Deference prevents judicial imposition of partisan preferences.

That order, in and of itself, is apolitical, because the Chevron sword cuts both ways. In administrations that are seeking to relax protections (such as Reagan’s EPA in the Chevron case itself), agency heads won’t like having their decisions overruled by judges with a different way of seeing things. For presidential administrations that prioritize climate action, curbing pollution, and promoting environmental justice, Chevron deference has helped allow environmental progress. , a senior advocate in NRDC’s Environmental Health program, has argued many cases in federal court where Chevron deference has come into play, and he thinks combatants on both sides of the political divide should bemoan its erasure. Walke says, “Regulatory agencies can be harmed, but deregulatory agencies can be harmed as well.” 

Chevron deference’s detractors argue that the doctrine gives agencies a rubber stamp to impose onerous restrictions and rules. But as noted by the , a nonpartisan law and policy institute, federal agencies face legal challenges to their rules all the time—and only prevail in about 70 percent of these challenges, even with the Chevron doctrine on their side. In other words, their powers are far from unchecked.

Both Doniger and Walke think that ending Chevron deference could potentially usher in a new era marked by legal and administrative chaos. For instance, in Chevron v. NRDC, the Supreme Court admonished the lower courts to not usurp agency prerogatives by making public policy through their rulings. Now the Supreme Court has reopened the door for federal judges to decide how executive-branch agencies should go about their daily business whenever Congress has used ambiguous language, which, it should be noted, isn’t always unintentional. Sometimes Congress is purposefully inexplicit in order to give the subject-area experts space to decide how best to implement a regulation. For example, an agency made up of occupational safety specialists should already be well equipped to decide how to handle the technical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of imposing workplace protections—rules about equipment usage, say, or the need for periodic employee rest breaks—without the meddling of judges. And given the complexity of weather patterns, EPA scientists are better equipped than judges at determining how much a state should curb its air pollution in order to protect people living in other states downwind.

An even more obvious problem with giving judges this unrestrained interpretive authority? The federal court system is huge—and the roughly 850 judges who sit on the lower courts are a philosophically and ideologically diverse bunch, to say the least. And as the judicial appointments process has become increasingly partisan, the range of these judges’ views has gotten even wider. Ending Chevron deference is tantamount to throwing a dart at a lower-court dartboard…and hoping for the best. “[There are] more than 10 different circuits, each with multiple judges,” Walke says. “Each with the ability to decide which reasonable interpretation is their preferred reasonable interpretation.”