged for that reason alone.
Justice Kagan dissented, citing an earlier opinion. “Today’s decision by the majority will cause a huge shock to the legal system, ‘cast doubt on many established constructions’ of statutes and threaten the interests of many parties that have relied on them for years.”
For starters, she wrote, “some agency interpretations that were never in question under Chevron may now be.”
Second, she ignored the chief justice’s assurance that past decisions generally will not be open to challenge. “The majority are optimistic; I’m not that much,” she wrote. “Courts motivated to overturn an old Chevron-based decision can always come up with something to label ‘special justification’” to overcome the generally required respect for precedent.
Overall, she wrote, “it is impossible to pretend that today’s decision is a one-off, both in terms of its treatment of instances and its treatment of precedents.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Justice Kagan in the dissent.
The conservative legal movement and business groups have long objected to Chevron’s ruling, based partly on a general hostility to government regulation and partly on the belief, rooted in the separation of powers, that agencies should have only the power that Congress has explicitly given them.
Proponents of the doctrine say it gives specialized agencies the ability to fill gaps in ambiguous statutes and establish uniform rules in their areas of expertise, a practice they say Congress was considering.
Judge Kagan echoed that view. “Some interpretive issues that arise in the regulatory context relate to scientific or technical topics,” she wrote. “Agencies have expertise in those areas; courts do not. Some demand a detailed understanding of complex and interdependent regulatory programs. Agencies know these programs inside and out; Again, courts do not.”
Opponents counter that it is the role of the courts, not the executive branch, to determine the meaning of statutes. They also say agencies’ interpretations can change with new administrations and court cases favor the government, even if it is a party to the case.
Chief Justice Roberts said the fundamental point was that “agencies have no special authority in resolving statutory ambiguities.”
“Courts do,” he wrote. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.
By overruling Chevron, the court returned the nation to the world that existed before it was decided in 1984. But the two sides were deeply at odds over what that world looked like and how the courts had handled the work of the many administrative agencies created during World War II. New agreement.
Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Supreme Court had had the final say.
“As new agencies with new powers proliferated,” he wrote, “the court continued to adhere to the traditional view that questions of law were for the courts to decide, exercising independent judgment.”
Judge Kagan took the opposite position. As New Deal programs came into their own, she wrote, “the courts became increasingly deferential to agencies.”
The court decided two nearly identical cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451, and Relentless v. Department of Commerce, No. 22-1219. Judge Jackson was removed from the first case because she had participated as a federal appeals court judge.
Both cases involved a 1976 federal law that requires herring boats to carry federal observers to collect data used to prevent overfishing. Under a 2020 ordinance interpreting the law, owners of the boats were required not only to transport the observers but also to pay $700 per day for their supervision.
Fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island sued because the 1976 law did not authorize the relevant agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service, to impose the fee.
Two appeals courts — one in Washington, the other in Boston — ruled that the deference demanded by Chevron’s decision required a government ruling. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington ruled that the interpretation of the 1976 law “to permit industry-funded surveillance” was reasonable. The First Circuit in Boston said the agency’s interpretation of the 1976 law was “at a minimum” “certainly reasonable.”
The fishermen were represented by the Cause of Action Institute, which says its mission is “to limit the power of the administrative state,” and the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which says its goal is “to protect constitutional liberties against violations by the administrative state’. Both groups have financial ties to the network of foundations and advocacy groups funded by Charles Koch, a billionaire who has long supported conservative and libertarian causes.
Forty years ago, when Chevron was decided by a unanimous but short-handed six-member Supreme Court, dismissing three justices, it was widely seen as a victory for conservatives. Responding to a challenge from environmental groups, the justices backed a Reagan-era interpretation of the Clean Air Act that loosened regulations on emissions. They said the Environmental Protection Agency’s interpretation of the statute was “a reasonable construction” that was “entitled to deference.” ”
Chief Justice Roberts noted that the Chevron doctrine has been refined over the years. It is also, he said, supplemented by the “big questions” doctrine, which says Congress must be particularly clear when authorizing agencies to interpret laws on major economic and political issues.
Judge Kagan wrote that there was a theme in the court’s work in this area.
“The majority hates restraint,” she wrote, “and grabs power.”
Linda Qiu reporting contributed.
