Supreme Court takes sledgehammer to federal regulatory structure
The Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling significantly weakening the authority of federal agencies to interpret and enforce regulations, delivering a major blow to the federal regulatory structure by overturning the long-standing Chevron deference doctrine.
Background
- At the core of this ruling is **Chevron deference**, a 1984 precedent that required courts to defer to federal agencies' reasonable interpretations of ambiguous laws. Overturning it would be the "sledgehammer" referenced.
- The two cases are **Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo** and **Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce**, brought by fishing companies and conservative legal groups to challenge agency fee programs — with the real goal of killing Chevron.
- If Chevron falls, agencies like the EPA, SEC, FDA, and FCC lose much of their power to fill gaps in statutes. That authority shifts to federal judges, who will now decide technical policy questions without agency expertise.
- This is the culmination of a decades-long conservative legal movement (backed by the Federalist Society and Koch network) to shrink the "administrative state" — the federal bureaucracy that writes and enforces regulations under delegated authority from Congress.