Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451 (slip op., June 28, 2024) — Majority (Roberts, C. J.), chunk 13

29 Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024)
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This Court, for its part, has not deferred to an agency interpretation 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 precedents, 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 cong ressional 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 violate the APA by yielding to an agency the express responsibility, 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 doctrine 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] reasoning, 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. Despite reshaping judicial review of agency action, neither it
nor any case of ours applying it grappled with the APA—

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the statute that lays out how such review works. Its flaws
were nonetheless apparent from the start, prompting this
Court to revise its foundations and continually limit its application. It has launched and sustained a cottage industry
of scholars attempting to de cipher its basis and meaning.
And Members of this Court have long questioned its premises. See, e.g., Pereira v. Sessions, 585 U. S. 198, 219–221
(2018) (Kennedy, J., concurring); Michigan, 576 U. S., at
760–764 (T
HOMAS, J., concurring); Buffington, 598 U. S.
___ (opinion of GORSUCH, J.); B. Kavanaugh, Fixing Statu -
tory Interpretation, 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2118, 2150–2154
(2016). Even Justice Scalia, an early champion of Chevron,
came to seriously doubt whether it could be reconciled with
the APA. See Perez, 575 U. S., at 109–110 (opinion concurring in judgment). For its entire existence, Chevron has
been a “rule in search of a justification,” Knick, 588 U. S.,
at 204, if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at
all.
Experience has also shown that Chevron is unworkable.
The defining feature of its framework is the identification
of statutory ambiguity, which requires deference at the doctrine’s second step. But the concept of ambiguity has al -
ways evaded meaningful definiti on. As Justice Scalia put
the dilemma just five years after Chevron was decided:
“How clear is clear?” 1989 Duke L. J., at 521.
We are no closer to an answer to that question than we
were four decades ago. “ ‘[A]mbiguity’ is a term that may
have different meanings for different judges.” Exxon Mobil
Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc., 545 U. S. 546, 572 (2005)
(Stevens, J., dissenting). One judge might see ambiguity
everywhere; another might never encounter it. Compare L.
Silberman, Chevron—The Intersection of Law & Policy, 58
Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 821, 822 (1990), with R. Kethledge, Ambiguities and Agency Cases: Reflections After (Almost) Ten
Years on the Bench, 70 Vand. L. Rev. En Banc 315, 323
(2017). A rule of law that is so wholly “in the eye of the

31 Cite as: 603 U. S. ____ (2024)
Opinion of the Court
beholder,” Exxon Mobil Corp., 545 U. S., at 572 (Stevens, J.,
dissenting), invites different results in like cases and is
therefore “arbitrary in practice,” Gulfstream Aerospace
Corp. v. Mayacamas Corp., 485 U. S. 271, 283 (1988). Such
an impressionistic and malleable concept “cannot stand as
an every-day test for allocating” interpretive authority between courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v. Wickham, 382
U. S. 111, 125 (1965).
The dissent proves the point. It tells us that a court
should reach Chevron’s second step when it finds, “at the
end of its interpretive work,” that “Congress has left an ambiguity or gap.” Post, at 1–2. (The Government offers a
similar test. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219,
pp. 7, 10, 14; Tr. of Oral Arg. 113–114, 116.) That is no
guide at all. Once more, the basic nature and meaning of a
statute does not change when an agency happens to be involved. Nor does it change just because the agency has happened to offer its interpretation through the sort of procedures necessary to obtain deference, or because the other
preconditions for Chevron happen to be satisfied. The stat -
ute still has a best meaning, necessarily discernible by a
court deploying its full interpre tive toolkit. So for the dissent’s test to have any meaning, it must think that in an
agency case (unlike in any other), a court should give up on
its “interpretive work” before it has identified that best
meaning. But how does a court know when to do so? On
that point, the dissent leaves a gap of its own. It protests
only that some other interpretive tools—all with pedigrees
more robust than Chevron’s, and all designed to help courts
identify the meaning of a text rather than allow the Executive Branch to displace it—also apply to ambiguous texts.
See post, at 27. That this is all the dissent can come up
with, after four decades of judicial experience attempting to
identify ambiguity under Chevron, reveals the futility of the