Will the Supreme Court’s Chevron Decision Impact Environmental Regulations?

According to an article from Grist, “The Supreme Court on Friday threw into question the future of climate and environmental regulation in the United States, scrapping a decades-old legal precedent that gave federal agencies leeway to interpret laws according to their expertise and scientific evidence.” Legal experts say the decision, which overturns the “Chevron deference” could lead to an increase in legal challenges against federal agency regulations that keep our land, water, and air clean, and mitigate climate change.

Grist reporters Jake Bittle and Zoya Teirstein write, “Federal courts have long deferred to federal agencies to interpret laws that are unclear and need further clarification. In 1984, a shorthanded Supreme Court ruled in a unanimous decision that federal agencies have the final say on ambiguous policies, which allowed those agencies broad authority to make decisions without fear of judicial override.” The Supreme Court’s recent decision revokes that authority and instead will leave decisions up to judges, who do not have the breadth of financial, scientific, and safety expertise that federal agencies have.

The Grist article delves deeper into the Court’s opinions, but broadly, the Court’s majority opinion (6-3) felt the Chevron deference stripped courts of judicial power and permitted overreach by the executive branch, while dissenting justices say that authority was crucial to protect the environment, public health, and economy and that, without it, the Supreme Court will now function as the “country’s administrative czar.”

“What’s at stake [in the decision] is whether courts are going to defer to agencies interpreting statutes or whether courts are going to stop doing that, and with more regularity take it on themselves to interpret the statutes even when they’re ambiguous, which means they may be in the position of making more policy choices,” Michael Burger, the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, told Grist.