Rachel Weintraub, executive director of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards, adds, “The public expects our government to protect us from dangerous products, polluted air and water, unsafe workplaces, and fraudulent markets. This decision will harm all of us for as long as it stands.”
The Chevron doctrine was established by the court’s landmark 1984 decision in a case between the namesake energy giant and the environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. It essentially said courts must defer to federal agencies over the interpretation and implementation of laws if Congress didn’t speak to (or was ambiguous about) the exact issue in question, and if the agency interpretations are reasonable.
The court’s reasoning in Chevron was, in part, that federal agencies are far better equipped than judges with the expertise needed to make highly technical and granular policy decisions. The Congressional Research Service says courts have cited the doctrine more than 18,000 times since 1984.
Today’s ruling, delivered by Chief Justice John Roberts, says courts must “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, [and] may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that “Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectly complete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court.”
CR’s Grose says that “Congress charged federal agencies with protecting consumers from threats like contaminated food, hazardous products, dirty air and water, and predatory financial schemes,” adding that “legislators can’t foresee or respond to every eventuality, and it’s critical for agency experts to ensure—consistent with the law—that federal rules reflect the realities of the marketplace and keep up with changing times.”
The decision is expected to have profound ripple effects because it is likely to embolden companies to challenge regulations or other implementations of federal law that were not explicitly laid out by Congress.
The federal government routinely relies on agency staff experts to make highly technical decisions about how best to implement federal laws. So now, when a regulation or administrative ruling is challenged in court, judges are more likely to feel empowered to decide the outcome themselves rather than defer to determinations by an agency’s highly trained subject matter experts.
Justice Roberts noted that today’s decision does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. “The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology," he wrote. Nevertheless, consumer advocates are concerned that regulatory challenges courts previously rejected could now be revisited if the court’s decision didn’t rely on Chevron’s framework.
Legal experts also worry that striking down Chevron deference will reduce accountability in—and bring more political partisanship to—the system of federal regulations meant to protect Americans. Whereas federal agencies get their funding from Congress and in most cases must answer to the presidential administration in office, federal judges have lifetime appointments.
The decision could also have a chilling effect on rulemaking at federal agencies, where plans to act in the best interests of the public may be undercut by fear of litigation.
The two cases the court decided today, Loper Bright v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce, concerned the herring industry. In both, commercial fishing companies challenged a National Marine Fisheries Service rule requiring them to bear some of the cost of onboard observers who are legally required to monitor fishing vessel operations. But the court, by a 6-3 vote, used the opportunity to strike down the broader principle of deference that lower courts had used to find against the fishing companies.
As a result, legal experts now expect a flood of legal challenges to the vast federal regulatory system.
Among the kinds of pending or future regulations that consumer advocates say are now vulnerable to challenge—and that would, if dismantled, threaten the safety, health, and financial well-being of Americans—are the following.
Product safety: The overturning of Chevron could put at risk future safety regulations covering everything from autos and home products to electric bikes and baby goods to products designed specifically to keep us safe, such as bike helmets and smoke detectors. Consumer advocates are concerned that the court’s decision would make it even more difficult to protect consumers from unreasonable risks of injury or death connected to consumer products.
Food and water safety: CR has long urged federal regulators to do more to protect consumers from preventable health risks in the food system, such as salmonella in poultry, lead and other heavy metals in baby food, and PFAS in drinking water. But consumer advocates say that eliminating the Chevron doctrine is likely to slow efforts to address them. “The tendency [for regulators] to use litigation risk as an excuse for inaction will grow, and consumers will pay the price,” the Consumer Federation of America wrote earlier this year.
Financial fairness: Consumer advocates worry that limiting Chevron deference will severely weaken the ability of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., and other regulators to protect consumers from investment scams, junk fees, surprise medical bills, predatory and discriminatory lending, and dangerous banking and financial practices that could lead to another financial crisis, among other financial risks. Additionally, as new technologies emerge, the FTC and CFPB may be limited in their ability to address new forms of unfair or deceptive practices.
Sustainability: Environmental regulations have been at the heart of debates over the rulemaking authority of federal agencies, including in the 1984 Chevron decision itself (which, ironically, enabled the Reagan-era Environmental Protection Agency to loosen regulations intended to decrease air pollution). Consumer advocates are concerned that the court’s decision will invite new challenges to EPA-issued rules like the new emissions standards for cars and light trucks that it announced this year, which not only will curb the kinds of pollution that cause climate change but also are projected to save consumers more than $1 trillion over the next 20 years and deliver $13 billion in annual health benefits.
Healthcare: A group of public health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association, and the American Lung Association wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief that overturning Chevron will cause “tremendous disruption” to the administration of Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, to the stability of this country’s healthcare system generally, and to the health and well-being of patients and consumers.
