On June 28, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an administrative law precedent—the so-called doctrine of Chevron deference—in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. Conservative commentators heralded the ruling as a victory for limited government and a boon for business. Liberals, for their part, complained of a rogue Court and warned that the decision would imperil the environment and daily well-being of American citizens.
But what exactly is Chevron deference? And what does its death mean for American political life? In this blog post, I will explain what was at stake in the 1984 Supreme Court case that gave rise to Chevron, and then describe the legal reasoning used by the Court to establish it.
The story of Chevron begins with the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1977, which required certain States to implement permit programs for “new or modified major stationary sources” of air pollution. But Congress, remarkably, failed to include a precise definition of what constitutes a “stationary source” in the law. Was a new pollution-emitting device at a particular manufacturing plant, for example, to be counted as a stationary source, and thus subject to the expensive permit program process? Or did the manufacturing plant itself—and all the pollution-emitting devices used on site—represent one stationary source of air pollution?
In 1981, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced a regulation that adopted the latter view; states were allowed to regard the total number of pollution-emitting devices at plants as one stationary source in executing the permit program. What this meant in practice was that newly installed or modified sources of air pollution were exempt from the permit process so long as the plant’s total pollution emissions did not increase as a result. The EPA’s ruling, in other words, reduced the costs of compliance for businesses.
But did the EPA possess the legal authority to establish its own interpretation of what constitutes a “stationary source” in the absence of clear guidelines from Congress? In Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), the Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that it did.
Ronald J. Pestritto, in our course, “The U.S. Supreme Court,” explains the logic used in the majority opinion—written by Justice Stevens—to decide the case. He says,
The first thing that Stevens says in this opinion is that by being ambiguous about the term or the question, that ambiguity is itself essentially Congress expressing an intent. When it’s ambiguous, Congress is intentionally leaving a gap in the law. Therefore, it is also intentionally delegating the power of filling that gap to the agency.
Dr. Pestritto continues,
Since the Court concluded that it is the intent of Congress to defer to the agency, then the appropriate posture for the courts is presumptive deference. It’s a presumption. . . . It does not mean the agency always wins. . . . The presumption is, and it’s a hard presumption to overcome, that as long as what the agency did was reasonable, even if the Court might disagree, that agency action is going to be upheld.
As Dr. Pestritto suggests, the core idea underlying Chevron deference is that unelected bureaucrats possess the legal right to clarify the meaning of vague congressional statutes on their own. Provided the interpretation is “reasonable,” the Court will defer to the agency under Chevron—even if a particular agency’s interpretation of the law has serious repercussions for American citizens and their way of life.
The Court’s ruling was especially consequential—it should be noted—because the congressional authorization bills conferring power to federal agencies are often kept vague by design. The ordinary representative prefers this arrangement: it enables him to transfer to the agencies the burden of policymaking on contentious questions, and thus shields him from accountability when regulatory policy proves to be unpopular with the citizenry.
Chevron deference, therefore, was bound to apply to a great number of administrative law proceedings. Indeed, the precedent has been cited by federal courts in many thousands of cases since its inception.
But as noted at the outset of this blog post, the forty-year judicial precedent of Chevron deference is no more. The Court, it appears, is now unwilling to defer obsequiously to the administrative state in cases that involve ambiguous congressional statutes.
Defenders of the Constitution should rightly regard the Court’s decision as a step in the right direction—as a ruling that may scale back some of the excesses of the bureaucracy. But it does not solve the fundamental problem: our elected representatives in Washington believe it is acceptable to transfer the legislative powers, entrusted to them alone under the Constitution, to unaccountable bureaucrats.