While Roe v. Wade – a landmark court case overturned by the Supreme Court in 2022 – is basically a household name, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council isn’t.
Still, it was an important ruling and it set a precedent for what became known as the Chevron defense. This Friday, around 40 years after the court settled that case, the Supreme Court overturned it. Here’s what this means for the country.
According to Amy Howe of Howe on the Court, the Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ruling “cut back sharply on the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer and ruled that courts should rely on their own interpretation of ambiguous laws.”
Howe said this decision is expected to impact everything from environmental regulation to healthcare costs across the nation. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) called the decision a “severe blow to the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs.”
Oyez explained that the Looper case focused on a group of commercial fishermen who sued the National Marine Fisheries Service after it required funding of at-sea monitoring programs at an estimated cost of $710 per day.
“The fisherman argued that the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 1976 did not authorize the Service to create industry-funded monitoring requirements and that the Service failed to follow proper rulemaking procedure,” said Oyez. “The district court granted summary judgment for the government based on its reasonable interpretation of its authority and its adoption of the rule through the required notice-and-comment procedure. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed.”
Under that Chevron defense, “if Congress had not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable,” Howe said.
“Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided,” said Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion of the court. He clarified that the overruling of Chevron does not “call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.”
He was joined by the court’s five other conservative-leaning justices. All three left-leaning justices did not join. In a dissenting opinion Justice Elena Kagan argued that the court gave itself too much power in overturning Chevron.
“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,” she wrote. “As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
Per the NRDC, “the court stripped many federal agencies tasked with protecting public health, public safety, and the environment – including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, to name just two – of their power to interpret the laws they carry out. Instead, federal judges now get to call the shots.”
The Fence Post, a publication focused on agricultural news, reported that GOP politicians and farm leaders praised the Supreme Court’s move. For example, the National Pork Producers Council said the “Chevron deference has been the foundation of the dramatic growth in federal regulations and the transfer of nearly unlimited power to unelected federal bureaucrats that has taken place over the last 40 years.”
On the other hand, groups like the NRDC and the Sierra Club, as well as some government officials, slammed the ruling.
“This decision will have widespread effects on public welfare, how businesses operate in this country, and economic stability,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown. “It strips away power from federal agencies to regulate their own programs, such as those dealing with environmental protection, healthcare, financial regulation, social welfare, and more. This decision will undeniably undermine the federal government in any efforts it makes to effectively operate and manage these programs.”