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With Supreme Court Overturn of Landmark Chevron Ruling, ‘Big Business Won Another Round’

Jonathan Levy, George Annas, Jonathan Buonocore, and Elizabeth McCuskey discuss the public health implications of the recent Supreme Court decision that significantly curtailed the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws they administer.

The final two weeks of the 2024 US Supreme Court term brought a flurry of decisions with far-reaching implications for numerous public health issues, including abortion, gun ownership restrictions, and air pollution.

Perhaps the most consequential ruling was the Court’s decision to overturn the 40-year legal precedent known as Chevron deference, which stems from the landmark 1984 ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council that required judges to defer to federal agencies for “reasonable” interpretations of ambiguous laws by Congress.

In its new rulings in Relentless v. Department of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court struck down the Chevron doctrine and shifted this regulatory authority from the executive branch to the lower courts. The 6-3 conservative majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr., argued that federal judges—rather than administrative agencies—should determine the meaning and intent of broad or vaguely worded Congressional legislation.

While the pair of cases centered narrowly around the government’s role in commercial fishing operations, the ruling effectively weakens the power of federal agencies to administer a broad range of regulations intending to protect and improve the environment, healthcare, workplace safety, food and drug safety, and many other areas. It could spark legal challenges to existing and future laws.

“Most major environmental laws were passed many decades ago, using language like ‘best available control technology’ to allow for actions to be informed by evolving science and technology,” says Jonathan Levy, chair and professor of environmental health. “The Loper Bright decision upends 40 years of settled practice in which scientific and technical expertise at the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies was used to figure out how to best protect public health.”

Now, he says, “judges with no subject matter expertise will be imposing their judgments about climate change, air quality, drug safety, and occupational safety, in what will undoubtedly be a chaotic process that creates uncertainty and instability for industry and the public alike.”

Upending the doctrine was a long-sought goal of conservatives and corporations pushing to limit the scope and power of the federal government in American life.

“In the ongoing power struggle between big business and federal health and safety oversight, big business has won another round,” says George Annas, William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor and director of the Center for Health Law, Ethics and Human Rights at SPH. “For at least the predictable future, public health leaders will have to work harder in Congress to produce clear rules for protecting our health and safety.”

He rejects Roberts’ assertion in the opinion that Chevron was inconsistent with the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), as well as the chief justice’s claim that, in alignment with Section 706 of the APA, courts “shall decide all relevant questions of law” and “interpret constitutional and statutory provisions,” and that they “must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.”

“Roberts is just making excuses that he hopes will take at least some of the attention away from the blunt political overruling of the Chevron doctrine, and what it tells us about the Court’s respect for precedent,” Annas says. “The Court has no respect for precedent and will use even very weak arguments to justify overruling cases that have been relied on by past Courts for decades. We have another opinion based on the personal Republican views of the justices, not on the law.”

The long-term consequences of the Chevron ruling could take years to fully comprehend, but health experts are just as worried about immediate ramifications. Many of the Biden administration’s initiatives—such as cutting carbon emissions, issuing student loan forgiveness, and negotiating drug prices with Medicare—are already being challenged in court. If agencies no longer have wide discretion to set policies, many other bedrock public health protections—including limits on air pollution in communities near industrial sites, protections from chemical exposures in the workplace, and rules around “forever” chemicals in consumer products—could also be at risk, says Jonathan Buonocore, assistant professor of environmental health.

He says he frequently cites the scope of the Clean Air Act to his students. The law gives the EPA authority to set and maintain national ambient air quality standards, “the attainment and maintenance of which in the judgment of the Administrator, based on such criteria and allowing an adequate margin of safety, are requisite to protect the public health.”

“That’s all it says about setting the standards,” Buonocore says. “Congress gave the agency the authority to decide what ‘requisite to protect public health’ means and what ‘adequate margin of safety’ means, and then use the best scientific evidence out there to set limits that accomplish those goals—protecting the public health of everyone living in the United States to an ‘adequate margin of safety.’”

The Supreme Court’s decision will also have a significant impact on the extent to which the FDA can regulate a wide range of products.

Granting courts greater power to intervene in federal agency functioning will undermine the FDA’s ability to regulate prescription drugs, medical devices, and vaccines—all products that rely heavily on the agency’s scientific expertise, says Elizabeth McCuskey, professor of health law, policy & management, adding that ending deference to FDA judgment will be problematic for both scientific advancement and patient protection.

“Medical science advances far faster than Congress does, so we often look to the FDA’s expertise to navigate questions about how to regulate 21^st-century advances using laws enacted before the internet,” McCuskey says. “The answers to many of those questions lie beyond the knowledge of judges or legislators.”

Under the new ruling, the FDA “may need to devote more of its time and energy to defending its work in court, which slows the agency down and diverts resources away from the core scientific regulatory functions it plays,” she says.

As Americans’ disapproval of the Supreme Court continues to rise with questions about the justices’ ethical and political motives, Annas suggests that the Court is not totally immune from public pressure. 

“There seems to be at least a chance that the public could respond negatively enough that a future Court may revisit this case,” he says. “One thing is certain. More power for the courts means more work for lawyers—especially health lawyers.”