The administrative state is doomed inevitably – external forces.

Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut, “The Supreme Court’s Stealth Attack on Expertise Helps Pave the Way for Authoritarianism,” Verdict, 01-24-2022,https://verdict.justia.com/2022/01/24/the-supreme-courts-stealth-attack-on-expertise-helps-pave-the-way-for-authoritarianism

On January 13, in National Federation of Independent Businesses v. Department of Labor, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority cast its lot with the anti-vaccination Republican base, its mistruths, and the attack on expertise. For the Court, it was convenient that doing so would serve its larger partisan agenda.

Degrading expertise is a necessary component for dismantling the “administrative state,” a long-term right-wing project that would tear down the institutions, agencies, and offices by which the government implements protective public policy.

And so, in the course of staying the Biden administration’s “get vaccinated-or-be-tested” mandate in businesses employing more than 100 workers, the National Federation majority laid the groundwork for stripping the country of the great benefit that federal agencies’ specialized knowledge brings to complex policy issues. Rather than following Chevron v. NRDC—the precedent conservatives love to hate—or even citing it, the Court refused to defer to agency expertise. In Chevron, Justice John Paul Stevens recognized that deference is important because “[j]udges are not experts in the field and are not part of either of the political branches of government.”

In place of such deference, the conservative majority continued with its anti-regulatory mission and “attacked the modern administrative state as a threat to liberty . . . .” But as researchers Matthew Thomas and Luke Buckmaster have written, “[T]he need for policy makers to seek expert advice has grown dramatically over the last century, driven by growth in the volume, range and specialization of subjects in the public policy domain.” The Congressional Research Service explains that “Congress delegates rulemaking authority to agencies [because] agencies have a significant amount of expertise and can ‘fill in’ technical details of programs that Congress created in statute.”

Simply put, “Competence is critical to democracy.”

The conservative attack on regulatory agencies, and the expertise they represent, does not proceed from a love of democracy. Rather, it derives from the Republican economic theory that wealth trickles down from the super-rich when they are allowed to freely pursue their own financial gain without interference from government.

It should come as no surprise that today’s business tycoons pay to promote the idea that regulatory agencies, and the experts in them, are evil. Take billionaire Charles Koch, chief funder of right-wing causes such as the Tea Party movement. His wealth traces to his father’s oil & gas business, still a mainstay of Koch Industries.

Small wonder that so much of his and his deceased brother’s political advocacy took straight aim at federal regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency. Their well-heeled political advocacy arm has regularly published newspaper op-eds with titles such as “Protect taxpayers from EPA,” and “Protect power grid from EPA mandate” or “Arizona should fight useless coal regulations.” Seeding climate change denial has been central to the Koch strategy.

Another part of the Koch strategy has been to make sure that the right kind of judges get appointed to the nation’s courts, especially the Supreme Court.