Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. ___ (2024) (2024)

NOTICE: This opinion is subject toformal revision before publication in the United States Reports.Readers are requested to notify the Reporter of Decisions, SupremeCourt of the United States, Washington, D.C. 20543,pio@supremecourt.gov, of any typographical or other formalerrors.SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES_________________Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219_________________LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, etal.,PETITIONERS22–451v.GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,etal.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the district of columbia circuitRELENTLESS, INC., et al.,PETITIONERS22–1219v.DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the first circuit[June 28, 2024]Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion ofthe Court.Since our decision in ChevronU.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources DefenseCouncil, Inc., 467 U.S.837 (1984), we have sometimes required courts to defer to“permissible” agency interpretations of the statutes those agenciesadminister—even when a reviewing court reads the statutedifferently. In these cases we consider whether that doctrineshould be overruled.IOur Chevron doctrine requires courts touse a two-step framework to interpret statutes administered byfederal agencies. After determining that a case satisfies thevarious preconditions we have set for Chevron to apply, areviewing court must first assess “whether Congress has directlyspoken to the precise question at issue.” Id., at 842. If,and only if, congressional intent is “clear,” that is the end ofthe inquiry. Ibid. But if the court determines that “thestatute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue”at hand, the court must, at Chevron’s second step, defer tothe agency’s interpretation if it “is based on a permissibleconstruction of the statute.” Id., at 843. The reviewingcourts in each of the cases before us applied Chevron’sframework to resolve in favor of the Government challenges to thesame agency rule.ABefore 1976, unregulated foreign vesselsdominated fishing in the international waters off the U.S.coast, which began just 12 nautical miles offshore. See,e.g., S. Rep. No. 94–459, pp.2–3 (1975). Recognizingthe resultant overfishing and the need for sound management offishery resources, Congress enacted the Magnuson-Stevens FisheryConservation and Management Act (MSA). See 90 Stat. 331 (codifiedas amended at 16 U.S.C. §1801 etseq.). TheMSA and subsequent amendments extended the jurisdiction of theUnited States to 200 nautical miles beyond the U.S.territorial sea and claimed “exclusive fishery management authorityover all fish” within that area, known as the “exclusive economiczone.” §1811(a); see Presidential Proclamation No. 5030, 3 CFR 22(1983 Comp.); §§101, 102, 90 Stat. 336. The National MarineFisheries Service (NMFS) administers the MSA under a delegationfrom the Secretary of Commerce.The MSA established eight regional fisherymanagement councils composed of representatives from the coastalStates, fishery stakeholders, and NMFS. See 16 U.S.C.§§1852(a), (b). The councils develop fishery management plans,which NMFS approves and promulgates as final regulations. See§§1852(h), 1854(a). In service of the statute’s fisheryconservation and management goals, see §1851(a), the MSA requiresthat certain provisions—such as “a mechanism for specifying annualcatch limits ... at a level such that overfishing doesnot occur,” §1853(a)(15)—be included in these plans, see §1853(a).The plans may also include additional discretionary provisions. See§1853(b). For example, plans may “prohibit, limit, condition, orrequire the use of specified types and quantities of fishing gear,fishing vessels, or equipment,” §1853(b)(4); “reserve a portion ofthe allowable biological catch of the fishery for use in scientificresearch,” §1853(b)(11); and “prescribe such other measures,requirements, or conditions and restrictions as are determined tobe necessary and appropriate for the conservation and management ofthe fishery,” §1853(b)(14).Relevant here, a plan may also require that “oneor more observers be carried on board” domestic vessels “for thepurpose of collecting data necessary for the conservation andmanagement of the fishery.” §1853(b)(8). The MSA specifies threegroups that must cover costs associated with observers: (1) foreignfishing vessels operating within the exclusive economic zone (whichmust carry observers), see §§1821(h)(1)(A), (h)(4), (h)(6);(2) vessels participating in certain limited access privilegeprograms, which impose quotas permitting fishermen to harvest onlyspecific quantities of a fishery’s total allowable catch, see§§1802(26), 1853a(c)(1)(H), (e)(2), 1854(d)(2); and (3) vesselswithin the jurisdiction of the North Pacific Council, where many ofthe largest and most successful commercial fishing enterprises inthe Nation operate, see §1862(a). In the latter two cases, the MSAexpressly caps the relevant fees at two or three percent of thevalue of fish harvested on the vessels. See §§1854(d)(2)(B),1862(b)(2)(E). And in general, it authorizes the Secretary toimpose “sanctions” when “any payment required for observer servicesprovided to or contracted by an owner or operator ...has not been paid.” §1858(g)(1)(D).The MSA does not contain similar termsaddressing whether Atlantic herring fishermen may be required tobear costs associated with any observers a plan may mandate. And atone point, NMFS fully funded the observer coverage the New EnglandFishery Management Council required in its plan for the Atlanticherring fishery. See 79 Fed. Reg. 8792 (2014). In 2013, however,the council proposed amending its fishery management plans toempower it to require fishermen to pay for observers if federalfunding became unavailable. Several years later, NMFS promulgated arule approving the amendment. See 85 Fed. Reg. 7414 (2020).With respect to the Atlantic herring fishery,the Rule created an industry funded program that aims to ensureobserver coverage on 50 percent of trips undertaken by vessels withcertain types of permits. Under that program, vesselrepresentatives must “declare into” a fishery before beginning atrip by notifying NMFS of the trip and announcing the species thevessel intends to harvest. If NMFS determines that an observer isrequired, but declines to assign a Government-paid one, the vesselmust contract with and pay for a Government-certified third-partyobserver. NMFS estimated that the cost of such an observer would beup to $710 per day, reducing annual returns to the vessel owner byup to 20 percent. See id., at 7417–7418.BPetitioners Loper Bright Enterprises, Inc.,H&L Axelsson, Inc., Lund Marr Trawlers LLC, and Scombrus OneLLC are family businesses that operate in the Atlantic herringfishery. In February 2020, they challenged the Rule under the MSA,16 U.S.C. §1855(f), which incorporates theAdministrative Procedure Act (APA), 5 U.S.C. §551etseq. In relevant part, they argued that the MSA doesnot authorize NMFS to mandate that they pay for observers requiredby a fishery management plan. The District Court granted summaryjudgment to the Government. It concluded that the MSA authorizedthe Rule, but noted that even if these petitioners’ “arguments wereenough to raise an ambiguity in the statutory text,” deference tothe agency’s interpretation would be warranted underChevron. 544 F.Supp.3d 82, 107 (DC 2021); seeid., at 103–107.A divided panel of the D.C. Circuitaffirmed. See 45 F.4th 359 (2022). The majority addressedvarious provisions of the MSA and concluded that it was not “whollyunambiguous” whether NMFS may require Atlantic herring fishermen topay for observers. Id., at 366. Because there remained “somequestion” as to Congress’s intent, id., at 369, the courtproceeded to Chevron’s second step and deferred to theagency’s interpretation as a “reasonable” construction of the MSA,45 F.4th, at 370. In dissent, Judge Walker concluded thatCongress’s silence on industry funded observers for the Atlanticherring fishery—coupled with the express provision for suchobservers in other fisheries and on foreign vessels—unambiguouslyindicated that NMFS lacked the authority to “require [Atlanticherring] fishermen to pay the wages of at-sea monitors.”Id., at 375.CPetitioners Relentless Inc., Huntress Inc.,and Seafreeze Fleet LLC own two vessels that operate in theAtlantic herring fishery: the F/V Relentless and the F/VPersistence.[1] Thesevessels use small-mesh bottom-trawl gear and can freeze fish atsea, so they can catch more species of fish and take longer tripsthan other vessels (about 10 to 14 days, as opposed to the moretypical 2 to 4). As a result, they generally declare into multiplefisheries per trip so they can catch whatever the ocean offers up.If the vessels declare into the Atlantic herring fishery for aparticular trip, they must carry an observer for that trip if NMFSselects the trip for coverage, even if they end up harvesting fewerherring than other vessels—or no herring at all.This set of petitioners, like those in theD.C. Circuit case, filed a suit challenging the Rule asunauthorized by the MSA. The District Court, like the D.C.Circuit, deferred to NMFS’s contrary interpretation underChevron and thus granted summary judgment to the Government.See 561 F.Supp. 3d226, 234–238 (RI 2021).The First Circuit affirmed. See 62 F.4th621 (2023). It relied on a “default norm” that regulated entitiesmust bear compliance costs, as well as the MSA’s sanctionsprovision, Section 1858(g)(1)(D). See id., at 629–631. Andit rejected petitioners’ argument that the express statutoryauthorization of three industry funding programs demonstrated thatNMFS lacked the broad implicit authority it asserted to impose sucha program for the Atlantic herring fishery. See id., at631–633. The court ultimately concluded that the “[a]gency’sinterpretation of its authority to require at-sea monitors who arepaid for by owners of regulated vessels does not ‘exceed[]the bounds of the permissible.’” Id., at 633–634(quoting Barnhart v. Walton, 535U.S. 212, 218 (2002); alteration in original). In reaching thatconclusion, the First Circuit stated that it was applyingChevron’s two-step framework. 62 F.4th, at 628. But itdid not explain which aspects of its analysis were relevant towhich of Chevron’s two steps. Similarly, it declined todecide whether the result was “a product of Chevron step oneor step two.” Id., at 634.We granted certiorari in both cases, limited tothe question whether Chevron should be overruled orclarified. See 601 U.S. ___ (2023); 598 U.S. ___(2023).[2]IIAArticle III of the Constitution assigns to theFederal Judiciary the responsibility and power to adjudicate“Cases” and “Controversies”—concrete disputes with consequences forthe parties involved. The Framers appreciated that the laws judgeswould necessarily apply in resolving those disputes would notalways be clear. Cognizant of the limits of human language andforesight, they anticipated that “[a]ll new laws, though pennedwith the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest andmost mature deliberation,” would be “more or less obscure andequivocal, until their meaning” was settled “by a series ofparticular discussions and adjudications.” The FederalistNo.37, p.236 (J. Cooke ed. 1961) (J. Madison).The Framers also envisioned that the final“interpretation of the laws” would be “the proper and peculiarprovince of the courts.” Id., No.78, at 525 (A.Hamilton). Unlike the political branches, the courts would bydesign exercise “neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment.”Id., at 523. To ensure the “steady, upright and impartialadministration of the laws,” the Framers structured theConstitution to allow judges to exercise that judgment independentof influence from the political branches. Id., at 522; seeid., at 522–524; Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S.462, 484 (2011).This Court embraced the Framers’ understandingof the judicial function early on. In the foundational decision ofMarbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall famouslydeclared that “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of thejudicial department to say what the law is.” 1 Cranch 137, 177(1803). And in the following decades, the Court understood“interpret[ing] the laws, in the last resort,” to be a “solemnduty” of the Judiciary. United States v. Dickson, 15Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J., for the Court). When the meaningof a statute was at issue, the judicial role was to “interpret theact of Congress, in order to ascertain the rights of the parties.”Decatur v. Paulding, 14 Pet. 497, 515 (1840).The Court also recognized from the outset,though, that exercising independent judgment often includedaccording due respect to Executive Branch interpretations offederal statutes. For example, in Edwards’ Lessee v.Darby, 12 Wheat. 