By Bradley C.S. Watson
Contrary to the prognostications — and fond wishes — of many conservative and libertarian legal scholars, the overturning of Chevron deference is not likely to make much of a dent in the administrative state. In fact, it might make tackling the bureaucratic hydra even more difficult. According to the Supreme Court in Loper v. Raimondo (2024), administrative agencies will no longer be granted vast interpretive authority when statutes are ambiguous. Instead, courts will have the final say. Insisting that agencies must be more beholden to written law sounds fine on the surface, but it assumes too much about the good faith and competence of lawyers and judges—and of Congress, too. The story of how we got to Chevron deference is not well known. By the 1970s, liberal interest groups had begun a campaign of litigation in federal courts in order to expand the scope and activity of the new and enormous post-Great Society administrative state. This was opposed by the Nixon administration, which attempted to re-politicize the bureaucracy so it could be brought under presidential control. But with progressive judges calling the shots, the power of the executive branch — and ultimately the people — was destined to be circumscribed. Many conservatives, including Justice Scalia, initially rallied around Chevron deference as a means of controlling an administrative apparatus that was increasingly taking its marching orders from the least republican branch. | 
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