Chevron Deference is No More

On Friday, June 28, 2024, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. In the opinion, the Court’s conservative majority overruled the landmark 1984 case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, and in so doing struck down the longstanding doctrine known as Chevron deference. In Chevron, the Court held that courts should defer to an executive branch agency’s interpretation of a statute if the agency is responsible for implementing the statute, so long as the statute is ambiguous and the agency’s interpretation was reasonable. In Loper Bright Enterprises, the Court wrestled that limited authority away from federal agencies, vesting it instead with the federal courts.

In Loper Bright Enterprises, the Court held that when agency acts are challenged, the Administrative Procedure Act “requires courts to exercise their independent judgment” to discern whether an agency’s act is within its statutory authority. Deferring to agency interpretations “simply because a statute is ambiguous” abdicated the responsibility of the courts to decide cases and controversies in law, according to the Court.

The doctrine of deference to agencies was based on the Court’s view, in 1984, that agency expertise had a role to play in resolving ambiguity in statutory language, given the specialized and often scientific or technical issues at play that fall within the agency’s ambit. But in his opinion in Loper Bright Enterprises, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected that framework, holding that Congress expected the courts, not the executive branch, to handle technical questions about statutory language, with the benefit of briefing from the parties to the dispute.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Elana Kagan wrote that the majority “disdains restraint, and grasps for power.” Arguing that the majority’s opinion would give the Court “exclusive power over every open issue…involving the meaning of regulatory law,” the dissenting Justices wrote that the majority’s belief about Congress’ expectations were misplaced, given the Court had previously held Congress would desire the agency it “put in control of a regulatory scheme” to exercise a degree of discretion when inevitable uncertainties arise.

 According to the dissent, federal agencies with specialized expertise, like the FDA or the EPA, have specialized expertise both with the subject matter of a statute and the “complex regulatory scheme” underlying it. The dissent noted that most statutes necessarily contain ambiguities, or one day will be read to contain one, and that Congress has only twice since Chevron altered Chevron’s interpretive assignment within the body of a statute. According to the dissent, the “congressional reaction shows as well as anything could that the Chevron Court read Congress right.”

Read the full case: Loper Bright Enterprises et al. v. Raimondo.