206 (1827), the Court explained that “[i]nthe construction of a doubtful and ambiguous law, thecontemporaneous construction of those who were called upon to actunder the law, and were appointed to carry its provisions intoeffect, is entitled to very great respect.” Id., at 210; seealso United States v. Vowell, 5 Cranch 368, 372(1809) (Marshall, C.J., for the Court).Such respect was thought especially warrantedwhen an Executive Branch interpretation was issued roughlycontemporaneously with enactment of the statute and remainedconsistent over time. See Dickson, 15 Pet., at 161;United States v. Alabama Great Southern R. Co.,142 U.S.615, 621 (1892); National Lead Co. v. UnitedStates, 252 U.S.140, 145–146 (1920). That is because “the longstanding‘practice of the government’”—like any other interpretiveaid—“can inform [a court’s] determination of ‘what the lawis.’” NLRB v. Noel Canning, 573 U.S.513, 525 (2014) (first quoting McCulloch v.Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 401 (1819); then quotingMarbury, 1 Cranch, at 177). The Court also gave “the mostrespectful consideration” to Executive Branch interpretationssimply because “[t]he officers concerned [were] usually able men,and masters of the subject,” who were “[n]ot unfrequently... the draftsmen of the laws they [were] afterwardscalled upon to interpret.” United States v. Moore,95 U.S.760, 763 (1878); see also Jacobs v. Prichard,223 U.S.200, 214 (1912).“Respect,” though, was just that. The views ofthe Executive Branch could inform the judgment of the Judiciary,but did not supersede it. Whatever respect an Executive Branchinterpretation was due, a judge “certainly would not be bound toadopt the construction given by the head of a department.”Decatur, 14 Pet., at 515; see also Burnet v.Chicago Portrait Co., 285 U.S.1, 16 (1932). Otherwise, judicial judgment would not beindependent at all. As Justice Story put it, “in cases where [acourt’s] own judgment ... differ[ed] from that of otherhigh functionaries,” the court was “not at liberty to surrender, orto waive it.” Dickson, 15 Pet., at 162.BThe New Deal ushered in a “rapid expansion ofthe administrative process.” United States v. Morton SaltCo., 338 U.S.632, 644 (1950). But as new agencies with new powersproliferated, the Court continued to adhere to the traditionalunderstanding that questions of law were for courts to decide,exercising independent judgment.During this period, the Court often treatedagency determinations of fact as binding on the courts,provided that there was “evidence to support the findings.” St.Joseph Stock Yards Co. v. United States, 298 U.S.38, 51 (1936). “When the legislature itself acts within thebroad field of legislative discretion,” the Court reasoned, “itsdeterminations are conclusive.” Ibid. Congress couldtherefore “appoint[] an agent to act within that sphere oflegislative authority” and “endow the agent with power to makefindings of fact which are conclusive, provided therequirements of due process which are specially applicable to suchan agency are met, as in according a fair hearing and acting uponevidence and not arbitrarily.” Ibid. (emphasis added).But the Court did not extend similar deferenceto agency resolutions of questions of law. It instead madeclear, repeatedly, that “[t]he interpretation of the meaning ofstatutes, as applied to justiciable controversies,” was“exclusively a judicial function.” United States v.American Trucking Assns., Inc., 310U.S. 534, 544 (1940); see also Social Security Bd. v.Nierotko, 327 U.S.358, 369 (1946); Medo Photo Supply Corp. v. NLRB,321 U.S.678, 681–682, n.1 (1944). The Court understood, in thewords of Justice Brandeis, that “[t]he supremacy of law demandsthat there shall be opportunity to have some court decide whetheran erroneous rule of law was applied.” St. Joseph StockYards, 298 U.S., at 84 (concurring opinion). It alsocontinued to note, as it long had, that the informed judgment ofthe Executive Branch—especially in the form of an interpretationissued contemporaneously with the enactment of the statute—could beentitled to “great weight.” American Trucking Assns., 310U.S., at 549.Perhaps most notably along those lines, inSkidmore v. Swift & Co., 323U.S. 134 (1944), the Court explained that the “interpretationsand opinions” of the relevant agency, “made in pursuance ofofficial duty” and “based upon ... specializedexperience,” “constitute[d] a body of experience and informedjudgment to which courts and litigants [could] properly resort forguidance,” even on legal questions. Id., at 139–140. “Theweight of such a judgment in a particular case,” the Courtobserved, would “depend upon the thoroughness evident in itsconsideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency withearlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which giveit power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Id., at140.On occasion, to be sure, the Court applieddeferential review upon concluding that a particular statuteempowered an agency to decide how a broad statutory term applied tospecific facts found by the agency. For example, in Gray v.Powell, 314 U.S.402 (1941), the Court deferred to an administrative conclusionthat a coal-burning railroad that had arrangements with severalcoal mines was not a coal “producer” under the Bituminous Coal Actof 1937. Congress had “specifically” granted the agency theauthority to make that determination. Id., at 411. The Courtthus reasoned that “[w]here, as here, a determination has been leftto an administrative body, this delegation will be respected andthe administrative conclusion left untouched” so long as theagency’s decision constituted “a sensible exercise of judgment.”Id., at 412–413. Similarly, in NLRB v. HearstPublications, Inc., 322 U.S.111 (1944), the Court deferred to the determination of theNational Labor Relations Board that newsboys were “employee[s]”within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act. The Acthad, in the Court’s judgment, “assigned primarily” to the Board thetask of marking a “definitive limitation around the term‘employee.’” Id., at 130. The Court accordingly viewedits own role as “limited” to assessing whether the Board’sdetermination had a “‘warrant in the record’ and a reasonablebasis in law.” Id., at 131.Such deferential review, though, was cabined tofactbound determinations like those at issue in Gray andHearst. Neither Gray nor Hearst purported torefashion the longstanding judicial approach to questions of law.In Gray, after deferring to the agency’s determination thata particular entity was not a “producer” of coal, the Court went onto discern, based on its own reading of the text, whether anotherstatutory term—“other disposal” of coal—encompassed a transactionlacking a transfer of title. See 314 U.S., at 416–417. TheCourt evidently perceived no basis for deference to the agency withrespect to that pure legal question. And in Hearst, theCourt proclaimed that “[u]ndoubtedly questions of statutoryinterpretation ... are for the courts to resolve,giving appropriate weight to the judgment of those whose specialduty is to administer the questioned statute.” 322 U.S., at130–131. At least with respect to questions it regarded asinvolving “statutory interpretation,” the Court thus did notdisturb the traditional rule. It merely thought that a differentapproach should apply where application of a statutory term wassufficiently intertwined with the agency’s factfinding.In any event, the Court was far from consistentin reviewing deferentially even such factbound statutorydeterminations. Often the Court simply interpreted and applied thestatute before it. See K. Davis, Administrative Law §248,p.893 (1951) (“The one statement that can be made withconfidence about applicability of the doctrine of Gray v. Powell isthat sometimes the Supreme Court applies it and sometimes it doesnot.”); B. Schwartz, Gray vs. Powell and the Scope of Review, 54Mich. L.Rev. 1, 68 (1955) (noting an “embarrassingly largenumber of Supreme Court decisions that do not adhere to thedoctrine of Gray v. Powell”). In one illustrative example,the Court rejected the U.S. Price Administrator’sdetermination that a particular warehouse was a “public utility”entitled to an exemption from the Administrator’s General MaximumPrice Regulation. Despite the striking resemblance of thatadministrative determination to those that triggered deference inGray and Hearst, the Court declined to “accept theAdministrator’s view in deference to administrative construction.”Davies Warehouse Co. v. Bowles, 321 U.S.144, 156 (1944). The Administrator’s view, the Court explained,had “hardly seasoned or broadened into a settled administrativepractice,” and thus did not “overweigh the considerations” theCourt had “set forth as to the proper construction of the statute.”Ibid.Nothing in the New Deal era or before it thusresembled the deference rule the Court would begin applying decadeslater to all varieties of agency interpretations of statutes.Instead, just five years after Gray and two afterHearst, Congress codified the opposite rule: the traditionalunderstanding that courts must “decide all relevantquestions of law.” 5 U.S.C. §706.[3]CCongress in 1946 enacted the APA “as a checkupon administrators whose zeal might otherwise have carried them toexcesses not contemplated in legislation creating their offices.”Morton Salt, 338 U.S., at 644. It was the culminationof a “comprehensive rethinking of the place of administrativeagencies in a regime of separate and divided powers.” Bowenv. Michigan Academy of Family Physicians, 476 U.S.667, 670–671 (1986).In addition to prescribing procedures for agencyaction, the APA delineates the basic contours of judicial review ofsuch action. As relevant here, Section 706 directs that “[t]o theextent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewingcourt shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpretconstitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaningor applicability of the terms of an agency action.” 5U.S.C. §706. It further requires courts to “holdunlawful and set aside agency action, findings, and conclusionsfound to be ... not in accordance with law.”§706(2)(A).The APA thus codifies for agency cases theunremarkable, yet elemental proposition reflected by judicialpractice dating back to Marbury: that courts decide legalquestions by applying their own judgment. It specifies that courts,not agencies, will decide “all relevant questions of law”arising on review of agency action, §706 (emphasis added)—eventhose involving ambiguous laws—and set aside any such actioninconsistent with the law as they interpret it. And it prescribesno deferential standard for courts to employ in answering thoselegal questions. That omission is telling, because Section 706does mandate that judicial review of agency policymaking andfactfinding be deferential. See §706(2)(A) (agency action to be setaside if “arbitrary, capricious, [or] an abuse of discretion”);§706(2)(E) (agency factfinding in formal proceedings to be setaside if “unsupported by substantial evidence”).In a statute designed to “serve as thefundamental charter of the administrative state,” Kisor v.Wilkie, 588 U.S. 558, 580 (2019) (plurality opinion)(internal quotation marks omitted), Congress surely would havearticulated a similarly deferential standard applicable toquestions of law had it intended to depart from the settled pre-APAunderstanding that deciding such questions was “exclusively ajudicial function,” American Trucking Assns., 310U.S., at 544. But nothing in the APA hints at such a dramaticdeparture. On the contrary, by directing courts to “interpretconstitutional and statutory provisions” without differentiatingbetween the two, Section 706 makes clear that agencyinterpretations of statutes—like agency interpretations of theConstitution—are not entitled to deference. Under the APA,it thus “remains the responsibility of the court to decide whetherthe law means what the agency says.” Perez v. MortgageBankers Assn., 575 U.S.92, 109 (2015) (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).