What they cannot do anymore is delegate unknown unknowns. They cannot leave X and Y unspecified, the executive agencies cannot do things in Z way that Congress didn't enumerate, or α and β way that Congress didn't even conceive.
And that's absurd. Congress should have the ability to do this. If they don't like what an agency is doing, they're perfectly able to amend the law.
Because the Constitution defined the Legislative branch as the entry point for new laws. Not the Executive. Period. The Legislative branch, with the Power of the Purse, is more than capable of establishing the requisite in-house research apparata to allow the Branch to become quickly read up and fluent on anything. That was the purpose of the Library of Congress, and the Office of Technology Assessment. OTA, in particular, was dismantled by Congress because "why should we have this when all the lobbyists are so well informed anyway". I.e. an act of a group of politicians that should damn well know better than to blindly believe everything they are told/ignore everything they are specifically not told by special interests without corroborating reality first through the exercise of legislative subpoenas.
Congress put it's eyes out in a desperate bid to make it that much easier to be held unaccountable for doing their jobs, necessitating delegation to the Executive, which was far easier to manage dealing with.
>The Executive agencies and departments are created by Congress. US regulatory agencies have authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).
Yep. Those Agencies, however, should not be making corpuses of law (Administrative law; but I'll be charitable for argument sake, and grant that Administrative law is a necessary evil).
Notwithstanding the above, the Judiciary damn well shouldn't be ignoring grievance redressing relevant to any Administrative law. The Executive cannot be allowed to be all rolled up in one lawmaker, enforcer, and interpreter of last resort. It completely undermines the principle of seperation of powers.
Does that make life harder? Hell yes. Governing ain't supposed to be easy. It's high demand, high overhead, and wide blast radius at the Federal level. The fact the Legislature has gotten so bad at legislating should be a point of shame on us all.
And (some) delegation has been found to be Constitutional for (at least) a century:
> Since 1935, the Court has not struck down a delegation to an administrative agency.15 Rather, the Court has approved, without deviation, Congress's ability to delegate power under broad standards.16 The Court has upheld, for example, delegations to administrative agencies to determine excessive profits during wartime,17 to determine unfair and inequitable distribution of voting power among securities holders,18 to fix fair and equitable commodities prices,19 to determine just and reasonable rates,20 and to regulate broadcast licensing as the public interest, convenience, or necessity require.21
* https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation03.html
From the original, unanimous, Chevron ruling:
> When a challenge to an agency construction of a statutory provision, fairly conceptualized, really centers on the wisdom of the agency's policy, rather than whether it is a reasonable choice within a gap left open by Congress, the challenge must fail. In such a case, federal judges—who have no constituency—have a duty to respect legitimate policy choices made by those who do. The responsibilities for assessing the wisdom of such policy choices and resolving the struggle between competing views of the public interest are not judicial ones: "Our Constitution vests such responsibilities in the political branches."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevron_U.S.A.,_Inc._v._Natura....
It is the current reverse that is strange (Chevron was simply a codification of what was already happening for decades).
Not only can they not “become fluent in anything,” it shifts more power to lobbyists and industry where expertise exists that can draft the language they want with the loopholes they want. The scale of federal governance is literally impossible without the looseness of intent interpretation that can be challenged and validated by the court.
You may as well say we can replace the regulatory bureaucracies with expert systems, because we should be able to predict every possible outcome beforehand and just make a giant if/then out of it.
I think that's the whole point of the Federalist Society's libertarian, small government (except for the military) philosophy.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_Society#Role_in_pre...
The Office of Technology Assessment was dismantled specifically because it was making it too hard for lobbyists to transparently pull the wool over lawmaker's eyes. Suddenly there was paper trail that the Legislature *knew, or should have known, that lobbyists were feeding Congress a line. OTA's entire job was to issue legislative subpoena's to collect information relative to legislative business.
Congress can literally make itself the single most pre-eminent employer of research staff on the planet, overnight. Do not sit here, and tell me with a straight face, that that is infeasible. The issue is will to govern, and reluctance by moneyed interests to start being questioned back by motivated, competent answer seekers in D.C. they can't legally withhold info from without committing the equivalent of a felony.
>The scale of federal governance is literally impossible without the looseness of intent interpretation that can be challenged and validated by the court.
That (challenging in Court) couldn't happen with Chevron deference in practice. Now it can. Good riddance.
Federal governance is far from impossible to do; and I'd like to know your definition of Federal governance. If it's "I want to pass a controversial law once to get it to stick in all jurisdictions, damn the consequences"; then not only do your complaints fall on unsympathetic ears, but I'd say that's the system working as designed, and Chevron was a step to breaking it worse.
If on the other hand, Federal Governance is "the judicious elevation to the highest level of government/enforcement only those tasks that need to be there irrespective of any individual subjurisdictions, all subject to the constraints of who does what aspect of the job as set forth in the Constitution of the United States"; then we're cool. I feel ya'. Them's the breaks though. And I say that as an ex-civil servant.
Government work is hard, thankless, frustrating, and the most dangerous thing to get fast and loose with.
> Congress can literally make itself the single most pre-eminent employer of research staff on the planet, overnight. Do not sit here, and tell me with a straight face, that that is infeasible. The issue is will to govern, and reluctance by moneyed interests to start being questioned back by motivated, competent answer seekers in D.C. they can't legally withhold info from without committing the equivalent of a felony.
And this ruling is going to change this how exactly? It isn't. It is merely going to increase the gap between what is going on in the real world and what is effectively regulated. This is a shift in power from the unelected bureaucracy to the unelected judicial. I'll take the bureaucrats.
> Federal governance is far from impossible to do; and I'd like to know your definition of Federal governance. If it's "I want to pass a controversial law once to get it to stick in all jurisdictions, damn the consequences"; then not only do your complaints fall on unsympathetic ears, but I'd say that's the system working as designed, and Chevron was a step to breaking it worse.
Federal governance includes the need to manage, iterate, and execute on regulation in a world that is far too quickly changing and far too complex for 535 people. There are more decision makers than that in a large tech company.
If Congress wants to delegate authority for micro-managing things to agencies, why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
> Kagan cited as one example a hypothetical bill to regulate artificial intelligence. Congress, she said, “knows there are going to be gaps because Congress can hardly see a week in the future.” So it would want people “who actually know about AI and are accountable to the political process to make decisions” about artificial intelligence. Courts, she emphasized, “don’t even know what the questions are about AI,” much less the answers.
* https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/01/supreme-court-likely-to-d...
If Congress doesn't like where an Executive agency is headed they can further change the Act governing it to clarify things. The guardrails can be set that way, and with-in them agencies—generally subject matter experts—can write and refine regulations as they are needed.
The Executive agencies and departments are created by Congress. US regulatory agencies have authority because it was given to them by The People (through their elected representatives).
The Judiciary seems to be limiting the Legislative here. Is there anything in the US Constitution that says Congress cannot delegate?
* https://constitution.findlaw.com/article1/annotation03.html