The future of the administrative state hangs in the balance. Supreme Court justices will soon decide in a pair of cases whether to reverse a decades-old precedent known as thedeference that would curb federal agencies’ power to regulate everything from Wall Street to the stove in your kitchen.
Many other rulemakings authored by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department could also be at risk. This includes the Bureau of Land Management’s public lands rule, which is meant to add conservation to the approved list of lease activities under its so-called “multiple use framework” for public lands — effectively putting it on the same footing as fossil fuel production or mining.
Other Department of Energy and EPA actions could also be vulnerable, including the DOE’s decision to temporarily halt construction of new liquefied natural gas export terminals, and various EPA rules set under the Clean Air Act. “If you look at air pollution when the Clean Air Act was written, the science wasn’t what it is now … and if we’re looking at a much narrower definition of air pollution, courts could very easily say, ‘Well, it doesn’t mean methane emissions, because methane emissions were not a known air pollution at the time,'” Ombres told thedeference argue it has been a tool used to undermine judicial authority and allow agencies, rather than the court system, to interpret the law.