[4]The text of the APA means what it says. And alook at its history if anything only underscores that plainmeaning. According to both the House and Senate Reports on thelegislation, Section 706 “provide[d] that questions of law are forcourts rather than agencies to decide in the last analysis.”H.R. Rep. No. 1980, 79th Cong., 2d Sess., 44 (1946) (emphasisadded); accord, S.Rep. No. 752, 79th Cong., 1st Sess., 28(1945). Some of the legislation’s most prominent supportersarticulated the same view. See 92 Cong. Rec. 5654 (1946) (statementof Rep. Walter); P. McCarran, Improving “Administrative Justice”:Hearings and Evidence; Scope of Judicial Review, 32A.B.A.J. 827, 831 (1946). Even the Department ofJustice—an agency with every incentive to endorse a view of the APAfavorable to the Executive Branch—opined after its enactment thatSection 706 merely “restate[d] the present law as to the scope ofjudicial review.” Dept. of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual onthe Administrative Procedure Act 108 (1947); see also Kisor,588 U.S., at 582 (plurality opinion) (same). That “presentlaw,” as we have described, adhered to the traditional conceptionof the judicial function. See supra, at 9–13.Various respected commentators contemporaneouslymaintained that the APA required reviewing courts to exerciseindependent judgment on questions of law. Professor John Dickinson,for example, read the APA to “impose a clear mandate that all[questions of law] shall be decided by the reviewing Court itself,and in the exercise of its own independent judgment.”Administrative Procedure Act: Scope and Grounds of BroadenedJudicial Review, 33 A.B.A.J. 434, 516 (1947).Professor Bernard Schwartz noted that §706 “would seem... to be merely a legislative restatement of thefamiliar review principle that questions of law are for thereviewing court, at the same time leaving to the courts the task ofdetermining in each case what are questions of law.” MixedQuestions of Law and Fact and the Administrative Procedure Act, 19Ford. L.Rev. 73, 84–85 (1950). And Professor Louis Jaffe, whohad served in several agencies at the advent of the New Deal,thought that §706 leaves it up to the reviewing “court” to “decideas a ‘question of law’ whether there is ‘discretion’ in thepremises”—that is, whether the statute at issue delegatesparticular discretionary authority to an agency. Judicial Controlof Administrative Action 570 (1965).The APA, in short, incorporates the traditionalunderstanding of the judicial function, under which courts mustexercise independent judgment in determining the meaning ofstatutory provisions. In exercising such judgment, though, courtsmay—as they have from the start—seek aid from the interpretationsof those responsible for implementing particular statutes. Suchinterpretations “constitute a body of experience and informedjudgment to which courts and litigants may properly resort forguidance” consistent with the APA. Skidmore, 323 U.S.,at 140. And interpretations issued contemporaneously with thestatute at issue, and which have remained consistent over time, maybe especially useful in determining the statute’s meaning. Seeibid.; American Trucking Assns., 310U.S., at 549.In a case involving an agency, of course, thestatute’s meaning may well be that the agency is authorized toexercise a degree of discretion. Congress has often enacted suchstatutes. For example, some statutes “expressly delegate[]”to an agency the authority to give meaning to a particularstatutory term. Batterton v. Francis, 432 U.S.416, 425 (1977) (emphasis deleted).[5] Others empower an agency to prescribe rules to “fill upthe details” of a statutory scheme, Wayman v.Southard, 10 Wheat. 1, 43 (1825), or to regulate subject tothe limits imposed by a term or phrase that “leaves agencies withflexibility,” Michigan v. EPA, 576 U.S.743, 752 (2015), such as “appropriate” or“reasonable.”[6]When the best reading of a statute is that itdelegates discretionary authority to an agency, the role of thereviewing court under the APA is, as always, to independentlyinterpret the statute and effectuate the will of Congress subjectto constitutional limits. The court fulfills that role byrecognizing constitutional delegations, “fix[ing] the boundaries of[the] delegated authority,” H. Monaghan, Marbury and theAdministrative State, 83 Colum. L.Rev. 1, 27 (1983), andensuring the agency has engaged in “‘reasoneddecisionmaking’” within those boundaries, Michigan,576 U.S., at 750 (quoting Allentown Mack Sales &Service, Inc. v. NLRB, 522 U.S.359, 374 (1998)); see also Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. ofUnited States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins.Co., 463 U.S.29 (1983). By doing so, a court upholds the traditionalconception of the judicial function that the APA adopts.IIIThe deference that Chevron requires ofcourts reviewing agency action cannot be squared with the APA.AIn the decades between the enactment of theAPA and this Court’s decision in Chevron, courts generallycontinued to review agency interpretations of the statutes theyadminister by independently examining each statute to determine itsmeaning. Cf. T. Merrill, Judicial Deference to Executive Precedent,101 Yale L.J. 969, 972–975 (1992). As an early proponent (andlater critic) of Chevron recounted, courts during thisperiod thus identified delegations of discretionary authority toagencies on a “statute-by-statute basis.” A. Scalia, JudicialDeference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 DukeL.J. 511, 516.Chevron, decided in 1984 by a bare quorumof six Justices, triggered a marked departure from the traditionalapproach. The question in the case was whether an EPA regulation“allow[ing] States to treat all of the pollution-emitting deviceswithin the same industrial grouping as though they were encasedwithin a single ‘bubble’” was consistent with the term“stationary source” as used in the Clean Air Act. 467 U.S.,at 840. To answer that question of statutory interpretation, theCourt articulated and employed a now familiar two-step approachbroadly applicable to review of agency action.The first step was to discern “whether Congressha[d] directly spoken to the precise question at issue.”Id., at 842. The Court explained that “[i]f the intent ofCongress is clear, that is the end of the matter,” ibid.,and courts were therefore to “reject administrative constructionswhich are contrary to clear congressional intent,” id., at843, n.9. To discern such intent, the Court noted, areviewing court was to “employ[] traditional tools ofstatutory construction.” Ibid.Without mentioning the APA, or acknowledging anydoctrinal shift, the Court articulated a second step applicablewhen “Congress ha[d] not directly addressed the precise question atissue.” Id., at 843. In such a case—that is, a case in which“the statute [was] silent or ambiguous with respect to the specificissue” at hand—a reviewing court could not “simply imposeits own construction on the statute, as would be necessary in theabsence of an administrative interpretation.” Ibid.(footnote omitted). A court instead had to set aside thetraditional interpretive tools and defer to the agency if it hadoffered “a permissible construction of the statute,” ibid.,even if not “the reading the court would have reached if thequestion initially had arisen in a judicial proceeding,”ibid., n.11. That directive was justified, accordingto the Court, by the understanding that administering statutes“requires the formulation of policy” to fill statutory “gap[s]”; bythe long judicial tradition of according “considerable weight” toExecutive Branch interpretations; and by a host of otherconsiderations, including the complexity of the regulatory scheme,EPA’s “detailed and reasoned” consideration, the policy-ladennature of the judgment supposedly required, and the agency’sindirect accountability to the people through the President.Id., at 843, 844, and n.14, 865.Employing this new test, the Court concludedthat Congress had not addressed the question at issue with thenecessary “level of specificity” and that EPA’s interpretation was“entitled to deference.” Id., at 865. It did not matterwhy Congress, as the Court saw it, had not squarelyaddressed the question, see ibid., or that “the agency ha[d]from time to time changed its interpretation,” id., at 863.The latest EPA interpretation was a permissible reading of theClean Air Act, so under the Court’s new rule, that readingcontrolled.Initially, Chevron “seemed destined toobscurity.” T. Merrill, The Story of Chevron: The Making ofan Accidental Landmark, 66 Admin. L.Rev. 253, 276 (2014). TheCourt did not at first treat it as the watershed decision it wasfated to become; it was hardly cited in cases involving statutoryquestions of agency authority. See ibid. But within a fewyears, both this Court and the courts of appeals were routinelyinvoking its two-step framework as the governing standard in suchcases. See id., at 276–277. As the Court did so, itrevisited the doctrine’s justifications. Eventually, the Courtdecided that Chevron rested on “a presumption that Congress,when it left ambiguity in a statute meant for implementation by anagency, understood that the ambiguity would be resolved, first andforemost, by the agency, and desired the agency (rather than thecourts) to possess whatever degree of discretion the ambiguityallows.” Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota),N.A., 517 U.S.735, 740–741 (1996); see also, e.g., Cuozzo SpeedTechnologies, LLC v. Lee, 579 U.S. 261, 276–277 (2016);Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, 573 U.S.302, 315 (2014); National Cable & TelecommunicationsAssn. v. Brand X Internet Services, 545 U.S.967, 982 (2005).BNeither Chevron nor any subsequentdecision of this Court attempted to reconcile its framework withthe APA. The “law of deference” that this Court has built on thefoundation laid in Chevron has instead been “[h]eedless ofthe original design” of the APA. Perez, 575 U.S., at109 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment).1Chevron defies the command of the APAthat “the reviewing court”—not the agency whose action itreviews—is to “decide all relevant questions of law” and“interpret ... statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasisadded). It requires a court to ignore, not follow, “thereading the court would have reached” had it exercised itsindependent judgment as required by the APA. Chevron, 467U.S., at 843, n.11. And although exercising independentjudgment is consistent with the “respect” historically given toExecutive Branch interpretations, see, e.g., Edwards’Lessee, 12 Wheat., at 210; Skidmore, 323 U.S., at140, Chevron insists on much more. It demands that courtsmechanically afford binding deference to agencyinterpretations, including those that have been inconsistent overtime. See 467 U.S., at 863. Still worse, it forces courts todo so even when a pre-existing judicial precedent holds that thestatute means something else—unless the prior court happened toalso say that the statute is “unambiguous.” Brand X, 545U.S., at 982. That regime is the antithesis of the timehonored approach the APA prescribes. In fretting over the prospectof “allow[ing]” a judicial interpretation of a statute “to overridean agency’s” in a dispute before a court, ibid.,Chevron turns the statutory scheme for judicial review ofa*gency action upside down.Chevron cannot be reconciled with theAPA, as the Government and the dissent contend, by presuming thatstatutory ambiguities are implicit delegations to agencies. SeeBrief for Respondents in No. 22–1219, pp.13, 37–38;post, at 4–15 (opinion of Kagan, J.). Presumptions havetheir place in statutory interpretation, but only to the extentthat they approximate reality. Chevron’s presumption doesnot, because “[a]n ambiguity is simply not a delegation oflaw-interpreting power. Chevron confuses the two.” C.Sunstein, Interpreting Statutes in the Regulatory State, 103 Harv.L.Rev. 405, 445 (1989). As Chevron itself noted,ambiguities may result from an inability on the part of Congress tosquarely answer the question at hand, or from a failure to even“consider the question” with the requisite precision. 467U.S., at 865. In neither case does an ambiguity necessarilyreflect a congressional intent that an agency, as opposed to acourt, resolve the resulting interpretive question. And many orperhaps most statutory ambiguities may be unintentional. As theFramers recognized, ambiguities will inevitably follow from “thecomplexity of objects, ... the imperfection of thehuman faculties,” and the simple fact that “no language is socopious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea.” TheFederalist No. 37, at 236.Courts, after all, routinely confront statutoryambiguities in cases having nothing to do with Chevron—casesthat do not involve agency interpretations or delegations ofauthority. Of course, when faced with a statutory ambiguity in sucha case, the ambiguity is not a delegation to anybody, and a courtis not somehow relieved of its obligation to independentlyinterpret the statute. Courts in that situation do not throw uptheir hands because “Congress’s instructions have” supposedly “runout,” leaving a statutory “gap.” Post, at 2 (opinion ofKagan, J.). Courts instead understand that such statutes, no matterhow impenetrable, do—in fact, must—have a single, best meaning.That is the whole point of having written statutes; “everystatute’s meaning is fixed at the time of enactment.” WisconsinCentral Ltd. v. United States, 585 U.S. 274, 284 (2018)(emphasis deleted). So instead of declaring a particular party’sreading “permissible” in such a case, courts use every tool attheir disposal to determine the best reading of the statute andresolve the ambiguity.In an agency case as in any other, though, evenif some judges might (or might not) consider the statute ambiguous,there is a best reading all the same—“the reading the court wouldhave reached” if no agency were involved. Chevron, 467U.S., at 843, n.11. It therefore makes no sense tospeak of a “permissible” interpretation that is not the one thecourt, after applying all relevant interpretive tools, concludes isbest. In the business of statutory interpretation, if it is not thebest, it is not permissible.Perhaps most fundamentally, Chevron’spresumption is misguided because agencies have no specialcompetence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. TheFramers, as noted, anticipated that courts would often confrontstatutory ambiguities and expected that courts would resolve themby exercising independent legal judgment. And even Chevronitself reaffirmed that “[t]he judiciary is the final authority onissues of statutory construction” and recognized that “in theabsence of an administrative interpretation,” it is “necessary” fora court to “impose its own construction on the statute.”Id., at 843, and n.9. Chevron gravely erred,though, in concluding that the inquiry is fundamentally differentjust because an administrative interpretation is in play. The verypoint of the traditional tools of statutory construction—the toolscourts use every day—is to resolve statutory ambiguities. That isno less true when the ambiguity is about the scope of an agency’sown power—perhaps the occasion on which abdication in favor of theagency is least appropriate.2The Government responds that Congress mustgenerally intend for agencies to resolve statutory ambiguitiesbecause agencies have subject matter expertise regarding thestatutes they administer; because deferring to agencies purportedlypromotes the uniform construction of federal law; and becauseresolving statutory ambiguities can involve policymaking best leftto political actors, rather than courts. See Brief for Respondentsin No. 22–1219, pp.16–19. The dissent offers more of thesame. See post, at 9–14. But none of these considerationsjustifies Chevron’s sweeping presumption of congressionalintent.Beginning with expertise, we recently noted thatinterpretive issues arising in connection with a regulatory schemeoften “may fall more naturally into a judge’s bailiwick” than anagency’s. Kisor, 588 U.S., at 578 (opinion of theCourt). We thus observed that “[w]hen the agency has no comparativeexpertise in resolving a regulatory ambiguity, Congress presumablywould not grant it that authority.” Ibid. Chevron’sbroad rule of deference, though, demands that courts presume justthe opposite. Under that rule, ambiguities of all stripes triggerdeference. Indeed, the Government and, seemingly, the dissentcontinue to defend the proposition that Chevron applies evenin cases having little to do with an agency’s technical subjectmatter expertise. See Brief for Respondents in No. 22–1219,p.17; post, at 10.But even when an ambiguity happens to implicatea technical matter, it does not follow that Congress has taken thepower to authoritatively interpret the statute from the courts andgiven it to the agency. Congress expects courts to handle technicalstatutory questions. “[M]any statutory cases” call upon “courts[to] interpret the mass of technical detail that is the ordinarydiet of the law,” Egelhoff v. Egelhoff, 532 U.S.141, 161 (2001) (Breyer, J., dissenting), and courts did sowithout issue in agency cases before Chevron, seepost, at 30 (Gorsuch, J., concurring). Courts, after all, donot decide such questions blindly. The parties and amici insuch cases are steeped in the subject matter, and reviewing courtshave the benefit of their perspectives. In an agency case inparticular, the court will go about its task with the agency’s“body of experience and informed judgment,” among otherinformation, at its disposal. Skidmore, 323 U.S., at140. And although an agency’s interpretation of a statute “cannotbind a court,” it may be especially informative “to the extent itrests on factual premises within [the agency’s] expertise.”Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms v. FLRA,464 U.S.89, 98, n.8 (1983). Such expertise has always been one ofthe factors which may give an Executive Branch interpretationparticular “power to persuade, if lacking power to control.”Skidmore, 323 U.S., at 140; see, e.g.,County of Maui v. Hawaii Wildlife Fund, 590 U.S. 165,180 (2020); Moore, 95 U.S., at 763.For those reasons, delegating ultimateinterpretive authority to agencies is simply not necessary toensure that the resolution of statutory ambiguities is wellinformed by subject matter expertise. The better presumption istherefore that Congress expects courts to do their ordinary job ofinterpreting statutes, with due respect for the views of theExecutive Branch. And to the extent that Congress and the ExecutiveBranch may disagree with how the courts have performed that job ina particular case, they are of course always free to act byrevising the statute.Nor does a desire for the uniform constructionof federal law justify Chevron. Given inconsistencies in howjudges apply Chevron, see infra, at 30–33, it isunclear how much the doctrine as a whole (as opposed to its highlydeferential second step) actually promotes such uniformity. In anyevent, there is little value in imposing a uniform interpretationof a statute if that interpretation is wrong. We see no reason topresume that Congress prefers uniformity for uniformity’s sake overthe correct interpretation of the laws it enacts.The view that interpretation of ambiguousstatutory provisions amounts to policymaking suited for politicalactors rather than courts is especially mistaken, for it rests on aprofound misconception of the judicial role. It is reasonable toassume that Congress intends to leave policymaking to politicalactors. But resolution of statutory ambiguities involves legalinterpretation. That task does not suddenly become policymakingjust because a court has an “agency to fall back on.” Kisor,588 U.S., at 575 (opinion of the Court). Courts interpretstatutes, no matter the context, based on the traditional tools ofstatutory construction, not individual policy preferences. Indeed,the Framers crafted the Constitution to ensure that federal judgescould exercise judgment free from the influence of the politicalbranches. See The Federalist, No. 78, at 522–525. They were toconstrue the law with “[c]lear heads ... and honesthearts,” not with an eye to policy preferences that had not made itinto the statute. 1 Works of James Wilson 363 (J. Andrews ed.1896).That is not to say that Congress cannot or doesnot confer discretionary authority on agencies. Congress may do so,subject to constitutional limits, and it often has. But to stay outof discretionary policymaking left to the political branches,judges need only fulfill their obligations under the APA toindependently identify and respect such delegations of authority,police the outer statutory boundaries of those delegations, andensure that agencies exercise their discretion consistent with theAPA. By forcing courts to instead pretend that ambiguities arenecessarily delegations, Chevron does not prevent judgesfrom making policy. It prevents them from judging.3In truth, Chevron’s justifyingpresumption is, as Members of this Court have often recognized, afiction. See Buffington v. McDonough, 598 U.S.___, ___ (2022) (Gorsuch, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari)(slip op., at 11); Cuozzo, 579 U.S., at 286 (Thomas,J., concurring); Scalia, 1989 Duke L.J., at 517; see alsopost, at 15 (opinion of Kagan, J.). So we have spent thebetter part of four decades imposing one limitation onChevron after another, pruning its presumption on theunderstanding that “where it is in doubt that Congress actuallyintended to delegate particular interpretive authority to anagency, Chevron is ‘inapplicable.’” UnitedStates v. Mead Corp., 533 U.S.218, 230 (2001) (quoting Christensen v. HarrisCounty, 529 U.S.576, 597 (2000) (Breyer, J., dissenting)); see also AdamsFruit Co. v. Barrett, 494 U.S.638, 649 (1990).Consider the many refinements we have made in aneffort to match Chevron’s presumption to reality. We havesaid that Chevron applies only “when it appears thatCongress delegated authority to the agency generally to make rulescarrying the force of law, and that the agency interpretationclaiming deference was promulgated in the exercise of thatauthority.” Mead, 533 U.S., at 226–227. In practice,that threshold requirement—sometimes called Chevron “stepzero”—largely limits Chevron to “the fruits ofnotice-and-comment rulemaking or formal adjudication.” 533U.S., at 230. But even when those processes are used,deference is still not warranted “where the regulation is‘procedurally defective’—that is, where the agency errs by failingto follow the correct procedures in issuing the regulation.”Encino Motorcars, LLC v. Navarro, 579 U.S. 211, 220(2016) (quoting Mead, 533 U.S., at 227).Even where those procedural hurdles are cleared,substantive ones remain. Most notably, Chevron does notapply if the question at issue is one of “deep ‘economic andpolitical significance.’” King v. Burwell,576 U.S.473, 486 (2015). We have instead expected Congress to delegatesuch authority “expressly” if at all, ibid., for“[e]xtraordinary grants of regulatory authority are rarelyaccomplished through ‘modest words,’ ‘vague terms,’ or ‘subtledevice[s],’” West Virginia v. EPA, 597 U.S.697, 723 (2022) (quoting Whitman v. American TruckingAssns., Inc., 531 U.S.457, 468 (2001); alteration in original). Nor have we appliedChevron to agency interpretations of judicial reviewprovisions, see Adams Fruit Co., 494 U.S., at 649–650,or to statutory schemes not administered by the agency seekingdeference, see Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 584 U.S.497, 519–520 (2018). And we have sent mixed signals on whetherChevron applies when a statute has criminal applications.Compare Abramski v. United States, 573 U.S.169, 191 (2014), with Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter,Communities for Great Ore., 515 U.S.687, 704, n.18 (1995).Confronted with this byzantine set ofpreconditions and exceptions, some courts have simply bypassedChevron, saying it makes no difference for one reason oranother.[7] And even when theydo invoke Chevron, courts do not always heed the varioussteps and nuances of that evolving doctrine. In one of the casesbefore us today, for example, the First Circuit both skipped “stepzero,” see 62 F.4th, at 628, and refused to “classify [its]conclusion as a product of Chevron step one or steptwo”—though it ultimately appears to have deferred under step two,id., at 634.This Court, for its part, has not deferred to anagency interpretation under Chevron since 2016. SeeCuozzo, 579 U.S., at 280 (most recent occasion). ButChevron remains on the books. So litigants must continue towrestle with it, and lower courts—bound by even our crumblingprecedents, see Agostini v. Felton, 521 U.S.203, 238 (1997)—understandably continue to apply it.The experience of the last 40 years has thusdone little to rehabilitate Chevron. It has only made clearthat Chevron’s fictional presumption of congressional intentwas always unmoored from the APA’s demand that courts exerciseindependent judgment in construing statutes administered byagencies. At best, our intricate Chevron doctrine has beennothing more than a distraction from the question that matters:Does the statute authorize the challenged agency action? And atworst, it has required courts to violate the APA by yielding to anagency the express responsibility, vested in “the reviewingcourt,” to “decide all relevant questions of law” and“interpret ... statutory provisions.” §706 (emphasisadded).IVThe only question left is whether staredecisis, the doctrine governing judicial adherence toprecedent, requires us to persist in the Chevron project. Itdoes not. Stare decisis is not an “inexorable command,”Payne v. Tennessee, 501 U.S.808, 828 (1991), and the stare decisis considerationsmost relevant here—“the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning, theworkability of the rule it established, ... andreliance on the decision,” Knick v. Township ofScott, 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 fundamentallymisguided. Despite reshaping judicial review of agency action,neither it nor any case of ours applying it grappled with theAPA—the statute that lays out how such review works. Its flaws werenonetheless apparent from the start, prompting this Court to reviseits foundations and continually limit its application. It haslaunched and sustained a cottage industry of scholars attempting todecipher its basis and meaning. And Members of this Court have longquestioned 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(Thomas,J., concurring); Buffington, 598 U.S.___ (opinion of Gorsuch,J.); B. Kavanaugh, Fixing StatutoryInterpretation, 129 Harv. L.Rev. 2118, 2150–2154 (2016). EvenJustice Scalia, an early champion of Chevron, came toseriously doubt whether it could be reconciled with the APA. SeePerez, 575 U.S., at 109–110 (opinion concurring injudgment). 