On Monday, the Solicitor General filed an extraordinary brief in Kisor v. Wilkie, a case in which the Supreme Court is reconsidering “Auer deference,” or binding judicial respect for an agency’s interpretation of its own regulation. The brief is remarkable, perhaps even unprecedented, because it reflects the evident desire of the president to cede significant power to another branch of government.
Under Auer’s canonical formulation, an agency’s regulatory interpretation is “controlling unless plainly erroneous or inconsistent with the regulation.” The problem is that, in practice, Auer allows agencies to bind the public with putatively nonbinding advisories, and thereby evade procedural safeguards.
Astonishingly, the government’s brief recognizes the harms engendered by Auer. In a forthright section titled “Overly broad deference to agency interpretations can have harmful practical consequences,” the Solicitor General concedes that “[Auer] deference can discourage agencies from engaging in notice-and-comment rulemaking.” More importantly, the government proposes to mitigate these concerns by narrowing the doctrine.
To this end, the brief argues that Auer deference is appropriate only if the regulatory text involves a “genuine ambiguity.” While this may seem obvious, reasonable minds often disagree about “how clear is clear?” The Solicitor General intimates that courts have been too quick to defer–that is, they’ve been too easily satisfied the regulatory text is ambiguous–when the brief claims that “[a] rigorous application of the tools of construction would obviate any need for [Auer] deference in many cases.” Here, the government borrowed from the late Justice Scalia, who made the same point about judicial deference to an agency’s statutory interpretations.
Even if the regulatory text is genuinely ambiguous, the government argues that “the agency’s interpretation should be given [Auer] deference only if certain threshold requirements are satisfied.”
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-administration-proposes-check-itself-remarkable-kisor-brief
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