Divided Supreme Court Strikes Down Chevron in Landmark Decision

Reversing four decades of precedent, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Chevron doctrine in its recent decision in Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.

By a vote of 6-3, the Court held that Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether a federal agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

Facts of the Case

The Supreme Court granted certiorari in the two cases to address whether Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S. 837 (1984), should be overruled or clarified. Under the Chevron doctrine, courts have sometimes been required to defer to “permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agencies administer—even when a reviewing court reads the statute differently.

Under Chevron’s two-step analysis, a reviewing court must first assess “whether Congress has directly spoken to the precise question at issue.” If congressional intent is “clear,” that is the end of the inquiry. However, if the court determines that “the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at hand, the court must defer to the agency’s interpretation if it “is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

In each case before the Court, the reviewing courts applied Chevron’s framework to resolve in favor of the Government challenges by petitioners to a rule promulgated by the National Marine Fisheries Service pursuant to the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which requires certain fishing vessels to pay for federal monitoring staff on their boats.

Supreme Court’s Decision

The Supreme Court expressly overruled Chevron. It further held that the APA requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.

According to the Court, the deference theChevrondoctrine requires of courts reviewing federal agency actions can’t be squared with the APA. As Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized in the Court’s majority opinion, the APA requires a reviewing court to “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaning or applicability of the terms of an agency action.”

According to Chief Justice Roberts, the APA “makes clear that agency interpretations of statutes — like agency interpretations of the Constitution — arenot entitled to deference. “Under the APA,” Roberts added, “it thus remains the responsibility of the court to decide whether the law means what the agency says.”

The majority further found that a desire for the uniform construction of federal law did not justify Chevron. “[T]here is little value in imposing a uniform interpretation of a statute if that interpretation is wrong,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “We see no reason to presume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake over the correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.”

In reaching its decision, the majority noted that courts may still consider agency interpretations. As the Chief Justice explained, “Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority . . . [c]areful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may help inform that inquiry.”

Finally, the Court emphasized that while it was overruling Chevron, it was not calling into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. “The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite the Court’s change in interpretive methodology,” Roberts wrote.

Justice Elena Kagan authored a strongly worded dissent, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. According to Kagan, the majority, in “one fell swoop,” has given “itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden — involving the meaning of regulatory law.”