SCOTUS Overturning the Chevron Doctrine Puts Our Regulatory Protections at Risk

The Supreme Court overturned the Chevron doctrine this month, a long-standing legal precedent, reducing the effectiveness of government agencies and endangering countless regulations, by transferring a huge function of agencies--to interpret and enforce laws--from the executive branch to the courts.

The 1984 Chevron decision required that when a law was unclear or ambiguous, courts should defer to agency experts’ “reasonable interpretations” of those laws, and was the underpinning for regulatory enforcement in healthcare, safety, finance and the environment. The idea was always that people working in federal agencies have knowledge and expertise in their field of regulation, more than lawmakers and judges do. But now that traditional understanding has been overruled by the Roberts court.  

“If Americans are worried about their drinking water, their health, their retirement account, discrimination on the job, if they fly on a plane, drive a car, if they go outside and breathe the air — all of these day-to-day activities are run through a massive universe of federal agency regulations,” said Lisa Heinzerling, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University. “And this decision now means that more of those regulations could be struck down by the courts.”

When Congress passes a law, it cannot anticipate all the ways that the economy, the nation and the world will change. If regulators had only the powers that Congress explicitly gave them, many regulations would be vulnerable to legal challenges. 

For instance, as society, technology, and the economy have grown more complex (think AI or biotech), so too has the task of governance. Because Congress is not equipped to micromanage the day-to-day administration of the legislation that it passes, it must rely on federal agencies to carry out laws and policies according to good-faith interpretations. 

Now the Supreme Court has reopened the door for federal judges to decide how agencies enforce laws when Congress has used ambiguous language. Sometimes Congress is purposefully not explicit in writing statutes, in order to give the subject area experts space to decide how best to implement a regulation. 

The courts will no longer defer to agency experts. Industry-funded studies that appeal to a particular judge might influence their decisions more than the years and decades of research showing why well-regulated systems serve the greater good. Federal agencies could cease to take on the critical challenges of the present day, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, tackling the challenges of microplastics, protecting consumers from the downsides of AI, or even keeping us safe from the next pandemic.
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Congress is expected to take more time fleshing out legislation to avoid legal challenges,and judges will be more apt to overrule current and future regulations.

Examples of potential impacts:

• An agency made up of occupational safety specialists should already be well equipped to decide how to handle the technical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of imposing workplace protections—rules about equipment usage, say, or the need for periodic employee rest breaks—without the meddling of judges, now it must anticipate being overruled by the courts.
• Given the complexity of weather patterns, EPA scientists are better equipped than judges at determining how much a state should curb its air pollution in order to protect people living in other states downwind, now it must prepare to be hampered and second-guessed.

The ruling will likely have seismic ramifications for health policy. A flood of litigation, with plaintiffs like pharmaceutical companies and hospitals challenging regulations they say aren’t specified in the law, could leave the country with a patchwork of disparate health regulations varying by jurisdiction. 

• Routine government functions such as deciding the rate to pay doctors for treating Medicare beneficiaries could become embroiled in long legal battles that disrupt patient care or strain providers to adapt.
• Parts of the healthcare industry may not take on reimbursement rates for doctors that are set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services because those specific rates aren’t written into law. 
• The No Surprises Act, which passed in 2020 and took effect for most people in 2022, aims to protect patients from unexpected, out-of-network medical bills, especially in emergencies. The high court’s ruling is expected to spur more litigation over its implementation. 
• Specific regulations — such those designed to cut car and truck pollution by accelerating the transition to electric vehicles, or to slash power plant pollution with the use of costly carbon capture and sequestration technology — could now be more legally vulnerable.
• Although Congress creates the tax code through legislation, the I.R.S. has wide latitude in how the tax laws are administered. Accounting experts have suggested that the court’s ruling could complicate the agency’s ability to administer the tax code without specific direction from Congress.  
• “This is disastrous for public health. This is disastrous for the critical role of science-based regulatory agencies,” said Mitch Zeller, a former F.D.A. associate commissioner and tobacco division director. “Chevron has worked well for half a century and makes a lot of sense.” Challenges could range from whether tainted spinach can be traced back to a farm to the very core of the F.D.A.’s decisions on whether drugs are safe and effective enough to be sold in the United States.
• The court’s ruling could affect how Medicare, Medicaid and Affordable Care Act insurance plans are administered, health law experts said, as opponents gain an opportunity to challenge how these huge programs operate. The health care system is governed by elaborate regulations covering how hospitals operate, what providers are paid for medical services and how insurance companies are monitored by the government. Much of that regulation is grounded in interpretation of laws that date back decades. 
• Drugmakers may try to capitalize on the Center for Medicare Service’s reduced authority to interpret the Inflation Reduction Act, challenging CMS’s interpretation of which drugs are eligible for price negotiation and the methods used to select and determine the maximum fair price for those drugs. Additionally, President Biden’s landmark Medicare drug price negotiation program will likely face new challenges under this ruling.
• In fisheries, the effects of this could be far-reaching. Science-based expert decisions are the foundation of our fishery management system and are now at greater risk of litigation at all levels. From catch limits and protections for turtles, seabirds and marine mammals to rules for preventing habitat damage, and more—our system relies on experts applying the law to specific situations. And right now, with climate change stressing ocean ecosystems, we need to be acting to build resilience for fish populations by setting climate-informed catch levels, restoring habitats and supporting fishing community adaptation. We shouldn’t want our members of Congress to have to think about the fluctuating sea-surface temperature of every estuary and the impact that has on the fish that live there.

Finally, decisions may lead to inconsistent rulings across different courts. Instead of deferring to a single regulatory body, courts will exercise independent judgment, potentially resulting in varied conclusions regarding federal regulations across the country. This could make certain locations more or less favorable for healthcare company operations or expansions. It will also lead to a surge of litigant’s venue shopping for judges sympathetic to their challenges to particular agency actions.

In the same way overturning Roe v Wade is having tangible impacts on the lives of women, their families and medical providers that no one even imagined, the overturning of the Chevron doctrine will have deep and tangible impacts on ALL of our lives in how government agencies provide valuable services, protections and oversight. Think of the GOP’s anti-science, anti regulation biases and attempts to implant loyalists within agencies per Project 2025, and the impact is amplified. However, our Democratic legislators are already working to reverse the ruling: Democratic senators seek to reverse the ruling the restricts federal agency power! Another reason to vote Blue!