Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-451_7m58.pdf
Page Number: 37

Cite as:  603 U. S. ____ (2024) 

29 

Opinion of the Court 

This Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency in-
terpretation  under  Chevron  since  2016.  See  Cuozzo,  579 
U. S., at 280 (most recent occasion).  But Chevron remains 
on the books.  So litigants must continue to wrestle with it,
and  lower  courts—bound  by  even  our  crumbling  prece-
dents,  see  Agostini  v.  Felton,  521  U. S.  203,  238  (1997)—
understandably continue to apply it.

The experience of the last 40 years has thus done little to
rehabilitate Chevron.  It has only made clear that Chevron’s 
fictional  presumption  of  congressional  intent  was  always
unmoored from the APA’s demand that courts exercise in-
dependent  judgment  in  construing  statutes  administered 
by  agencies.  At  best,  our  intricate  Chevron  doctrine  has 
been  nothing  more  than  a  distraction  from  the  question
that  matters:  Does  the  statute  authorize  the  challenged 
agency action?  And at worst, it has required courts to vio-
late the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsi-
bility, vested in “the reviewing court,” to “decide all relevant 
questions of law” and “interpret . . . statutory provisions.”
§706 (emphasis added). 

IV 
The  only  question  left  is  whether stare  decisis,  the  doc-
trine governing judicial adherence to precedent, requires us 
to persist in the Chevron project.  It does not.  Stare decisis 
is  not  an  “inexorable  command,”  Payne  v.  Tennessee,  501 
U. S. 808, 828 (1991), and the stare decisis considerations 
most  relevant  here—“the  quality  of  [the  precedent’s]  rea-
soning,  the  workability  of  the  rule  it  established,  . . .  and 
reliance  on the  decision,” Knick  v.  Township  of  Scott,  588 
U. S. 180, 203 (2019) (quoting Janus v. State, County, and 
Municipal Employees, 585 U. S. 878, 917 (2018))—all weigh 
in favor of letting Chevron go. 

Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided.  De-
spite reshaping judicial review of agency action, neither it 
nor any case of ours applying it grappled with the APA—