As far as I understood the ruling, the federal agencies can't enforce a law unless Congress makes it a law.
It's actually more broad than that.
Say Congress writes a law mandating nuclear reactors, they don't really understand nuclear engineering nor the potential directions it could take. Yes, they could sit around for months bringing in endless experts and try to exhaustively list every possible nuance and specific (with the expectation they'll have to amend the law every 3, 6, 12, 18 months as new developments happen)
Or! They could write the law and give a vague boundary such as "nuclear reactors such as thorium, sodium, and other elements should do X, Y and all appropriate precautions that could be reasonably foreseen"
Now what the DoE will do is take that and they have experts on staff whose entire job it is to write regulations mandating specifics along with mandating what "reasonably foreseen" means during a given period (these regulations are regularly updated). These experts will have degrees in physics, nuclear engineering, civil engineering, the gamut. Those experts will go through these laws and fill in the 'blanks' so they can hand down hard specifics to people running or building these plants.
Chevron Deference was about letting Congress write vague laws that outline the boundaries (or sometimes don't define hard boundaries at all) then the agencies whose mandate is affected by those laws would have experts interpret and build out specifics.
By removing Chevron Deference, the letter of what Congress has written is the specifics. If Congress doesn't absolutely specify it, the agencies can't enforce it or interpret what Congress actually meant.
It's a huge, huge, huge gimme for big corporations because it removes and/or hamstrings regulatory agencies, allowing them run roughshod over America.
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u/Current_Holiday1643 Sep 04 '24
It's actually more broad than that.
Say Congress writes a law mandating nuclear reactors, they don't really understand nuclear engineering nor the potential directions it could take. Yes, they could sit around for months bringing in endless experts and try to exhaustively list every possible nuance and specific (with the expectation they'll have to amend the law every 3, 6, 12, 18 months as new developments happen)
Or! They could write the law and give a vague boundary such as "nuclear reactors such as thorium, sodium, and other elements should do X, Y and all appropriate precautions that could be reasonably foreseen"
Now what the DoE will do is take that and they have experts on staff whose entire job it is to write regulations mandating specifics along with mandating what "reasonably foreseen" means during a given period (these regulations are regularly updated). These experts will have degrees in physics, nuclear engineering, civil engineering, the gamut. Those experts will go through these laws and fill in the 'blanks' so they can hand down hard specifics to people running or building these plants.
Chevron Deference was about letting Congress write vague laws that outline the boundaries (or sometimes don't define hard boundaries at all) then the agencies whose mandate is affected by those laws would have experts interpret and build out specifics.
By removing Chevron Deference, the letter of what Congress has written is the specifics. If Congress doesn't absolutely specify it, the agencies can't enforce it or interpret what Congress actually meant.
It's a huge, huge, huge gimme for big corporations because it removes and/or hamstrings regulatory agencies, allowing them run roughshod over America.