The justices just shackled Biden and every future president — and created new messes for Congress to solve

The Supreme Court’s decision to torch a once-obscure Reagan-era legal doctrine will remake one of the most fundamental aspects of power in Washington — and hobble presidents pursuing aggressive policies on anything from abortion to student debt relief.

Peeling back the doctrine known as Chevron deference has been a conservative cause for decades, one aimed at restricting agencies’ freedom to decide how to interpret Congress’ often-ambiguous statutes. Where Michigan produces cars and Texas pumps oil, the nation’s capital is America’s leading manufacturer of regulations, whose increasing complexity the high court is now subjecting to new scrutiny from judges.

" Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.

Conservatives advocating the change aimed to restrain presidents — mostly Democrats — whose agencies have stretched the boundaries of laws passed decades or generations ago to address the problems of today. Defanging the White House this way frees up judges to reach their own conclusions about what lawmakers meant, but it comes with a daunting consequence: From now on, Congress will be expected to sort out the intricacies of issues like housing finance, greenhouse gas emissions and artificial intelligence, at a time when it’s already struggling to legislate on big issues.

Instead, Congress has gotten used to leaving lots of legislative gaps for agencies to fill in themselves. So while the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act gave President Joe Biden a big win on drug prices — allowing Medicare to begin negotiating them with pharmaceutical companies for the first time — the law didn’t tell the agencies precisely how to do that. And while it’s well established that the Environmental Protection Agency can regulate carbon emissions from power plants, the decades-old Clean Air Act is similarly missing detailed instructions.

Here are some of the eye-popping issues that could unravel without Chevron :

Student debt relief could crumble

The future of Biden’s student debt relief efforts — an appeal to young and millennial voters — may come undone without Chevron .

The Supreme Court balked at Biden’s first attempt at wiping out billions of dollars in college loans last year using Covid-related emergency powers. In its wake, the Education Department fired up a plan B that instead relies on a novel reading of a decades-old higher education law.

Biden’s second, less sweeping, approach launched with a proposed rule this spring designed to cancel some debt for millions of borrowers as early as this fall.

The latest plan — separate from his new student loan repayment plan that is already partially blocked by the courts — seeks to forgive unpaid interest for some 25 million Americans who now owe more on their loans than what they originally took out. It would also help borrowers who attended “low-value" programs, more than 2 million people who have carried their debts for decades and another 2 million who would have qualified for existing federal programs but failed to enroll.

The Education Department argues that the president has the authority to enact this relief under the Higher Education Act’s compromise and settlement authority. The law says the department can “enforce, pay, compromise, waive, or release any right, title, claim, lien, or demand” as it relates to student loan debt. But many argue that the agency’s interpretation is too broad, leaving Biden’s push particularly vulnerable to a judge unrestrained by Chevron .

Other Education Department regulations aimed at student debt could also face a new level of legal uncertainty: Citing the HEA, the agency finalized a rule in September meant to protect students from low-performing career college programs and for-profit schools. It also finished a rule in 2022 that allows student borrowers to seek relief for loans they took out to attend schools that later defrauded them.

— Bianca Quilantan

Forget about policing artificial intelligence without Congress

The implications of the Supreme Court’s actions are even more stark for agencies’ attempts to address issues at the frontiers of new technology that have no real legal precedent — including artificial intelligence.

Capitol Hill has made little progress in harnessing AI, a rapidly evolving technology that’s already reshaping hiring, housing, health care and privacy and is raising fears that it could end humanity. And Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan doesn’t want judges filling that vacuum.

“Congress knows that this court and lower courts are not competent with respect to deciding all the questions about AI that are going to come up in the future,” she said during oral arguments in January for the case that ended Chevron . “We don't even know what the questions are about AI, let alone the answers to them, ‘we’ being the court.”

While lawmakers flail around over what to do about AI, Biden issued a sweeping executive order in October urging companies to report developments in the technology to the Commerce Department. It also pressed the Federal Trade Commission to enforce rules that could bust emerging AI monopolies and ordered several agencies to get up to speed on using and evaluating AI tools.