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 atall.Experience has also shown that Chevron isunworkable. The defining feature of its framework is theidentification of statutory ambiguity, which requires deference atthe doctrine’s second step. But the concept of ambiguity has alwaysevaded meaningful definition. As Justice Scalia put the dilemmajust five years after Chevron was decided: “How clear isclear?” 1989 Duke L.J., at 521.We are no closer to an answer to that questionthan we were four decades ago. “‘[A]mbiguity’ is a term thatmay have different meanings for different judges.” Exxon MobilCorp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc., 545 U.S.546, 572 (2005) (Stevens, J., dissenting). One judge might seeambiguity 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, Ambiguitiesand Agency Cases: Reflections After (Almost) Ten Years on theBench, 70 Vand. L.Rev. En Banc 315, 323 (2017). A rule of lawthat is so wholly “in the eye of the beholder,” Exxon MobilCorp., 545 U.S., at 572 (Stevens, J., dissenting),invites different results in like cases and is therefore “arbitraryin practice,” Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. v. MayacamasCorp., 485 U.S.271, 283 (1988). Such an impressionistic and malleable concept“cannot stand as an every-day test for allocating” interpretiveauthority between courts and agencies. Swift & Co. v.Wickham, 382 U.S.111, 125 (1965).The dissent proves the point. It tells us that acourt should reach Chevron’s second step when it finds, “atthe end of its interpretive work,” that “Congress has left anambiguity or gap.” Post, at 1–2. (The Government offers asimilar 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 notchange when an agency happens to be involved. Nor does it changejust because the agency has happened to offer its interpretationthrough the sort of procedures necessary to obtain deference, orbecause the other preconditions for Chevron happen to besatisfied. The statute still has a best meaning, necessarilydiscernible by a court deploying its full interpretive toolkit. Sofor the dissent’s test to have any meaning, it must think that inan agency case (unlike in any other), a court should give up on its“interpretive work” before it has identified that best meaning. Buthow does a court know when to do so? On that point, the dissentleaves a gap of its own. It protests only that some otherinterpretive tools—all with pedigrees more robust thanChevron’s, and all designed to help courts identify themeaning of a text rather than allow the Executive Branch todisplace it—also apply to ambiguous texts. See post, at 27.That this is all the dissent can come up with, after four decadesof judicial experience attempting to identify ambiguity underChevron, reveals the futility of the exercise.[8]Because Chevron in its original, two-stepform was so indeterminate and sweeping, we have instead been forcedto clarify the doctrine again and again. Our attempts to do so haveonly added to Chevron’s unworkability, transforming theoriginal two-step into a dizzying breakdance. See Adams FruitCo., 494 U.S., at 649–650; Mead, 533 U.S.,at 226–227; King, 576 U.S., at 486; EncinoMotorcars, 579 U.S., at 220; Epic Systems, 584U.S., at 519–520; on and on. And the doctrine continues tospawn difficult threshold questions that promise to furthercomplicate the inquiry should Chevron be retained. See,e.g., Cargill v. Garland, 57 F. 4th447, 465–468 (CA5 2023) (plurality opinion) (May the Governmentwaive reliance on Chevron? Does Chevron apply toagency interpretations of statutes imposing criminal penalties?Does Chevron displace the rule of lenity?), aff’d, 602U.S. ___ (2024).Four decades after its inception, Chevronhas thus become an impediment, rather than an aid, to accomplishingthe basic judicial task of “say[ing] what the law is.”Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 177. And its continuing import is farfrom clear. Courts have often declined to engage with the doctrine,saying it makes no difference. See n.7, supra. And asnoted, we have avoided deferring under Chevron since 2016.That trend is nothing new; for decades, we have often declined toinvoke Chevron even in those cases where it might appear tobe applicable. See W. Eskridge & L. Baer, The Continuum ofDeference: Supreme Court Treatment of Agency StatutoryInterpretations From Chevron to Hamdan, 96 Geo.L.J. 1083, 1125 (2008). At this point, all that remains ofChevron is a decaying husk with bold pretensions.Nor has Chevron been the sort of“‘stable background’ rule” that fosters meaningful reliance.Post, at 8, n.1 (opinion of Kagan, J.) (quotingMorrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U.S.247, 261 (2010)). Given our constant tinkering with andeventual turn away from Chevron, and its inconsistentapplication by the lower courts, it instead is hard to see howanyone—Congress included—could reasonably expect a court to rely onChevron in any particular case. And even if it were possibleto predict accurately when courts will apply Chevron, thedoctrine “does not provide ‘a clear or easily applicable standard,so arguments for reliance based on its clarity aremisplaced.’” Janus, 585 U.S., at 927 (quotingSouth Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc., 585 U.S. 162, 186(2018)). To plan on Chevron yielding a particular result isto gamble not only that the doctrine will be invoked, but also thatit will produce readily foreseeable outcomes and the stability thatcomes with them. History has proved neither bet to be a winningproposition.Rather than safeguarding reliance interests,Chevron affirmatively destroys them. Under Chevron, astatutory ambiguity, no matter why it is there, becomes a licenseauthorizing an agency to change positions as much as it likes, with“[u]nexplained inconsistency” being “at most ... areason for holding an interpretation to be ...arbitrary and capricious.” Brand X, 545 U.S., at 981.But statutory ambiguity, as we have explained, is not a reliableindicator of actual delegation of discretionary authority toagencies. Chevron thus allows agencies to change course evenwhen Congress has given them no power to do so. By its sheerbreadth, Chevron fosters unwarranted instability in the law,leaving those attempting to plan around agency action in an eternalfog of uncertainty.Chevron accordingly has undermined thevery “rule of law” values that stare decisis exists tosecure. Michigan v. Bay Mills Indian Community,572 U.S.782, 798 (2014). And it cannot be constrained by admonishingcourts to be extra careful, or by tacking on a new batch ofconditions. We would need to once again “revis[e] its theoreticalbasis ... in order to cure its practical deficiencies.”Montejo v. Louisiana, 556 U.S.778, 792 (2009). Stare decisis does not require us to doso, especially because any refinements we might make would onlypoint courts back to their duties under the APA to “decide allrelevant questions of law” and “interpret ... statutoryprovisions.” §706. Nor is there any reason to wait helplessly forCongress to correct our mistake. The Court has jettisoned manyprecedents that Congress likewise could have legislativelyoverruled. See, e.g., Patterson v. McLean CreditUnion, 485 U.S.617, 618 (1988) (per curiam) (collecting cases). Andpart of “judicial humility,” post, at 3, 25 (opinion ofKagan, J.,), is admitting and in certain cases correcting our ownmistakes, especially when those mistakes are serious, seepost, at 8–9 (opinion of Gorsuch, J.).This is one of those cases. Chevron was ajudicial invention that required judges to disregard theirstatutory duties. And the only way to “ensure that the law will notmerely change erratically, but will develop in a principled andintelligible fashion,” Vasquez v. Hillery, 474 U.S.254, 265 (1986), is for us to leave Chevron behind.By doing so, however, we do not call intoquestion prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework.The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions arelawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevronitself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despiteour change in interpretive methodology. See CBOCS West, Inc.v. Humphries, 553 U.S.442, 457 (2008). Mere reliance on Chevron cannotconstitute a “‘special justification’” for overrulingsuch a holding, because to say a precedent relied on Chevronis, at best, “just an argument that the precedent was wronglydecided.” Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund,Inc., 573 U.S.258, 266 (2014) (quoting Dickerson v. UnitedStates, 530 U.S.428, 443 (2000)). That is not enough to justify overruling astatutory precedent.*  *  *The dissent ends by quoting Chevron:“‘Judges are not experts in the field.’” Post,at 31 (quoting 467 U.S., at 865). That depends, of course, onwhat the “field” is. If it is legal interpretation, that has been,“emphatically,” “the province and duty of the judicial department”for at least 221 years. Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 177. The restof the dissent’s selected epigraph is that judges “‘are notpart of either political branch.’” Post, at 31(quoting Chevron, 467 U.S., at 865). Indeed. Judgeshave always been expected to apply their “judgment”independent of the political branches when interpreting thelaws those branches enact. The Federalist No. 78, at 523. And oneof those laws, the APA, bars judges from disregarding thatresponsibility just because an Executive Branch agency views astatute differently.Chevron is overruled. Courts mustexercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agencyhas acted within its statutory authority, as the APA requires.Careful attention to the judgment of the Executive Branch may helpinform that inquiry. And when a particular statute delegatesauthority to an agency consistent with constitutional limits,courts must respect the delegation, while ensuring that the agencyacts within it. But courts need not and under the APA may not deferto an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute isambiguous.Because the D.C. and First Circuits reliedon Chevron in deciding whether to uphold the Rule, theirjudgments are vacated, and the cases are remanded for furtherproceedings consistent with this opinion.It is so ordered.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES_________________Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219_________________LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, etal.,PETITIONERS22–451v.GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,etal.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the district of columbia circuitRELENTLESS, INC., et al.,PETITIONERS22–1219v.DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the first circuit[June 28, 2024]Justice Thomas, concurring.I join the Court’s opinion in full because itcorrectly concludes that Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v.Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U.S.837 (1984), must finally be overruled. Under Chevron, ajudge was required to adopt an agency’s interpretation of anambiguous statute, so long as the agency had a “permissibleconstruction of the statute.” See id., at 843. As the Courtexplains, that deference does not comport with the AdministrativeProcedure Act, which requires judges to decide “all relevantquestions of law” and “interpret constitutional and statutoryprovisions” when reviewing an agency action. 5 U.S.C.§706; see also ante, at 18–23; Baldwin v. UnitedStates, 589 U.S. ___, ___–___ (2020) (Thomas, J.,dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 4–5).I write separately to underscore a morefundamental problem: Chevron deference also violates ourConstitution’s separation of powers, as I have previously explainedat length. See Baldwin, 589 U.S., at ___–___(dissenting opinion) (slip op., at 2–4); Michigan v.EPA, 576 U.S.743, 761–763 (2015) (concurring opinion); see also Perezv. Mortgage Bankers Assn., 575 U.S.92, 115–118 (2015) (opinion concurring in judgment). And, Iagree with Justice Gorsuch that we should not overlookChevron’s constitutional defects in overruling it.