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FDA v. BROWN & WILLIAMSON TOBACCO CORP.

Opinion of the Court

give the FDA jurisdiction over tobacco, and repeatedly acted
to preclude any agency from exercising signiﬁcant policy-
making authority in the area. Given this history and the
breadth of the authority that the FDA has asserted, we are
obliged to defer not to the agency’s expansive construction
of the statute, but to Congress’ consistent judgment to deny
the FDA this power.

Our decision in MCI Telecommunications Corp. v. Ameri-
can Telephone & Telegraph Co., 512 U. S. 218 (1994), is in-
structive. That case involved the proper construction of the
term “modify” in § 203(b) of the Communications Act of 1934.
The FCC contended that, because the Act gave it the discre-
tion to “modify any requirement” imposed under the statute,
it therefore possessed the authority to render voluntary the
otherwise mandatory requirement that long distance carri-
ers ﬁle their rates.
Id., at 225. We rejected the FCC’s con-
struction, ﬁnding “not the slightest doubt” that Congress had
directly spoken to the question.
In reasoning
even more apt here, we concluded that “[i]t is highly unlikely
that Congress would leave the determination of whether
an industry will be entirely, or even substantially, rate-
regulated to agency discretion—and even more unlikely that
it would achieve that through such a subtle device as permis-
sion to ‘modify’ rate-ﬁling requirements.”

Id., at 228.

Id., at 231.

As in MCI, we are conﬁdent that Congress could not have
intended to delegate a decision of such economic and political
signiﬁcance to an agency in so cryptic a fashion. To ﬁnd
that the FDA has the authority to regulate tobacco products,
one must not only adopt an extremely strained understand-
ing of “safety” as it is used throughout the Act—a concept
central to the FDCA’s regulatory scheme—but also ignore
the plain implication of Congress’ subsequent
tobacco-
speciﬁc legislation.
It is therefore clear, based on the
FDCA’s overall regulatory scheme and the subsequent to-
bacco legislation, that Congress has directly spoken to the