The U.S. Supreme Court has overturned what is known as the Chevron deference, which is a decades-old court decision that says if a law passed by Congress is not clear in some area, then federal agencies of the Executive Branch can interpretat of how to enforce law through regulation. Such broad powers have led to an expansion of the regulatory state.
The decision’s ramifications will go far and wide throughout many areas of life impacted by regulation, impacting decisions by the EPA and the ATF, for example.
Here’s one instance where this decision impacts 80 million workers: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate of 2021.
The OSHA COVID-19 Emergency Temporary Standard on Vaccination and Testing required employers with 100 workers or more to establish, implement, and enforce a written mandatory vaccination policy for Covid-19 for their workplaces.
OSHA used the Chevron deference (also called Chevron doctrine) as the basis for its authority to mandate the experimental vaccine to these private-sector workers.
In a case brought by the National Federation of Independent Business and others that went to the Supreme Court, the Biden Administration argued that Covid-19 remained a “grave danger” in 2022, and that the OSH Act “clearly” grants OSHA the power to protect the workforce, and the agency can act on an emergency basis to do so — all based on Chevron deference.
The Supreme Court struck down that mandate on the 80 million workers in America. In the 6-3 decision, the justices blocked OSHA from its mandate, but allowed a separate vaccination mandate for health care workers at 76,000 federally funded facilities to stand. That upheld mandate came out of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services rather than OSHA.
The ruling on OSHA related to Chevron deference, but that term didn’t specifically show up in the decision, which just discussed regulatory overreach.
“Although Congress has indisputably given OSHA the power to regulate occupational dangers, it has not given that agency the power to regulate public health more broadly,” the majority said in the opinion. “Requiring the vaccination of 84 million Americans, selected simply because they work for employers with more than 100 employees, certainly falls in the latter category.”
This past week, however, the Supreme Court was very specific when it ruled that a federal agency cannot require fishing vessels to pay the federal government for agency-mandated observers to be on their boats while they are fishing.
The justices were clear in saying that the regulatory bureaucracy needs to step back into its cage created by Congress.
In the case that will impact so many federal agency regulations across the agencies, the plaintiffs were herring fishermen from Cape May, New Jersey. The Magnuson-Stevens Act gave the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration the authority to require federal monitors on commercial fishing boats to ensure that the fishermen adhere to the NOAA mandates.
But while the Magnuson-Stevens Act requires owners of certain classes of fishing boats to pay for their own monitors, the MSA never specified herring boats as one of those classes. That was added to the requirements by NOAA bureaucrats, not by Congress. And in this decision, the court took direct aim at the Chevron deference.
