The US Supreme Court punctuated its term ending July 2024 with major rulings affecting federal agencies. The Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, jettisoning so-called Chevron deference toward agencies’ interpretations of statutes, and other cases have stirred doubts about whether agencies can continue to make bold, effective health policy.1,2 These rulings have critical ramifications for health agencies, but the outlook is more complex than it might appear. [JAMA Network] . See Implications for Health Agencies below.
Incursions Into Agency Authority
Loper Bright held that except where statutes give interpretive discretion to the executive branch, courts “under the [Administrative Procedure Act] may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.” Instead, courts must independently determine the “best” interpretation.
Although that ruling garnered top headlines, other June 2024 decisions arguably rival its importance. In Corner Post v Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Court lengthened the time period when many agencies, including the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), can be sued. The justices concluded that a “claim accrues” under the default statute of limitations not from when the agency makes a decision but from “when the plaintiff is injured by final agency action.” Now, new plaintiffs can challenge old agency actions. In Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) v Jarkesy, the Court concluded that the Seventh Amendment’s jury protections preclude the SEC from seeking civil penalties for securities fraud through in-house proceedings. This could spell the end of US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies imposing civil monetary penalties—eg, fines for “information blocking” and violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act—without having to go through court proceedings.3 In Ohio v Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Court blocked the EPA from implementing a new ozone standard because the agency had insufficiently addressed a particular concern raised in the public comment period. This sounds a warning to all agencies engaged in notice-and-comment rulemaking that not scouring comments (which can number in the tens of thousands) and responding appropriately could be a consequential misstep.
These rulings follow decisions in 2022 adopting the major questions doctrine, which requires clear congressional authorization for agencies to act on issues that courts find to be of great economic and political significance. This powerful, destabilizing doctrine felled the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s COVID-19 vaccinate-or-test mandate and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium, among other policies, and lower courts have held that even modest actions like requiring masks on public transit trigger the doctrine.
Implications for Health Agencies >
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