Trump took office, his chief strategist at the time, Stephen K. But conservative hostility to the doctrine may be partly rooted in distrust of entrenched bureaucracies and certain kinds of expertise. The constitutional dispute is not necessarily political, because Chevron deference applies to agency actions in both Republican and Democratic administrations. In one of his most famous opinions as an appeals court judge, Associate Justice Gorsuch wrote that Chevron allowed “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power.” “Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government,” Associate Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his opinion for a unanimous court.īut many conservatives say the decision violates the separation of powers by allowing executive branch officials rather than judges to say what the law is. Known as “Chevron deference,” after a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, that doctrine holds that courts must defer to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by federal agencies on the theory that agencies have more expertise than judges and are more accountable to voters. The ultimate goal of the Republican activists, people involved in the effort say, is to overturn the legal doctrine by which Congress has delegated authority to federal agencies to regulate the environment, health care, workplace safety, telecommunications, the financial sector and more. Supreme Court Ruling: By limiting the Environmental Protection agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions, the court made it much harder for the president to achieve his climate goals.Extreme Heat : President Biden said that he would expand existing federal programs to help Americans cope with the extreme heat wrought by climate change, stopping short of declaring a national emergency.The bill avoided the political pitfalls of past legislative attempts by offering only incentives to cut climate pollution, not taxes. Long-Sought Climate Action: After decades of failed attempts, Congress is on the cusp of passing the nation’s first major climate law.The Biden Administration’s Environmental Agenda President Biden is pushing stronger regulations, but faces a narrow path to achieving his goals in the fight against global warming.