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4 

LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES v. RAIMONDO 

Syllabus 

Service, Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U. S. 359, 374).  By doing so, a court upholds
the traditional conception of the judicial function that the APA adopts.
Pp. 13–18. 

(c) The deference that Chevron requires of courts reviewing agency

action cannot be squared with the APA.  Pp. 18–29. 

(1) Chevron, decided in 1984 by a bare quorum of six Justices, trig-
gered a marked departure from the traditional judicial approach of in-
dependently  examining  each  statute  to  determine  its  meaning.   The 
question in the case was whether an Environmental Protection Agency 
(EPA) regulation was consistent with the term “stationary source” as 
used in the Clean Air Act.  467 U. S., at 840.  To answer that question,
the Court articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approach 
broadly  applicable  to  review  of  agency  action.    The  first  step  was  to 
discern “whether Congress ha[d] directly spoken to the precise ques-
tion at issue.”  Id., at 842.  The Court explained that “[i]f the intent of 
Congress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid., and courts were 
therefore to “reject administrative constructions which are contrary to 
clear congressional intent,” id., at 843, n. 9.  But in a case in which “the 
statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue” at 
hand, a reviewing court could not “simply impose its own construction
on the statute, as would be necessary in the absence of an administra-
tive interpretation.”  Id., at 843 (footnote omitted).  Instead, at Chev-
ron’s second step, a court had to defer to the agency if it had offered “a
permissible construction of the statute,” ibid., even if not “the reading 
the court would have reached if the question initially had arisen in a
judicial proceeding,” ibid., n. 11.  Employing this new test, the Court 
concluded that Congress had not addressed the question at issue with
the necessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was
“entitled to deference.”  Id., at 865. 

Although the Court did not at first treat Chevron as the watershed 
decision  it  was  fated  to  become,  the  Court  and  the courts  of  appeals
were soon routinely invoking its framework as the governing standard 
in cases involving statutory questions of agency authority.  The Court 
eventually decided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Con-
gress, when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by
an agency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first and 
foremost,  by  the  agency,  and  desired  the  agency  (rather  than  the 
courts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguity allows.” 
Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N. A., 517 U. S. 735, 740–741.  Pp.
18–20.

(2) Neither Chevron nor any subsequent decision of the Court at-
tempted to reconcile its framework with the APA.  Chevron defies the 
command of the APA that “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose