Supreme Court kills the Chevron doctrine, handing win to opponents of the 'administrative state'
The decision puts any number of administrative rules in danger, including regulations addressing everything from clean air and water to toxic chemicals to federal forest management.
Today’s story focuses on some breaking news. The Supreme Court just tossed the major legal precedent known as the Chevron doctrine. What follows is a quick explainer to help folks get their bearings on what the doctrine is, its history and some quick takeaways. We’re planning on writing a more focused analysis for the weekend — if you have strong feelings about the impact of overturning Chevron, hit us up! The Supreme Court’s full decision can be read on its website by clicking this link.
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the decades-old “Chevron deference” legal doctrine that has given agencies like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a whole lot of leeway to interpret ambiguous laws when writing regulations.
The court’s 6-3 decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, hands a major victory to conservatives who have long been interested in reigning in the power of the so-called administrative state. And it shifts the balance of power between executive agencies and the courts, handing the latter a greater opportunity to wade into policy.
The landmark decision, issued along ideological lines, threatened regulations made by virtually every federal agency including the EPA, the Interior Department and others to address everything from power plant pollution to logging projects in federal forests.
This is an environmental law-focused newsletter, but it is worth noting that Chevron has been used to defend rules on all sorts of issues from tax policy to health care, too.
What was Chevron?
First, a slight civics lesson: Readers may remember from basic government classes in high school that Congress writes the laws, the executive branch puts the laws into place and the judiciary acts as a sort of referee that resolves disputes about what the laws Congress wrote actually meant.
In theory, the laws Congress passes could be clear and unambiguous. But, since the world is more complicated than that, laws contain ambiguous phrases or words (for instance: what does the phrase “best system of emission reduction” that is “adequately demonstrated” actually mean?), and executive branch agencies have filled in the gaps with their interpretations.
With Chevron, courts generally deferred to those interpretations so long as they were reasonable. The idea is agencies like the EPA have the kind of technical and expert knowledge that courts and Congress simply do not. And, the thinking goes, agencies report to the president, a politician held accountable via elections, so they are in a better place to make policy decisions in an increasingly complex world.
The doctrine has been relied upon to defend agency rules in court less and less in recent years, as conservative legal scholars and activists have put pressure on the courts to toss it. Still, it was good law until Friday, and was one of the most cited cases in U.S. history.
What did the Supreme Court majority hold?
Roberts was joined in the majority opinion by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. They held that Chevron was keeping judges from doing the work of judges. Courts are supposed to interpret questions of law, and that role should not be abdicated to the executive branch for expediency, they said.
The majority specifically said that Chevron is inconsistent with the 1940s law the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which they said requires courts to exercise independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions. The courts can recognize that Congress intended to grant a degree of leeway for agencies to interpret laws, but Chevron went too far in giving power to the agencies, they said.
“Chevron defies the command of the APA that ‘the reviewing court’—not the agency whose action it reviews—is to ‘decide all relevant questions of law’ and ‘interpret … statutory provisions.’” Roberts wrote for the majority. “It requires a court to ignore, not follow, ‘the reading the court would have reached’ had it exercised its independent judgment as required by the APA.”
What did the dissent say?
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, slammed the majority’s decision. They defended Chevron as the right way for the courts to approach ambiguous laws, noting that agencies have technical expertise and also answer to the political system should they get things wrong.
“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law,” Kagan wrote. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
What does this mean for climate change?
This ruling could theoretically make it much harder for agencies to advance environmental regulations using novel interpretations of statutes, but also could leave established approaches vulnerable as well. A critique of tossing Chevron has been that it will imperil rules protecting clean water and and clean air, and will put the fate of those regulations into the hands of unelected judges across the country.
Scott Segal, a partner at the law firm Bracewell LLP who represents energy companies, said the Chevron decision is one of several Supreme Court opinions in recent years that show the court’s “intent on sending a clarion call to regulators that their agendas must derive from clear instruction from the Congress.”
Segal noted that the Supreme Court had already limited the ability of the EPA to regulate power plants using novel interpretations of provisions in the Clean Air Act in 2022’s West Virginia v. EPA, and had pounced on environmental rules as recently as Thursday.
How did we get here?
The cases that upended Chevron — Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless v. Department of Commerce — focused on a 1976 law that requires federal monitors be on herring boats to prevent overfishing. A 2020 regulation by the National Marine Fisheries Service interpreted that law as saying not only that the monitors must be on the boats, but also that the fishing companies pay them to be there (up to around $700 per day).
That fee was challenged by fishing groups from New Jersey and Rhode Island, who said the law didn’t authorize it. Two U.S. appeals courts upheld the agency’s interpretation of the law, however, saying it was reasonable.
Who represented these fishing groups?
The fishing groups attracted the support of some powerful legal interest groups that have been working to undermine administrative agency powers for a while. They include the Cause of Action Institute and the New Civil Liberties Alliance.
Both groups have financial ties to groups associated with billionaire Charles Koch, whose fortune was made in part through fossil fuels and who is deeply involved in conservative and libertarian causes.
What did supporters and opponents of the doctrine say?
Supporters of the doctrine maintained that it allowed specialized agencies (the EPA, for instance, has a team of scientists that analyze any number of issues from chemical toxicity to the efficiency of energy systems) to interpret ambiguous laws and, ultimately, allowed agencies to more uniformly approach decision making. They argued that Congress often anticipated that outcome when writing laws.
Opponents meanwhile often took a more ideological approach. Many have expressed concerns that the doctrine has allowed the administrative state to grow well beyond its intended scope, or that the doctrine upends the delicate separation of powers envisioned between Congress, the executive branch and the courts.