[1]* Post, at 15–20 (concurringopinion). To provide “practical and real protections for individualliberty,” the Framers drafted a Constitution that divides thelegislative, executive, and judicial powers between three branchesof Government. Perez, 575 U.S., at 118 (opinion ofThomas, J.). Chevron deference compromises this separationof powers in two ways. It curbs the judicial power afforded tocourts, and simultaneously expands agencies’ executive power beyondconstitutional limits.Chevron compels judges to abdicate theirArticle III “judicial Power.” §1. “[T]he judicial power, asoriginally understood, requires a court to exercise its independentjudgment in interpreting and expounding upon the laws.”Perez, 575 U.S., at 119 (opinion of Thomas, J.);accord, post, at 17–18 (opinion of Gorsuch, J.). The Framersunderstood that “legal texts ... often containambiguities,” and that the judicial power included “the power toresolve these ambiguities over time.” Perez, 575 U.S.,at 119 (opinion of Thomas, J.); accord, ante, at 7–9. But,under Chevron, a judge must accept an agency’sinterpretation of an ambiguous law, even if he thinks anotherinterpretation is correct. Ante, at 19. Chevrondeference thus prevents judges from exercising their independentjudgment to resolve ambiguities. Baldwin, 589 U.S., at___ (opinion of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 3); see alsoMichigan, 576 U.S., at 761 (opinion of Thomas, J.);see also Perez, 575 U.S., at 123 (opinion of Thomas,J.). By tying a judge’s hands, Chevron prevents theJudiciary from serving as a constitutional check on the Executive.It allows “the Executive ... to dictate the outcome ofcases through erroneous interpretations.” Baldwin, 589U.S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 4);Michigan, 576 U.S., at 763, n. 1 (opinion of Thomas,J.); see also Perez, 575 U.S., at 124 (opinion ofThomas, J.). Because the judicial power requires judges to exercisetheir independent judgment, the deference that Chevronrequires contravenes Article III’s mandate.Chevron deference also permits theExecutive Branch to exercise powers not given to it. “When theGovernment is called upon to perform a function that requires anexercise of legislative, executive, or judicial power, only thevested recipient of that power can perform it.” Department ofTransportation v. Association of American Railroads,575 U.S.43, 68 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring in judgment). Because theConstitution gives the Executive Branch only “[t]he executivePower,” executive agencies may constitutionally exercise only thatpower. Art.II, §1, cl.1. But, Chevron givesagencies license to exercise judicial power. By allowing agenciesto definitively interpret laws so long as they are ambiguous,Chevron “transfer[s]” the Judiciary’s “interpretive judgmentto the agency.” Perez, 575 U.S., at 124 (opinion ofThomas, J.); see also Baldwin, 589 U.S., at ___(opinion of Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 4); Michigan, 576U.S., at 761–762 (opinion of Thomas, J.); post, at 18(Gorsuch, J., concurring).Chevron deference “cannot be salvaged” byrecasting it as deference to an agency’s “formulation of policy.”Baldwin, 589 U.S., at ___ (opinion of Thomas, J.)(internal quotation marks omitted) (slip op., at 3). If that weretrue, Chevron would mean that “agencies areunconstitutionally exercising ‘legislative Powers’ vested inCongress.” Baldwin, 589 U.S., at ___ (opinion ofThomas, J.) (slip op., at 3) (quoting Art. I, §1). By “giv[ing] theforce of law to agency pronouncements on matters of private conductas to which Congress did not actually have an intent,”Chevron “permit[s] a body other than Congress to perform afunction that requires an exercise of legislative power.”Michigan, 576 U.S., at 762 (opinion of Thomas, J.)(internal quotation marks omitted). No matter the gloss put on it,Chevron expands agencies’ power beyond the bounds of ArticleII by permitting them to exercise powers reserved to another branchof Government.Chevron deference was “not a harmlesstransfer of power.” Baldwin, 589 U.S., at ___ (opinionof Thomas, J.) (slip op., at 3). “The Constitution carefullyimposes structural constraints on all three branches, and theexercise of power free of those accompanying restraints subvertsthe design of the Constitution’s ratifiers.” Ibid. Inparticular, the Founders envisioned that “the courts [would] checkthe Executive by applying the correct interpretation of the law.”Id., at ___ (slip op., at 4). Chevron was thus afundamental disruption of our separation of powers. It improperlystrips courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing thepower of executive agencies. By overruling Chevron, werestore this aspect of our separation of powers. To safeguardindividual liberty, “[s]tructure is everything.” A. Scalia,Foreword: The Importance of Structure in ConstitutionalInterpretation, 83 Notre Dame L.Rev. 1417, 1418 (2008).Although the Court finally ends our 40-year misadventure withChevron deference, its more profound problems should not beoverlooked. Regardless of what a statute says, the type ofdeference required by Chevron violates the Constitution.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES_________________Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219_________________LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, etal.,PETITIONERS22–451v.GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,etal.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the district of columbia circuitRELENTLESS, INC., et al.,PETITIONERS22–1219v.DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the first circuit[June 28, 2024]Justice Gorsuch, concurring.In disputes between individuals and thegovernment about the meaning of a federal law, federal courts havetraditionally sought to offer independent judgments about “what thelaw is” without favor to either side. Marbury v.Madison, 1 Cranch 137, 177 (1803). Beginning in themid-1980s, however, this Court experimented with a radicallydifferent approach. Applying Chevron deference, judges begandeferring to the views of executive agency officials about themeaning of federal statutes. See Chevron U.S.A.Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.,467 U.S.837 (1984). With time, the error of this approach became widelyappreciated. So much so that this Court has refused to applyChevron deference since 2016. Today, the Court places atombstone on Chevron no one can miss. In doing so, the Courtreturns judges to interpretive rules that have guided federalcourts since the Nation’s founding. I write separately to addresswhy the proper application of the doctrine of stare decisissupports that course.IAToday, the phrase “common law judge” may callto mind a judicial titan of the past who brilliantly devised newlegal rules on his own. The phrase “stare decisis” mightconjure up a sense that judges who come later in time are strictlybound to follow the work of their predecessors. But neither ofthose intuitions fairly describes the traditional common-lawunderstanding of the judge’s role or the doctrine of staredecisis.At common law, a judge’s charge to decide caseswas not usually understood as a license to make new law. For muchof England’s early history, different rulers and different legalsystems prevailed in different regions. As England consolidatedinto a single kingdom governed by a single legal system, thejudge’s task was to examine those pre-existing legal traditions andapply in the disputes that came to him those legal rules that were“common to the whole land and to all Englishmen.” F. Maitland,Equity, Also the Forms of Action at Common Law 2 (1929). That was“common law” judging.This view of the judge’s role had consequencesfor the authority due judicial decisions. Because a judge’s job wasto find and apply the law, not make it, the “opinion of the judge”and “the law” were not considered “one and the same thing.” 1 W.Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 71 (1765)(Blackstone) (emphasis deleted). A judge’s decision might bind theparties to the case at hand. M. Hale, The History and Analysis ofthe Common Law of England 68 (1713) (Hale). But none of that meantthe judge had the power to “make a Law properly so called” forsociety at large, “for that only the King and Parliament can do.”Ibid.Other consequences followed for the roleprecedent played in future judicial proceedings. Because pastdecisions represented something “less than a Law,” they did notbind future judges. Ibid. At the same time, as Matthew Haleput it, a future judge could give a past decision “Weight” as“Evidence” of the law. Ibid. Expressing the same idea,William Blackstone conceived of judicial precedents as “evidence”of “the common law.” 1 Blackstone 69, 71. And much like other formsof evidence, precedents at common law were thought to vary in theweight due them. Some past decisions might supply future courtswith considerable guidance. But others might be entitled to lesserweight, not least because judges are no less prone to error thananyone else and they may sometimes “mistake” what the law demands.Id., at 71 (emphasis deleted). In cases like that, both menthought, a future judge should not rotely repeat a past mistake butinstead “vindicate” the law “from misrepresentation.” Id.,at 70.When examining past decisions as evidence of thelaw, common law judges did not, broadly speaking, affordoverwhelming weight to any “single precedent.” J.Baker, AnIntroduction to English Legal History 209–210 (5th ed. 2019).Instead, a prior decision’s persuasive force depended in largemeasure on its “Consonancy and Congruity with Resolutions andDecisions of former Times.” Hale 68. An individual decision mightreflect the views of one court at one moment in time, but aconsistent line of decisions representing the wisdom of many mindsacross many generations was generally considered stronger evidenceof the law’s meaning. Ibid.With this conception of precedent in mind, LordMansfield cautioned against elevating “particular cases” above the“general principles” that “run through the cases, and govern thedecision of them.” Rust v. Cooper, 2 Cowp. 629, 632,98 Eng. Rep. 1277, 1279 (K. B. 1777). By discarding aberrationalrulings and pursuing instead the mainstream of past decisions, heobserved, the common law tended over time to “wor[k] itself pure.”Omychund v. Barker, 1 Atk. 22, 33, 26 Eng. Rep. 15,23 (Ch. 1744) (emphasis deleted). Reflecting similar thinking,Edmund Burke offered five principles for the evaluation of pastjudicial decisions: “They ought to be shewn; first, to be numerousand not scattered here and there;—secondly, concurrent and notcontradictory and mutually destructive;—thirdly, to be made in goodand constitutional times;—fourthly, not to be made to serve anoccasion;—and fifthly, to be agreeable to the general tenor oflegal principles.” Speech of Dec. 23, 1790, in 3 The Speeches ofthe Right Honourable Edmund Burke 513 (1816).Not only did different decisions carry differentweight, so did different language within a decision. An opinion’sholding and the reasoning essential to it (the ratiodecidendi) merited careful attention. Dicta, stray remarks, anddigressions warranted less weight. See N. Duxbury, The Intricaciesof Dicta and Dissent 19–24 (2021) (Duxbury). These were no morethan “the vapours and fumes of law.” F. Bacon, The Lord Keeper’sSpeech in the Exchequer (1617), in 2 The Works of Francis Bacon 478(B. Montagu ed. 1887) (Bacon).That is not to say those “vapours” wereworthless. Often dicta might provide the parties to a particulardispute a “fuller understanding of the court’s decisional path orrelated areas of concern.” B. Garner etal., The Law ofJudicial Precedent 65 (2016) (Precedent). Dicta might also providefuture courts with a source of “thoughtful advice.” Ibid.But future courts had to be careful not to treat every “hastyexpression ... as a serious and deliberate opinion.”Steel v. Houghton, 1 Bl. H. 51, 53, 126 Eng. Rep. 32,33 (C.P. 1788). To do so would work an “injustice to [the]memory” of their predecessors who could not expect judicial remarksissued in one context to apply perfectly in others, perhapsespecially ones they could not foresee. Ibid. Also, thelimits of the adversarial process, a distinctive feature of Englishlaw, had to be borne in mind. When a single judge or a small panelreached a decision in a case, they did so based on the factualrecord and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosen todevelop. Attuned to those constraints, future judges had to proceedwith an open mind to the possibility that different facts anddifferent legal arguments might dictate different outcomes in laterdisputes. See Duxbury 19–24.BNecessarily, this represents just a quicksketch of traditional common-law understandings of the judge’s roleand the place of precedent in it. It focuses, too, on thehorizontal, not vertical, force of judicial precedents. But thereare good reasons to think that the common law’s understandings ofjudges and precedent outlined above crossed the Atlantic andinformed the nature of the “judicial Power” the Constitution vestsin federal courts. Art.III, §1.Not only was the Constitution adopted againstthe backdrop of these understandings and, in light of that alone,they may provide evidence of what the framers meant when they spokeof the “judicial Power.” Many other, more specific provisions inthe Constitution reflect much the same distinction betweenlawmaking and lawfinding functions the common law did. TheConstitution provides that its terms may be amended only throughcertain prescribed democratic processes. Art. V. It vests the powerto enact federal legislation exclusively in the people’s electedrepresentatives in Congress. Art. I, §1. Meanwhile, theConstitution describes the judicial power as the power to resolvecases and controversies. Art. III, §2, cl.1. As well, itdelegates that authority to life-tenured judges, see §1, anassignment that would have made little sense if judges could usurplawmaking powers vested in periodically elected representatives.But one that makes perfect sense if what is sought is a neutralparty “to interpret and apply” the law without fear or favor in adispute between others. 