How Much Power Should Government Experts Have?

Now that abortion is restricted and affirmative action is hobbled, the conservative legal movement has set its sights on a third precedent: Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

The 1984 decision, one of the most cited in American law but largely unknown to the public, bolstered the power of executive agencies that regulate the environment, the marketplace, the work force, the airwaves and countless other aspects of modern life. Overturning it has been a key goal of the right and is part of a project to demolish the “administrative state.”

A decision rejecting Chevron would threaten regulations covering — just for starters — health care, consumer safety, government benefit programs and climate change. (My colleague Charlie Savage has written more on the possible implications.)

After three and a half hours of lively arguments on Wednesday that appeared to divide the justices along the usual lines, it seemed that the court’s conservative majority was prepared to limit or even eliminate the precedent.

Chevron — and bear with me here, this will hurt only for a minute — established the principle that courts must defer to agencies’ reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes. The theory is that agencies have more expertise than judges, are more accountable to voters and are better able to establish uniform national policies. “Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of the government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 1984 for a unanimous court (though three of its justices recused for reasons of health or financial conflict). Stevens later said of the opinion, which was easily his most influential, that it was “simply a restatement of existing law.”

The decision was not much noted when it was issued. “If Chevron amounted to a revolution, it seems almost everyone missed it,” Justice Neil Gorsuch, the harshest critic of the doctrine on the current court, wrote in 2022, saying that courts had read it too broadly.