Press Releases

Washington, D.C. – Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves (R-MO) and Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) today sent letters to three Biden Administration department heads requesting information about any agency rules, actions, or decisions impacted by the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, which overturned the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (Chevron) decision. 

Chevron opened the door to courts’ deference to agency interpretation of laws passed by Congress, which allowed the Executive Branch to usurp the legislative authority granted exclusively to Congress through Article I of the Constitution.

In letters to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan, Chairman Graves and Chairman Comer wrote, “Unsurprisingly, Chevron unleashed decades of successively broader, more costly and more invasive assertions of agency power over citizens’ lives, liberty, and property, as agencies adopted expansive interpretations of assertedly ambiguous statutes, demanding courts defer to them. 

“Perhaps no administration has gone as far as President Biden’s to found sweeping and intrusive agency dictates on such questionable assertions of agency authority.  The Biden Administration has promulgated far more major rules, imposing far more costs and paperwork burdens, than either of its recent predecessor administrations. Many of these rules — such as those promulgated to impose President Biden’s climate, energy, and Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) agendas — have been based on aggressive interpretations of statutes enacted by Congress years and even decades ago, before many issues against which the Biden administration has sought to deploy them were even imagined.”

To help the committees conduct oversight of these agencies, Graves and Comer requested the Biden Administration officials to send any information about legislative rules proposed or promulgated, agency adjudications initiated or completed, enforcement actions brought by agencies, and agency interpretive rules proposed or issued since January 20, 2021.  The committee chairmen also requested information about any judicial decisions in cases to which agencies have been a party since the 1984 Chevron decision.  They requested the information be provided no later than July 23, 2024.

Read the full letter to Secretary Buttigieg, the letter to Secretary Mayorkas, and the letter to Administrator Regan.