2 The Works of James Wilson 161 (J. Andrewsed. 1896) (Wilson); see Osborn v. Bank of UnitedStates, 9 Wheat. 738, 866 (1824).The constrained view of the judicial power thatruns through our Constitution carries with it familiarimplications, ones the framers readily acknowledged. James Madison,for example, proclaimed that it would be a “fallacy” to suggestthat judges or their precedents could “repeal or alter” theConstitution or the laws of the United States. Letter to N. Trist(Dec. 1831), in 9 The Writings of James Madison 477 (G. Hunt ed.1910). A court’s opinion, James Wilson added, may be thought of as“effective la[w]” “[a]s to the parties.” Wilson 160–161. But as inEngland, Wilson said, a prior judicial decision could serve in afuture dispute only as “evidence” of the law’s proper construction.Id., at 160; accord, 1 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law442–443 (1826).The framers also recognized that the judicialpower described in our Constitution implies, as the judicial powerdid in England, a power (and duty) of discrimination when it comesto assessing the “evidence” embodied in past decisions. So, forexample, Madison observed that judicial rulings “repeatedlyconfirmed” may supply better evidence of the law’smeaning than isolated or aberrant ones. Letter to C. Ingersoll(June 1831), in 4 Letters and Other Writings of James Madison 184(1867) (emphasis added). Extending the thought, Thomas Jeffersonbelieved it would often take “numerous decisions” for the meaningof new statutes to become truly “settled.” Letter to S. Jones (July1809), in 12 The Writings of Thomas Jefferson 299 (A. Bergh ed.1907).From the start, too, American courts recognizedthat not everything found in a prior decision was entitled to equalweight. As Chief Justice Marshall warned, “It is a maxim not to bedisregarded, that general expressions, in every opinion, are to betaken in connection with the case in which those expressions areused.” Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 399 (1821).To the extent a past court offered views “beyond the case,” thoseexpressions “may be respected” in a later case “but ought not tocontrol the judgment.” Ibid. One “obvious” reason for this,Marshall continued, had to do with the limits of the adversarialprocess we inherited from England: Only “[t]he question actuallybefore the Court is investigated with care, and considered in itsfull extent. Other principles which may serve to illustrate it, areconsidered in their relation to the case decided, but theirpossible bearing on all other cases is seldom completelyinvestigated.” Id., at 399–400.Abraham Lincoln championed these traditionalunderstandings in his debates with Stephen Douglas. Douglas tookthe view that a single decision of this Court—no matter howflawed—could definitively resolve a contested issue for everyoneand all time. Those who thought otherwise, he said, “aim[ed] adeadly blow to our whole Republican system of government.” Speechat Springfield, Ill. (June 26, 1857), in 2 The Collected Works ofAbraham Lincoln 401 (R. Basler ed. 1953) (Lincoln Speech). ButLincoln knew better. While accepting that judicial decisions“absolutely determine” the rights of the parties to a court’sjudgment, he refused to accept that any single judicial decisioncould “fully settl[e]” an issue, particularly when that decisiondeparts from the Constitution. Id., at 400–401. In casessuch as these, Lincoln explained, “it is not resistance, it is notfactious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat [the decision] asnot having yet quite established a settled doctrine for thecountry.” Id., at 401.After the Civil War, the Court echoed some ofthese same points. It stressed that every statement in a judicialopinion “must be taken in connection with its immediate context,”In re Ayers, 123 U.S.443, 488 (1887), and stray “remarks” must not be elevated abovethe written law, see The Belfast, 7 Wall. 624, 641 (1869);see also, e.g., Trebilco*ck v. Wilson,12 Wall. 687, 692–693 (1872); Mason v. Eldred, 6Wall. 231, 236–238 (1868). During Chief Justice Chase’s tenure, itseems a Justice writing the Court’s majority opinion wouldgenerally work alone and present his work orally and in summaryform to his colleagues at conference, which meant that otherJustices often did not even review the opinion prior topublication. 6 C. Fairman, History of the Supreme Court of theUnited States 69–70 (1971). The Court could proceed in this waybecause it understood that a single judicial opinion may resolve a“case or controversy,” and in so doing it may make “effective law”for the parties, but it does not legislate for the whole of thecountry and is not to be confused with laws that do.CFrom all this, I see at least three lessonsabout the doctrine of stare decisis relevant to the decisionbefore us today. Each concerns a form of judicial humility.First, a past decision may bind theparties to a dispute, but it provides this Court no authority infuture cases to depart from what the Constitution or laws of theUnited States ordain. Instead, the Constitution promises, theAmerican people are sovereign and they alone may, throughdemocratically responsive processes, amend our foundational charteror revise federal legislation. Unelected judges enjoy no suchpower. Part I–B, supra.Recognizing as much, this Court has often saidthat stare decisis is not an “‘inexorablecommand.’” State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S.3, 20 (1997). And from time to time it has found it necessaryto correct its past mistakes. When it comes to correcting errors ofconstitutional interpretation, the Court has stressed theimportance of doing so, for they can be corrected otherwise onlythrough the amendment process. See, e.g., Franchise TaxBd. of Cal. v. Hyatt, 587 U.S. 230, 248 (2019). When itcomes to fixing errors of statutory interpretation, the Court hasproceeded perhaps more circ*mspectly. But in that field, too, ithas overruled even longstanding but “flawed” decisions. See,e.g., Leegin Creative Leather Products, Inc. v.PSKS, Inc., 551 U.S.877, 904, 907 (2007).Recent history illustrates all this. During thetenures of Chief Justices Warren and Burger, it seems this Courtoverruled an average of around three cases per Term, includingroughly 50 statutory precedents between the 1960s and 1980s alone.See W. Eskridge, Overruling Statutory Precedents, 76 Geo.L.J. 1361, 1427–1434 (1988) (collecting cases). Many of thesedecisions came in settings no less consequential than today’s. Inrecent years, we have not approached the pace set by ourpredecessors, overruling an average of just one or two priordecisions each Term.[1] But thepoint remains: Judicial decisions inconsistent with the written lawdo not inexorably control.Second, another lesson tempers the first.While judicial decisions may not supersede or revise theConstitution or federal statutory law, they merit our “respect asembodying the considered views of those who have come before.”Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. 83, 105 (2020). As amatter of professional responsibility, a judge must not only avoidconfusing his writings with the law. When a case comes before him,he must also weigh his view of what the law demands against thethoughtful views of his predecessors. After all, “[p]recedent is away of accumulating and passing down the learning of pastgenerations, a font of established wisdom richer than what can befound in any single judge or panel of judges.” Precedent 9.Doubtless, past judicial decisions may, as theyalways have, command “greater or less authority as precedents,according to circ*mstances.” Lincoln Speech 401. But, like Englishjudges before us, we have long turned to familiar considerations toguide our assessment of the weight due a past decision. So, forexample, as this Court has put it, the weight due a precedent maydepend on the quality of its reasoning, its consistency withrelated decisions, its workability, and reliance interests thathave formed around it. See Ramos, 590 U.S., at 106.The first factor recognizes that the primary power of any precedentlies in its power to persuade—and poorly reasoned decisions may notprovide reliable evidence of the law’s meaning. The second factorreflects the fact that a precedent is more likely to be correct andworthy of respect when it reflects the time-tested wisdom ofgenerations than when it sits “unmoored” from surrounding law.Ibid. The remaining factors, like workability and reliance,do not often supply reason enough on their own to abide a flaweddecision, for almost any past decision is likely to benefit somegroup eager to keep things as they are and content with how thingswork. See, e.g., id., at 108. But these factors cansometimes serve functions similar to the others, by pointing toclues that may suggest a past decision is right in ways notimmediately obvious to the individual judge.When asking whether to follow or depart from aprecedent, some judges deploy adverbs. They speak of whether or nota precedent qualifies as “demonstrably erroneous,” Gamble v.United States, 587 U.S. 678, 711 (2019) (Thomas, J.,concurring), or “egregiously wrong,” Ramos, 590 U.S.,at 121 (Kavanaugh, J., concurring in part). But the emphasis theadverb imparts is not meant for dramatic effect. It seeks to serveinstead as a reminder of a more substantive lesson. The lessonthat, in assessing the weight due a past decision, a judge is notto be guided by his own impression alone, but must self-consciouslytest his views against those who have come before, open to thepossibility that a precedent might be correct in ways not initiallyapparent to him.Third, it would be a mistake to readjudicial opinions like statutes. Adopted through a robust anddemocratic process, statutes often apply in all their particularsto all persons. By contrast, when judges reach a decision in ouradversarial system, they render a judgment based only on thefactual record and legal arguments the parties at hand have chosento develop. A later court assessing a past decision must thereforeappreciate the possibility that different facts and different legalarguments may dictate a different outcome. They must appreciate,too, that, like anyone else, judges are “innately digressive,” andtheir opinions may sometimes offer stray asides about a wider topicthat may sound nearly like legislative commands. Duxbury 4. Often,enterprising counsel seek to exploit such statements to maximumeffect. See id., at 25. But while these digressions maysometimes contain valuable counsel, they remain “vapours and fumesof law,” Bacon 478, and cannot “control the judgment in asubsequent suit,” Cohens, 6 Wheat., at 399.These principles, too, have long guided thisCourt and others. As Judge Easterbrook has put it, an “opinion isnot a comprehensive code; it is just an explanation for the Court’sdisposition. Judicial opinions must not be confused with statutes,and general expressions must be read in light of the subject underconsideration.” United States v. Skoien, 614 F.3d638, 640 (CA7 2010) (en banc); see also Reiter v.Sonotone Corp., 442 U.S.330, 341 (1979) (stressing that an opinion is not “a statute,”and its language should not “be parsed” as if it were);Nevada v. Hicks, 533 U.S.353, 372 (2001) (same). If stare decisis counselsrespect for the thinking of those who have come before, it alsocounsels against doing an “injustice to [their] memory” byoverreliance on their every word. Steel, 1 Bl. H., at 53,126 Eng. Rep., at 33. As judges, “[w]e neither expect nor hope thatour successors will comb” through our opinions, searching fordelphic answers to matters we never fully explored. Brown v.Davenport, 596 U.S. 118, 141 (2022). To proceed otherwiserisks “turn[ing] stare decisis from a tool of judicialhumility into one of judicial hubris.” Ibid.IITurning now directly to the question whatstare decisis effect Chevron deference warrants, eachof these lessons seem to me to weigh firmly in favor of the coursethe Court charts today: Lesson 1, because Chevron deferencecontravenes the law Congress prescribed in the AdministrativeProcedure Act. Lesson 2, because Chevron deference runsagainst mainstream currents in our law regarding the separation ofpowers, due process, and centuries-old interpretive rules thatfortify those constitutional commitments. And Lesson 3, because tohold otherwise would effectively require us to endow straystatements in Chevron with the authority of statutorylanguage, all while ignoring more considered language in that samedecision and the teachings of experience.AStart with Lesson 1. The AdministrativeProcedure Act of 1946 (APA) directs a “reviewing court” to “decideall relevant questions of law” and “interpret” relevant“constitutional and statutory provisions.”5U.S.C. §706. When applying Chevrondeference, reviewing courts do not interpret all relevant statutoryprovisions and decide all relevant questions of law. Instead,judges abdicate a large measure of that responsibility in favor ofa*gency officials. Their interpretations of “ambiguous” laws controleven when those interpretations are at odds with the fairestreading of the law an independent “reviewing court” can muster.Agency officials, too, may change their minds about the law’smeaning at any time, even when Congress has not amended therelevant statutory language in any way. National Cable &Telecommunications Assn. v. Brand X Internet Services,545 U.S.967, 982–983 (2005). And those officials may even disagree withand effectively overrule not only their own past interpretations ofa law but a court’s past interpretation as well. Ibid. Noneof that is consistent with the APA’s clear mandate.The hard fact is Chevron “did not evenbother to cite” the APA, let alone seek to apply its terms.United States v. Mead Corp., 533U.S. 218, 241 (2001) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Instead, as evenits most ardent defenders have conceded, Chevron deferencerests upon a “fictionalized statement of legislativedesire,” namely, a judicial supposition that Congress implicitlywishes judges to defer to executive agencies’ interpretations ofthe law even when it has said nothing of the kind. D. Barron &E. Kagan, Chevron’s Nondelegation Doctrine, 2001 S.Ct. Rev.201, 212 (Kagan) (emphasis added). As proponents see it, thatfiction represents a “policy judgmen[t] about what ...make[s] for good government.” Ibid.