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Abstract

For the 40-year period between the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron USA Inc., v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984) and its decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), federal courts sustained executive branch agency decisions when such decisions were “reasonable” or “permissible” interpretations of congressional statutes. By overturning Chevron in Loper Bright on the heels of its decision two years earlier in West Virginia v. EPA (2022), the Court has opened agency decisions to significant additional judicial scrutiny, which will likely require Congress to be much clearer about its policymaking instructions. Congressional committees will have an important role to play in managing the fallout from changes to Chevron deference, a task that their current capacity, structures, and workflow are unable to accommodate. In this essay, we supplement the analysis of a dataset of more than 435,000 witnesses before the U.S. House of Representatives with interviews of legislative and executive branch staff members to demonstrate that congressional committees hear from fewer executive branch witnesses than they once did, with the consequence of a significant reduction in the amount of information entering the policymaking process. We argue that the consequences of Chevron deference, alongside phenomena such as leadership-centered lawmaking, legislative party polarization, partisan investigations rather than bipartisan oversight, and divided government, have left congressional committees ill-equipped to engage with the executive branch in a post-Chevron policymaking environment. We conclude by offering suggestions for ways that Congress can begin to reclaim its primacy in national policymaking and to forge more productive working relationships with the executive branch.