Policies that may be vulnerable to new legal challenges

“This is chaos,” said Dorothy A. Brown, a law professor at Georgetown University. “This is the Supreme Court limiting the agency’s authority, knowing that Congress can never pass a law that answers all the questions. But it limits what the government can do to protect people, protect consumers and impose costs on large corporations.”

Here are some of the policy areas that could change as a result of the Loper Bright ruling.

Student Loan Forgiveness

Hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan relief could now hang in the balance. The Education Department has announced a half-dozen rules that would repay or forgive student loans starting in July 2023, and two of them are the subject of ongoing lawsuits that accuse the government of abusing its authority.

“No policy is more at risk than the administration’s action to forgive student loans, which has been spent on hundreds of billions of dollars without congressional approval,” said Michael Brickman, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former senior adviser at the Education Department under President Donald Trump.

Republican attorneys general in 18 states have filed a lawsuit to halt the Savings on a Valuable Education program, which lowers monthly student loan payments and offers a shorter path to loan forgiveness. They argue that Congress never included anything as sweeping as the program in the law that underpins the regulation.

Lawyers for Career Colleges and Schools of Texas made similar arguments in their lawsuit to block the Borrower Defense to Repayment rules, which forgive the debts of students whose colleges used illegal or deceptive tactics to convince them to take out loans. The Education Department is required to refrain from fully implementing any of those rules.

The new rules will make it harder for the department to defend pro-student policies, said Dan Zibel, co-founder of the National Student Legal Defense Network and a former deputy deputy general counsel at the Education Department under President Barack Obama.

Protecting Transgender Students

The Biden administration’s new regulation protecting transgender students and outlining how schools must respond to allegations of sexual assault and harassment has already been challenged, and the new ruling gives opponents more reason to stop it.

The regulations are the administration’s interpretation of the half-century-old Title IX law that prohibits sex discrimination in federally funded K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The administration, citing a 2020 Supreme Court ruling, included gender identity discrimination in its definition of sex discrimination.

The rules, which were to go into effect on Aug. 1, have already been temporarily blocked by three different federal courts in different parts of the country, and more proceedings are pending.

Employee rights

Expanded overtime pay entitlements, new requirements for employers to accommodate pregnancy, guidelines on workplace harassment and standards to hold franchises accountable for labor law violations all could be in question.

“It has created many, many new areas for litigation,” said Ann Lofaso, a professor of employment law at West Virginia University.

The Supreme Court ruling almost immediately blocked the Labor Department’s authority. Hours after the ruling Friday, a U.S. District Court judge in Eastern Texas cited the decision in an order blocking the federal overtime expansion from applying to Texas state workers. The rule took effect Monday and makes millions more workers nationwide eligible for overtime pay. But labor and employment lawyers say the Texas judge’s decision signals that another court is likely to block the rule.

Separately, long-awaited Labor Department rules that took effect this week that would regulate workers’ exposure to extreme heat are likely to be vulnerable to attack.

Electric Vehicle Support and Emission Limits

Federal aid for electric vehicles — and a federal crackdown on emissions from gasoline-powered cars and trucks — could be in jeopardy.

The Biden administration’s most important climate change measure could prove newly vulnerable: the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to boost sales of electric vehicles while cutting emissions from gasoline-powered cars and trucks.

Republican attorneys general from more than two dozen states have already sued the EPA over the rule, a sweeping attempt to reshape the U.S. auto market. The top trade association for the U.S. oil and gas industry, which could see demand for its products fall as consumers switch to electric vehicles, also challenged the rule in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Opponents say the agency overstepped its authority.

The Environmental Protection Agency will have to convince the court that Congress has authorized it to issue such rules, said Jeff Holmstead, a partner at the law and lobbying firm Bracewell LLP and a former senior EPA official under President George W. Bush.

Intellectual property rights

Patent infringement battles and other intellectual property claims could soon be back in court. One example that’s already likely to heat up again: tech giant Google’s battle with speaker maker Sonos.

Courts have ruled in the past that Google infringed Sonos’ patents by using software to control audio speakers. But Google says those rulings are based on an interpretation of the law by the U.S. International Trade Commission, a federal agency that issues rulings and takes action on unfair trade practices. In a court filing last week, Google’s lawyers asked the U.S. Court of Appeals to review the case if the Supreme Court rejects the Chevron rule.

A Google spokesman declined to comment. A Sonos spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.