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1 1 (July 26, 2024)

handle is hein.crs/goveqbz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Congressional Court Watcher: Federal Appellate Decisions in Recent Years Applying Chevron Deference July 26, 2024 In late June 2024, the Supreme Court issued a decision in the consolidated cases of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce (collectively referred to as Loper Bright here) overruling the Chevron doctrine. The doctrine, established by the Supreme Court's 1984 decision in Chevron USA. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., generally directed courts to defer to agencies' interpretations of ambiguous statutes that those agencies administer, so long as those interpretations were reasonable. The Court held in Loper Bright that Chevron deference could not be squared with the Administrative Procedure Act's command that courts interpret statutes and that, going forward, courts should exercise independent judgment in determining the meaning of statutory provisions by using every tool at their disposal to determine the best reading of a statute. (A recent Legal Sidebar examines the Loper Bright decision in detail.) Chevron generally required courts to perform a two-step analysis when evaluating agency interpretations of statutes that they administered. At step one, a court would determine whether the statute was silent or ambiguous with regard to the question at issue. If the court determined the statute to be ambiguous, step two required the court to accept an agency's interpretation if it was reasonable, even if the reviewing court believed that there was a better reading of the statute. This standard likely influenced regulatory behavior. One empirical study cited in a CRS product observed that over 80% of agency rule drafters surveyed either agreed or somewhat agreed that Chevron made them more willing to adopt a more aggressive interpretation of their authority. Over its 40-year existence, the Chevron doctrine was cited by federal courts tens of thousands of times, though the Supreme Court and, to a lesser extent, the federal appellate courts deferred to agency interpretations under step two of the Chevron test with less frequency in more recent years. In some cases, this might have been because the reviewing court determined that the agency interpretation lacked the formality necessary for the Chevron doctrine to apply, or the agency regulation involved a major question of political or economic significance that made Chevron deference inappropriate. Other cases might have been resolved at Chevron step one, as the reviewing court determined that the statutory Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB11210 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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