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18 

WEST VIRGINIA v. EPA 

Opinion of the Court 

buildings,  that  had  never  before  been  subject  to  such  re-
quirements.  Id., at 310, 324.  We declined to uphold EPA’s 
claim of “unheralded” regulatory power over “a significant
portion of the American economy.”  Id., at 324.  In Gonzales 
v. Oregon, 546 U. S. 243 (2006), we confronted the Attorney 
General’s assertion that he could rescind the license of any 
physician  who  prescribed  a  controlled  substance  for  as-
sisted suicide, even in a State where such action was legal. 
The  Attorney  General  argued  that  this  came  within  his 
statutory power to revoke licenses where he found them “in-
consistent with the public interest,” 21 U. S. C. §823(f ).  We 
considered the “idea that Congress gave [him] such broad
and  unusual  authority  through  an  implicit  delegation  . . . 
not sustainable.”  546 U. S., at 267.  Similar considerations 
informed our recent decision invalidating the Occupational 
Safety and Health Administration’s mandate that “84 mil-
lion Americans . . . either obtain a COVID–19 vaccine or un-
dergo  weekly  medical  testing  at  their  own  expense.”  Na-
tional Federation of Independent Business v. Occupational 
Safety and Health Administration, 595 U. S. ___, ___ (2022) 
(per curiam) (slip op., at 5).  We found it “telling that OSHA,
in its half century of existence,” had never relied on its au-
thority to regulate occupational hazards to impose such a
remarkable measure.  Id., at ___ (slip op., at 8). 

All of these regulatory assertions had a colorable textual
basis.  And  yet,  in  each  case,  given  the  various  circum-
stances,  “common  sense  as  to  the  manner  in  which  Con-
gress  [would  have  been]  likely  to  delegate”  such  power  to 
the agency at issue, Brown & Williamson, 529 U. S., at 133, 
made it very unlikely that Congress had actually done so.
Extraordinary grants of regulatory authority are rarely ac-
complished  through  “modest  words,”  “vague  terms,”  or 
“subtle  device[s].”  Whitman,  531  U. S.,  at  468.    Nor  does 
Congress typically use oblique or elliptical language to em-
power an agency to make a “radical or fundamental change”
to a statutory scheme.  MCI Telecommunications Corp. v.