The Supreme Court of the United States overturned a long-standing decision Friday in a ruling Connecticut lawyers and officials say could inject widespread uncertainty into everything from environmental regulation to the safety of workplace conditions, food and drugs, financial markets, new technology, transportation and more.
The 6-3 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and its companion case Relentless v. Dept. of Commerce overturned what’s known as “Chevron doctrine,” a 40-year-old Supreme Court ruling that outlines when courts should defer to an executive branch agency’s interpretation of ambiguous statutes. Namely, deference is given when the court determines the agency’s interpretation is “rational.”
That will no longer be the standard.
Writing for the court in an opinion issued Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Chevron, decided in 1984 by a bare quorum of six Justices, triggered a marked departure from the traditional judicial approach of independently examining each statute to determine its meaning.” Roberts added, “Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. “Today, the Court flips the script,” Kagan wrote in the dissent. “A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal called the ruling “a setback for good government.” When Congress writes laws, especially in areas that are rapidly changing like Artificial Intelligence, he said, policymakers prefer to keep the language somewhat flexible. That now creates a disadvantage for experts at agencies enforcing those laws; if an individual or company sues over a law, the courts no longer have to defer to the agency’s interpretation of what Congress enacted.
That has major implications for “all aspects of life … everything that we touch and use in our lives that needs to be safe,” said Connecticut Attorney General William Tong. Tong cited examples such as the Food and Drug Administration’s rules around the ingredients in baby food, the Federal Aviation Administration’s regulation of personal safety on airplanes and the Environmental Protection Agency’s limitations on toxic chemicals known as PFAS.
“The Supreme Court has broken the ability of the federal government to regulate large areas of really critical safety and consumer safety provisions for the American people,” Tong said.
Conservative groups applauded the ruling.
“Overturning Chevron means that Congress will have to stop over-delegating its responsibilities to federal agencies — and federal bureaucrats will have to think twice before they try to seize powers they aren’t supposed to have,” Carol Platt Liebau, president of the Connecticut-based conservative think-tank Yankee Institute, said in a statement.
‘As a result of this holding, people across Connecticut — and the United States — will wake up tomorrow with just a little more freedom to follow their dreams and build a more prosperous future for their families,” Platt Liebau said.
The Connecticut Business and Industry Association declined to comment on the decision.
Representatives from state agencies in Connecticut, many of which administer federal programs, deferred comment to the state attorney general. A spokeswoman for Gov. Ned Lamont said the governor wouldn’t be making any statement on the decision.
But advocates for labor, public health, civil liberties and the environment expressed grave concerns.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, which represents 60 domestic and international labor unions, condemned the decision. “This ruling paves the way for corporate challenges to the actions of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the National Labor Relations Board, and other agencies with a duty to protect workers’ lives and rights, which would allow employers to get away with retaliation, union-busting and maintaining dangerous workplace conditions,” Shuler said in an emailed statement.
“It’s really scary to me, as a lawyer, if lawyers are placed in charge of everything.”
Elana Bildner, ACLU of Connecticut
A group of medical associations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Cancer Society, American Heart Association, American Public Health Association, The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and a dozen others issued a statement Friday saying they were disappointed in the decision.
“We anticipate that today’s ruling will cause significant disruption to publicly funded health insurance programs, to the stability of this country’s health care and food and drug review systems, and to the health and well-being of the patients and consumers we serve,” the statement read. “Large health programs such as Medicaid and Medicare, as well as issues related to the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, are extremely complex, so it is key that decisions about how to interpret and implement relevant laws are made by experts at government agencies. Yet today’s majority opinion explicitly ends the use of this sensible doctrine.”
Environmental regulation has been a main target over the years for those intent on doing away with Chevron deference. And the Roberts Court has chipped away at the Chevron decision (a ruling that originally dealt with environmental regulation under the Clean Air Act) over the last few years.
“This is part of a pattern of the Supreme Court rolling back agency powers, taking those policy-related powers to themselves, and they’ve done it very much in the context of environmental statutes,” said Roger Reynolds, senior legal director for the environmental advocacy group Save the Sound. Save the Sound, along with another New England-based advocacy group, the Conservation Law Foundation, joined an amicus brief filed by Earthjustice last September opposing any rollback of Chevron.
Just yesterday, the court stayed a component of the Clean Air Act that prevents cross-state pollution. In the last two years, it has prevented regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants and limited the reach of the Clean Water Act. Next term it plans to look at challenges to the National Environmental Policy Act, which came into existence in 1970 along with the Clean Air Act. All, Reynolds said, were warnings that Chevron was in danger, even though it was never cited in those cases.
Friday’s ruling will not undo previous rulings under Chevron. But from now on, courts will decide what’s allowed and not, or Congress will have to legislate the specifics of regulations in far more detail.
Elana Bildner, a senior staff attorney with the Connecticut chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the ruling “as big of a watershed moment, in some ways, as Roe,” referring to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the Constitutional right to abortion.
Pointing to laws governing occupational safety, labor standards, air pollution, health care and the financial sector, Bildner said, “Congress makes things open and up for interpretation.” The ruling places that interpretation in the hands of judges, she said, “who are not good at being doctors or climatologists or aeronautical engineers or any other kind of specialists that would be employed by an agency and whose expertise would be reflected in agency decision making.”
Judges are just lawyers, she said, and “it’s really scary to me, as a lawyer, if lawyers are placed in charge of everything — including those specialized decisions that can affect people in so many areas.”
Reynolds of Save the Sound said now that some 1,500 federal judges will be interpreting laws without deferring to the expertise of federal agencies, the odds are high many rulings conflict with each other, resulting in massive implementation delays.
And conflicting lower court opinions often end up before the Supreme Court.
“It’s a bit of a power grab from the Supreme Court and intended to undermine agencies’ basic ability to function and to act for the purposes they were created,” Reynolds said.