The Supreme Court on Friday overturned the 1984 decision colloquially known as Chevron, that gave federal agencies broad regulatory power, weakening their authority to issue regulations unless Congress has spoken clearly. The court split along ideological lines in the dispute.
The core of the Chevron decision says federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details when laws aren’t clear and defer to an agency’s interpretation of laws if it is reasonable. Opponents of the decision argued that it gave power that should be wielded by judges to experts who work for the government.
“Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the [Administrative Procedure Act] requires,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. He called the earlier decision a “judicial invention that required judges to disregard their statutory duties.”
Chevron doctrine has been applied by lower courts in thousands of cases. The Supreme Court itself has invoked the framework to uphold agencies’ interpretations of statutes at least 70 times, but not since 2016.
Roberts wrote for the court that its decision reversing Chevron would not call those questions those prior cases. But with Chevron overruled, dissenting Justice Elena Kagan warned of new legal challenges to longstanding agency interpretations that had never previously been targeted.
