The Supreme Court’s decision striking down the 40-year-old Chevron deference is welcomed by many agricultural groups that have long contended the legal concept has led to rampant and overreaching regulations by federal agencies.

The Chevron deference concept was borne of the Supreme Court decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council in 1984.

In that decision, the Supreme Court found if Congress passes statutory language that is ambiguous or vague, federal administrative agencies have the authority to make a reasonable interpretation of that language, said Mary-Thomas Hart, chief counsel for National Cattlemen’s beef Association.

Following the 1984 decision, there was a pretty swift increase in the number of rulemakings that came out of administrative agencies and a significant increase in the breadth of those rulemakings, she said.

Unintended rules

It led to a lot of additional agency action without any congressional action to go along with it and many more rules than Congress ever intended, she said during the latest Beltway Beef podcast.

“It’s something that the court’s been going after for a long time. I think for the last few years the Supreme Court would have considered it a zombie concept; they no longer cited to it, they no longer referenced it,” she said.

But she thinks the court acknowledged in order to make sure lower courts and agencies weren’t utilizing that standard, the court formally put an end to the concept of Chevron deference.

The decision means agencies will no longer have the authority to make “willy-nilly” interpretations of vague statutory language, and it puts the burden back on Congress to craft specific mandates to agencies, she said.

Far reaching

In the 6-3 ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the majority decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts essentially kills the Chevron deference, she said.

The Loper Bright case involves a group of herring fishermen in New Jersey challenging a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule shifting the burden of paying for required federal inspectors on their boats to the fishermen.

“That decision, that change in policy, was made entirely at the agency with no congressional action to support it,” she said.

The Supreme Court’s decision in that case is much more far-reaching than just the herring fisherman, she said.

Balance of power

The concept of Chevron deference empowered administrative agencies and unelected agency staff to take on a lot of power in crafting federal policy. At the same time, it took the burden off Congress to make those tough decisions, to cast votes that might be politically risky, she said.

“In the last 40 years since Chevron deference was kind of formalized, we’ve seen a significant shift in policymaking from the legislative branch to the executive branch — and Congress really just becoming nothing more than a funding mechanism,” she said.

She thinks it will take a while to get back to what the Constitution’s framers intended to be the balance of powers.

“But I think eliminating Chevron from the equation does a lot in getting us back to … Congress being the branch that makes the laws or sets policy and then the executive branch implementing those laws instead of putting bureaucrats in the position of creating policy from scratch,” she said.