But in a legal environment where judges have far more latitude to toss out agency work that Congress didn’t explicitly assign, conservative critics and tech groups already attacking the order have little reason to hold back.

— Mohar Chatterjee

Good luck clamping down on carbon emissions

A central part of any president’s strategy for reining in greenhouse gas emissions has a big problem in a post- Chevron Washington: The regulators draw their authority from a law that Congress hasn’t significantly updated in 34 years — well before most lawmakers were even thinking about the dangers of climate change.

Both Congress and the Supreme Court have said the Environmental Protection Agency can rely on the Clean Air Act when it regulates greenhouse gas pollution from power plants, cars and trucks and other major sources. What’s less clear is exactly how the agency is supposed to go about doing it or how far its authority extends.

Carbon dioxide doesn’t fall under the list of traditional pollutants that lawmakers laid out when they were writing the Clean Air Act in 1970 or updating it two decades later, such as radiation, ozone, dust and soot. And even before Friday’s ruling, the conservative justices have put obstacles in the way of EPA’s climate efforts.

Two years ago, the Supreme Court rejected an Obama-era EPA rule that sought to force utilities to shut down their coal-fired power plants and switch to renewables and natural gas. That decision introduced a new test — the “major questions” doctrine — that says agencies need explicit authorization from Congress to enact rules that may have sweeping economic or political impact.

Striking down Chevron heightens the legal risks for climate regulations, inviting judges to second-guess any of the EPA’s Clean Air Act interpretations.

— Alex Guillén

Judges could upend almost everything about health care

Many of the mechanics around how the modern U.S. health care system operates were built on top of 40 years of the Chevron doctrine. Americans are about to find out if the two can be separated.

Medicare, Medicaid, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, hospitals and insurance operate under thousands of pages of federal regulations — determining everything from drug prices to countering pandemics. But the high court’s ruling puts Congress and judges in charge of keeping up with evolving standards of health and medicine they’re not equipped to manage, some experts say.

Who decides what separates dietary supplements from cover-the-counter drugs? Who writes the rules for how the federal government negotiates for lower drug prices? Who decides what preventive health care is covered by insurance? If Congress doesn’t say, a judge might.

"Judges are generalists," said Theresa Harris, who directs the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Center for Scientific Responsibility and Justice. "They're not scientific experts, and very few have access to the kind of scientific information and background and analysis that they're likely going to need."

AAAS, the world's largest professional society for scientists, has tapped its brain trust to educate more than 500 judges on health and science issues over the past two decades. Amid Chevron ’s demise, the group plans to ramp up its sessions with training by neuroscientists, sociologists and water experts, among others.

But Reshma Ramachandran, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale who wrote an amicus brief to the high court defending Chevron , said she and other health professionals are bracing themselves.

“That’s the fear we have,” she said. “This will introduce chaos.”

— Erin Schumaker, Lauren Gardner, Alice Miranda Ollstein, Dan Goldberg

Protections for transgender students could fall by the wayside

The federal law that has barred sex-based discrimination in school settings for half a century is likely to get more complicated without Chevron .

Title IX has been at the center of a political tussle for the past decade over how and when schools investigate sexual misconduct allegations — an issue the Education Department has interpreted and reinterpreted three different ways across three administrations.

The Biden administration’s new Title IX rule , which is slated to take effect in August, unravels many of the misconduct procedures setup by former Trump administration Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, which has directed schools to limit their investigations to “severe and pervasive” incidents. As a presidential candidate, Biden also blasted the DeVos rule’s expansion of due process rights for people accused of misconduct, calling them an effort to “shame and silence survivors.”

Biden’s version of the regulation lowers the threshold for opening investigations. It also defines harassment as “unwelcome sex-based conduct” and codifies discrimination protections for pregnant and parenting students. And it extends safeguards to LGBTQ+ students, a change not explicitly mentioned in the 1964 law. More than two dozen Republican state attorneys general are challenging the rule in court.

Attorneys general want the Education Department barred from implementing the rule and interpreting Title IX to include discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. So far, two challenges have been successful in blocking the rule from taking effect in 10 states.

