# Chevron deference **Chevron deference** was the rule, from 1984 to 2024, that courts should defer to a federal agency's reasonable reading of an ambiguous statute the agency administers. It is named for *Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council*, 467 U.S. 837 (1984). This page covers the doctrine's life. Its death, and what came after, belongs to [[Loper Bright v. Raimondo]]. ## The two steps Step one asks whether Congress has "directly spoken to the precise question at issue." If it has, that ends the matter. Step two applies only when the statute is silent or ambiguous. Then the court asks whether the agency's reading is "permissible," and if it is, the court accepts it even if the court would have read the statute differently. The justification was that ambiguity is an implicit delegation: Congress leaves gaps for the expert agency, answerable to an elected President, to fill. ## A deregulatory birth The origin is the part the modern campaign against it tends to leave out. The rule under review was the [[Ronald Reagan]] [[EPA]]'s 1981 "bubble" policy. It let a plant treat all its smokestacks as one source under the Clean Air Act, which loosened permitting. The EPA administrator at the time was Anne Gorsuch, mother of the Justice who would later lead the attack on the doctrine. Environmentalists (NRDC) challenged the rule; industry defended it. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for a unanimous six-Justice Court, since three Justices were recused, and deference let a Republican administration deregulate. For its first decade the doctrine's leading champion was [[Antonin Scalia]], who saw it as a check on judges imposing policy. ## How the right turned on it The switch followed who was running the agencies. Under Obama, deference protected climate, labor and financial rules, and the [[Conservative Legal Movement]] came to see it as the engine of the [[Administrative State]]. [[Clarence Thomas]] questioned its constitutionality in 2015. [[Neil Gorsuch]], then a Tenth Circuit judge, called it a "judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty" in 2016, and that line helped put him on the [[Federalist Society]] list. The Court also built workarounds before the formal kill: step zero, and then the [[Major Questions Doctrine]], which withdrew deference exactly where the stakes were highest. ## The end, and what it licensed *Loper Bright* (June 28, 2024, 6–3, Roberts) overruled *Chevron*. It held that the [[Administrative Procedure Act]] requires courts to use independent judgment. It also said that earlier decisions resting on *Chevron* keep their statutory stare decisis effect, so existing holdings were not reopened. The executive branch turned the overruling into a deregulatory tool within a year. The April 9, 2025 presidential memorandum "Directing the Repeal of Unlawful Regulations" told agencies to identify rules that conflict with *Loper Bright* and nine other decisions, including *West Virginia v. EPA* and *SEC v. Jarkesy*, and to repeal them. It invoked the APA's good-cause exception to skip notice and comment, on the theory that keeping an unlawful rule is contrary to the public interest. The doctrine that once let a Republican EPA deregulate by reinterpreting a statute now lets a Republican White House deregulate by declaring that the prior interpretation was never lawful. ## See also - [[Loper Bright v. Raimondo]]: the 2024 overruling and its consequences - [[Major Questions Doctrine]] · [[Nondelegation Doctrine]] · [[West Virginia v. EPA]] - [[Administrative Procedure Act]] · [[APA Notice-and-Comment Rulemaking]] · [[Administrative State]] - [[Conservative Legal Movement]] · [[Federalist Society]] · [[DOGE]]