The Supreme Court Reined in Federal Regulators. What Happens Now?
In 1984, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in favor of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule stemming from the Clean Air Act. The EPA rule allowed states to treat all pollution from a unified industrial group as a singular pollution source for regulatory purposes. A cohort of environmental groups challenged the rule, arguing that it allowed pollution-emitting devices to operate that would not have passed regulatory muster considered on their own.
It was a technical exercise in statutory interpretation—but the case’s long-term impact had little to do with pollution or the intricacies of the Clean Air Act. Embedded in that decision, Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., was a small revolution in administrative law.
Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which governs regulatory agencies, courts are instructed to litigate agency rules by interpreting relevant statutes themselves. But Chevron created a new standard: If a statute was ambiguous, courts had to defer to the agency’s interpretation. This became known as “Chevron deference.”
Chevron deference seemed reasonable enough on its face. Regulatory statutes and the rules that stem from them are quite intricate, the thinking went, and require subject-matter expertise to understand. Courts were instructed to defer to agency interpretation because agencies had technical staff with domain-specific knowledge.
But over time, Chevron deference became a mechanism for expanding the power of executive agencies. If an agency wanted to take some action not clearly authorized by statute, agency lawyers could hunt for a seemingly ambiguous statute, then tell courts that the agency’s new, extrastatutory power was implied by the law’s vague language.
The courts, which were designed p
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