Several states, including Louisiana , Montana, Florida , South Carolina and Oklahoma, have said they will not comply with the new rule.

Biden administration officials are also eyeing a separate rule outlining how transgender students participate in school sports. That proposed rule, which was unveiled in 2023 and has not yet been finalized, could also be at risk.

— Bianca Quilantan

Efforts to support pregnant workers who seek abortions may end

The Biden administration is also expected to face new legal challenges to its labor policies, including its efforts to enforce the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act , a 2022 law requiring employers to make “reasonable” workplace accommodations for pregnant employees.

The measure had strong bipartisan support, but Republicans were outraged when the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission included abortion among the medical conditions employees can seek time off for medical appointments or recovery. Opponents of the provision argue that the language went too far and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the top Republican on the Senate health, education and labor committee, accused the agency of attempting to “rewrite the law by regulation.”

More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general sued the Biden administration in April, asking a federal court in Arkansas to block the abortion language. But the court ruled they lacked legal standing to bring the suit.

A federal judge in Louisiana, meanwhile, halted enforcement of the mandate in that state and Mississippi.

Yet another federal judge ruled that the entire law cannot be enforced against the state of Texas and its agencies, arguing that the House had improperly passed the legislation using proxy voting during the pandemic.

Curtailing Chevron could pose risks to other parts of Biden's labor agenda, including his push to make it harder for companies to classify gig workers as contractors rather than employees, and to extend overtime pay requirements to more workers.

— Lawrence Ukenye

Another hurdle for ‘net neutrality’

An Obama-era rule barring internet providers from blocking or throttling consumers’ traffic sprang back to life this spring, more than six years after former President Donald Trump’s appointees killed it — and it remains as partisan as ever and deeply endangered.

Democrats have championed so-called net neutrality as a tool for protecting consumers from aggressive industry tactics as the center of everyday life has moved online, particularly since the pandemic .

To advance the policy, Democratic regulators recategorized internet providers as “common carriers” under the Communications Act. This designation puts them in the same regulatory bucket as traditional phone utilities — and under more oversight from the Federal Communications Commission.

Regulators made that change in April without a clear signal from Congress, which hasn’t touched the underlying law since the mid-1990s. Republicans have denounced the move as overreach by the FCC, as well as an innovation-stifling burden on the private sector. That decision is now likely to invite two threats from the Supreme Court, a foe that may prove more formidable than the question of who controls the White House.

Under Friday’s ruling, judges have new freedom to question the substance of the FCC rule without Chevron to protect it. In addition, the agency’s critics are expected to seize on the “major questions” doctrine that the high court endorsed in 2022 to attack the net neutrality rule as a sweeping action requiring explicit approval from Congress.

FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel has expressed confidence in her agenda’s legal strength. In a footnote to the net neutrality order, FCC staff argued that even when Chevron doesn’t apply, courts should still fairly consider an agency’s “well-reasoned views.”

— John Hendel

Biden’s plan to tackle ‘corporate greed’ of food companies could be in jeopardy

One of the signature tools the Biden administration is hoping to wield against what it views as overly powerful food conglomerates is particularly vulnerable after Friday’s decision.

Agriculture Department officials just finished writing a proposed rule meant to revive the Packers and Stockyards Act, a century-old law designed to promote industry competition and, by extension, help lower food prices. It’s exactly the kind of bureaucratic move the Biden White House can say demonstrates the president’s commitment to bringing down the costs that gnaw at working families — and their persistently negative feelings about the economy.

USDA and its supporters insist the regulations are legally airtight, arguing it restores the original intent of the 1921 law for the 21st century. Under the new proposed rule, a farmer can more easily mount legal challenges against large agricultural conglomerates that engage in unfair business practices, such as offering deceptive contract terms or retaliating against farmers for complaining.

But industry groups representing meat and poultry companies say USDA is overstepping its authority, and without Chevron they’ll have an easier time arguing the agency cannot clarify or update the Packers and Stockyards Act without explicit direction from Congress.

— Marcia Brown