Republican leaders from the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee are urging agency heads to assess the impact of a recent Supreme Court decision on their operations. The ruling overturned the Chevron doctrine, which had allowed federal agencies significant leeway in legal challenges related to their rulemaking since the mid-1980s.
Committee Chairman Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri and Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer of Kentucky expressed concerns in letters to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan. They stated, “Unsurprisingly, Chevron unleashed decades of successively broader, more costly, and more invasive assertions of agency power over citizens’ lives, liberty, and property, as agencies adopted expansive interpretations of assertedly ambiguous statutes, demanding courts defer to them.”
The representatives criticized the current administration for implementing more significant rules with higher costs and paperwork than previous administrations. They requested detailed information on rules proposed or enacted, adjudications initiated or completed, enforcement actions taken, or interpretive rules issued since President Biden took office on January 20, 2021. The deadline for this information is July 23.