
What a world without Chevron deference looks like in the Trump era
What a world without Chevron deference looks like in the Trump era

There is the power of the president, and then there is the power of the courts.
President Donald Trump has used his first days to try to remake government and society. In some cases, the president will have the powers he assumes, but a torrent of a legal challenges will show that, in other cases, he does not.
Many of those cases will come down to just how much power the courts decide federal agencies will have to carry out Trump’s plans. And a Supreme Court decision from last year will likely matter a lot here.
Marketplace Senior Washington Correspondent Kimberly Adams recently joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host Sabri Ben-Achour to explain what’s known as the “Chevron deference” and what may come in its place since SCOTUS overturned it. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Sabri Ben-Achour: So Chevron deference was the idea that whenever there is a debate over a regulation something unclear about it, a court should give deference to the federal agency involved in interpreting it, give the federal agency the benefit of the doubt. Remind us why the Supreme Court rolled that whole thing back.
Kimberly Adams: So opponents of this idea had been complaining for a long time that federal agencies were overreaching in their rules and regulations, and effectively doing the work of Congress. And, in a series of cases, the Supreme Court agreed. So now when there’s a disagreement over some federal agency’s policy, the deference is supposed to go to the Court’s interpretation of whatever law was being used to justify the regulation, rather than the agency’s interpretation.
Ben-Achour: Now, this move was celebrated by conservatives at the time, but now it is a conservative administration that’s in charge of these agencies. So is this a good thing for the Trump administration?
Adams: Potentially. I’ve talked to several conservative lawyers and economists who see the ruling, along with the administration friendly to regulatory rollbacks, as a good combination. Devin Watkins is an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Devin Watkins: We’re now looking and trying to decide exactly how much power these agencies have to interpret things and, for interpretations that the agencies have had in the past, how many of those are actually valid.
Adams: [That’s] with the idea that past regulations that may be on shaky ground post-Chevron could get struck down in court. This has come up a lot in the context of the planned Department of Government Efficiency.
Ben-Achour: This shift in policy, this end to the deference given to a government agency, that could work against the Trump administration, right?
Adams: Right. I mean, just like old regulations can be challenged, so can new ones. Neil Chilson is head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, which is a think tank focused on technology and innovation.
Neil Chilson: In areas with big rule-making agencies — and so if you think EPA, Department of Energy, transportation and telecommunications — those are probably the big spaces where the courts will apply a less deferential approach.
Adams: So we may see opponents of new rules and regulations coming out of the Trump White House deploy this tool as well to get a court to limit the reach of what these agencies can do without Congress under Trump.
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