Supreme Court strikes down Chevron doctrine, destroying federal environmental protections

The Supreme Court on Friday cast doubt on the future of climate and environmental regulation in the United States, abandoning decades-old legal precedent that gave federal agencies discretion to interpret regulations according to their expertise and scientific evidence. The effects of the decision to end so-called deference to Chevrons will become clear in a few years, but it could allow for many more legal challenges against regulations issued by agencies like the EPA and the Department of the Interior, which play a huge role in the climate change fight.

Federal courts have long relied on federal agencies to interpret unclear and unexplained rules. In 1984, a narrowly divided Supreme Court unanimously ruled that federal agencies have the final say on unclear rules, giving those agencies broad authority to make decisions without fear of judicial overreach.

In papers filed with the Supreme Court, the Biden administration said repealing the Chevron rule would be a “shock to the legal system.”

Environmental organizations also condemned the decision.

“Today’s ruling sidelines the role of agency expertise and instead shifts authority to judges who lack the expertise of agency staff who live the science, financial principles, and safety issues that federal agencies specialize in,” Kym Meyer, litigation director of the Southern Environmental Law Center, said in a statement.

Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, said the decision “undermines the basic protections of the American people at the behest of powerful polluters.”

Writing for a 6-3 majority vote, Chief Justice John Roberts argued that “courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency acted within its statutory authority.” He called Chevron’s decision “a fundamental disruption of our separation of powers,” one that “unfairly strips courts of judicial power while increasing the power of executive agencies.”

The current conservative Supreme Court no longer relies heavily on Chevron in important executive branch cases; Roberts noted during oral arguments in that case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo case, also this session, that the court has been “14 or 16” years since it issued a ruling citing the Chevron precedent. Instead, the court has set its own standard for evaluating regulation in several recent rulings. That standard, which the court’s conservative justices call the “principal questions doctrine,” prohibits agencies from making rules on issues “of economic and political magnitude” without clear directives from Congress. The court has never defined what constitutes an issue of that magnitude, but it invoked the “principal questions” test in a landmark 2022 case that limited the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Lower courts, however, still invoke the Chevron rule in many cases, and federal agencies prevail in most of them: an analysis of more than 1,500 district court decisions from 2003 to 2013 found that courts used Chevron in 77 percent of regulatory disputes, and the agencies won significantly more cases than cases in which courts did not use Chevron. The Department of the Interior, which deals with many issues related to climate change, oil leasing, endangered species and indigenous affairs, was one of the agencies that relied on Chevron the most.

The Biden administration and numerous lawyers urged the court to uphold the precedent, arguing that overturning it would create regulatory chaos as hundreds of plaintiffs filed lawsuits challenging existing rules. In his decision, Roberts rejected the notion that the court’s decision to kick out Chevron triggered a flurry of lawsuits against prior regulations, saying the decision should not call into question numerous past cases that relied on precedent.

“Rulings in these cases that specific agency actions are lawful — including the Clean Air Act ruling involving Chevron itself — remain subject to statutory provisions old decisions despite our change in interpretive methodology,” he wrote, referring to the legal principle that judges should leave intact most previous rulings.

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan expressed skepticism of that claim, saying most were too “optimistic” about the effects of kicking out Chevron, arguing that the precedent helped keep “our air and water clean, our food and medicine safe, and our financial markets honest.” She accused the conservative bloc of trying to turn the Supreme Court “into the country’s administrative czar.”

“What’s at stake (in the decision) is whether courts are going to task agencies with interpreting statutes,” said Michael Burger, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, “or whether courts will stop doing that and more regularly take on the task of interpreting statutes themselves, even if they are ambiguous, which means they can make more policy choices.”

The most important thing that is discussed this year is Loper Brightconcerned a regulation by the National Marine Fisheries Service that requires herring fishermen to pay for monitors on their boats. The primary law in question stipulates that monitors will go out on boats and make sure fishermen don’t overfish, but it doesn’t say whether the government can require fishing companies to pay for them. A commercial fishing company represented by lawyers with ties to energy billionaire Charles Koch’s conservative organization sued to overturn the monitor regulation — and also asked the court to dismiss Chevron standard in general.

Chevron’s original decision upheld an attempt to weaken environmental regulations, not strengthen them. The Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan sought to relax the standard for calculating air pollution emissions from industrial facilities, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC, sued, arguing that the EPA did not have the authority to offer a new interpretation of the Clean Air Act. NRDC won initially, but Chevron appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, which sided with Reagan’s EPA.

But over the past decade, many conservatives have come to believe that the precedent allows the executive branch to overstep its authority, and repealing it has become a rallying cry for many right-wing activists and lawyers.

“There is a sense that Chevron is pro-regulation,” Burger said. “And if you take away the deference and give power to the courts, the growing number of conservative judges in the federal court system will have more authority, and that will have a chilling effect on the agency.”