If not for the presidential race dominating the news, the Supreme Court’s recent reversal of its 1984 Chevron doctrine — and the hand-wringing and morbid predictions surrounding it — might have become the issue of the moment. After all, it concerns the authority of government officials that have the most direct impact over the day-to-day lives of Americans.
There are over 250 federal agencies, with more than 2 million employees. In 2023, they flooded the Federal Register with 3,000 new rules. They are experts in the regulation of consumer products, financial services, technology and natural resources, among other issues.
Courts naturally struggle to keep up with this blizzard of regulatory dos and don’ts and how they affect businesses. After all, they only encounter them sporadically. So the Supreme Court invented the Chevron doctrine, allowing federal courts to defer to the experts and adopt an agency’s interpretation when it is not clear how a law is intended to apply to the facts of the case.
This is not an entirely bad idea. But the Chevron doctrine was never meant to become, as it sometimes has over time, an invitation for agencies to........