[2] But in our democracy unelected judges possess noauthority to elevate their own fictions over the laws adopted bythe Nation’s elected representatives. Some might think the legaldirective Congress provided in the APA unwise; some might think adifferent arrangement preferable. See, e.g., post, at9–11 (Kagan, J., dissenting). But it is Congress’s view of “goodgovernment,” not ours, that controls.Much more could be said about Chevron’sinconsistency with the APA. But I have said it in the past. SeeBuffington v. McDonough, 598 U.S. ___, ___–___(2022) (opinion dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at5–6); Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, 834 F.3d 1142,1151–1153 (CA10 2016) (concurring opinion). And the Court makesmany of the same points at length today. See ante, at 18–22.For present purposes, the short of it is that continuing to abideChevron deference would require us to transgress the firstlesson of stare decisis—the humility required of judges torecognize that our decisions must yield to the laws adopted by thepeople’s elected representatives.[3]BLesson 2 cannot rescue Chevrondeference. If stare decisis calls for judicial humility inthe face of the written law, it also cautions us to test ourpresent conclusions carefully against the work of our predecessors.At the same time and as we have seen, this second form of humilitycounsels us to remember that precedents that have won theendorsem*nt of judges across many generations, demonstratedcoherence with our broader law, and weathered the tests of time andexperience are entitled to greater consideration than those thathave not. See Part I, supra. Viewed by each of these lights,the case for Chevron deference only grows weaker still.1Start with a look to how our predecessorstraditionally understood the judicial role in disputes over a law’smeaning. From the Nation’s founding, they considered “[t]heinterpretation of the laws” in cases and controversies “the properand peculiar province of the courts.” The Federalist No. 78,p.467 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961) (A. Hamilton). Perhaps theCourt’s most famous early decision reflected exactly that view.There, Chief Justice Marshall declared it “emphatically theprovince and duty of the judicial department to say what the lawis.” Marbury, 1 Cranch, at 177. For judges “have neitherFORCE nor WILL but merely judgment”—and an obligation to exercisethat judgment independently. The Federalist No. 78, at 465. Nomatter how “disagreeable that duty may be,” this Court has said, ajudge “is not at liberty to surrender, or to waive it.” UnitedStates v. Dickson, 15 Pet. 141, 162 (1841) (Story, J.).This duty of independent judgment is perhaps “the definingcharacteristi[c] of Article III judges.” Stern v.Marshall, 564 U.S.462, 483 (2011).To be sure, this Court has also long extended“great respect” to the “contemporaneous” and consistent views ofthe coordinate branches about the meaning of a statute’s terms.Edwards’ Lessee v. Darby, 12 Wheat. 206, 210 (1827);see also McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 401(1819); Stuart v. Laird, 1 Cranch 299, 309(1803).[4] But traditionally,that did not mean a court had to “defer” to any “reasonable”construction of an “ambiguous” law that an executive agency mightoffer. It did not mean that the government could propound a“reasonable” view of the law’s meaning one day, a different one thenext, and bind the judiciary always to its latest word. Nor did itmean the executive could displace a pre-existing judicialconstruction of a statute’s terms, replace it with its own, andeffectively overrule a judicial precedent in the process. Putsimply, this Court was “not bound” by any and all reasonable“administrative construction[s]” of ambiguous statutes whenresolving cases and controversies. Burnet v. ChicagoPortrait Co., 285 U.S.1, 16 (1932). While the executive’s consistent andcontemporaneous views warranted respect, they “by no meanscontrol[led] the action or the opinion of this court in expoundingthe law with reference to the rights of parties litigant beforethem.” Irvine v. Marshall, 20 How. 558, 567 (1858);see also A. Bamzai, The Origins of Judicial Deference to ExecutiveInterpretation, 126 Yale L. J. 908, 987 (2017).Sensing how jarringly inconsistentChevron is with this Court’s many longstanding precedentsdiscussing the nature of the judicial role in disputes over thelaw’s meaning, the government and dissent struggle for a response.The best they can muster is a handful of cases from the early 1940sin which, they say, this Court first “put [deference] principlesinto action.” Post, at 21 (Kagan, J., dissenting). And,admittedly, for a period this Court toyed with a form of deferenceakin to Chevron, at least for so-called mixed questions oflaw and fact. See, e.g., Gray v. Powell,314 U.S.402, 411–412 (1941); NLRB v. Hearst Publications,Inc., 322 U.S.111, 131 (1944). But, as the Court details, even that limitedexperiment did not last. See ante, at 10–12. JusticeRoberts, in his Gray dissent, decried these decisions for“abdicat[ing our] function as a court of review” and “complete[ly]revers[ing] ... the normal and usual method ofconstruing a statute.” 314 U.S., at 420–421. And just a fewyears later, in Skidmore v. Swift & Co.,323 U.S.134 (1944), the Court returned to its time-worn path.Echoing themes that had run throughout our lawfrom its start, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote for the Court inSkidmore. There, he said, courts may extend respectfulconsideration to another branch’s interpretation of the law, butthe weight due those interpretations must always “depend uponthe[ir] thoroughness ..., the validity of [their]reasoning, [their] consistency with earlier and laterpronouncements, and all those factors which give [them] power topersuade.” Id., at 140. In another case the same year, andagain writing for the Court, Justice Jackson expressly rejected acall for a judge-made doctrine of deference much likeChevron, offering that, “[i]f Congress had deemed itnecessary or even appropriate” for courts to “defe[r] toadministrative construction[,] ... it would not havebeen at a loss for words to say so.” Davies Warehouse Co. v.Bowles, 321 U.S.144, 156 (1944).To the extent proper respect for precedentdemands, as it always has, special respect for longstanding andmainstream decisions, Chevron scores badly. It representednot a continuation of a long line of decisions but a break fromthem. Worse, it did not merely depart from our precedents. Morenearly, Chevron defied them.2Consider next how uneasily Chevrondeference sits alongside so many other settled aspects of our law.Having witnessed first-hand King George’s efforts to gain influenceand control over colonial judges, see Declaration of Independence ¶11, the framers made a considered judgment to build judicialindependence into the Constitution’s design. They vested thejudicial power in decisionmakers with life tenure. Art.III,§1. They placed the judicial salary beyond political control duringa judge’s tenure. Ibid. And they rejected any proposal thatwould subject judicial decisions to review by political actors. TheFederalist No. 81, at 482; United States v. Hansen,599 U.S. 762, 786–791 (2023) (Thomas, J., concurring). All of thisserved to ensure the same thing: “A fair trial in a fair tribunal.”Inre Murchison, 349 U.S.133, 136 (1955). One in which impartial judges, not thosecurrently wielding power in the political branches, would “say whatthe law is” in cases coming to court. Marbury, 1 Cranch, at177.Chevron deference undermines all that. Itprecludes courts from exercising the judicial power vested in themby Article III to say what the law is. It forces judges to abandonthe best reading of the law in favor of views of those presentlyholding the reins of the Executive Branch. It requires judges tochange, and change again, their interpretations of the law as andwhen the government demands. And that transfer of power has exactlythe sort of consequences one might expect. Rather than insulateadjudication from power and politics to ensure a fair hearing“without respect to persons” as the federal judicial oath demands,28 U.S.C. §453, Chevron deference requirescourts to “place a finger on the scales of justice in favor of themost powerful of litigants, the federal government.”Buffington, 598 U.S., at ___ (slip op., at 9). Alongthe way, Chevron deference guarantees “systematic bias” infavor of whichever political party currently holds the levers ofexecutive power. P. Hamburger, Chevron Bias, 84 Geo. Wash.L. Rev. 1187, 1212 (2016).Chevron deference undermines otheraspects of our settled law, too. In this country, we often boastthat the Constitution’s promise of due process of law, see Amdts.5, 14, means that “‘no man can be a judge in his owncase.’” Williams v. Pennsylvania, 579 U.S. 1,8–9 (2016); Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386, 388 (1798)(opinion of Chase, J.). That principle, of course, has even deeperroots, tracing far back into the common law where it was known bythe Latin maxim nemo iudex in causa sua. See 1 E. co*ke,Institutes of the Laws of England §212, *141a. Yet, under theChevron regime, all that means little, for executiveagencies may effectively judge the scope of their own lawfulpowers. See, e.g., Arlington v. FCC, 569 U.S.290, 296–297 (2013).Traditionally, as well, courts have sought toconstrue statutes as a reasonable reader would “when the law wasmade.” Blackstone 59; see United States v. Fisher, 2Cranch 358, 386 (1805). Today, some call this “textualism.” Butreally it’s a very old idea, one that constrains judges to alawfinding rather than lawmaking role by focusing their work on thestatutory text, its linguistic context, and various canons ofconstruction. In that way, textualism serves as an essentialguardian of the due process promise of fair notice. If a judgecould discard an old meaning and assign a new one to a law’s terms,all without any legislative revision, how could people ever be sureof the rules that bind them? New Prime Inc. v.Oliveira, 586 U.S. 105, 113 (2019). Were the rulesotherwise, Blackstone warned, the people would be rendered “slavesto their magistrates.” 4Blackstone 371.Yet, replace “magistrates” with “bureaucrats,”and Blackstone’s fear becomes reality when courts employChevron deference. Whenever we confront an ambiguity in thelaw, judges do not seek to resolve it impartially according to thebest evidence of the law’s original meaning. Instead, we resort toa far cruder heuristic: “The reasonable bureaucrat always wins.”And because the reasonable bureaucrat may change his mindyear-to-year and election-to-election, the people can never knowwith certainty what new “interpretations” might be used againstthem. This “fluid” approach to statutory interpretation is “as mucha trap for the innocent as the ancient laws of Caligula,” whichwere posted so high up on the walls and in print so small thatordinary people could never be sure what they required. UnitedStates v. Cardiff, 344 U.S.174, 176 (1952).The ancient rule of lenity is still another ofChevron’s victims. Since the founding, American courts haveconstrued ambiguities in penal laws against the government and withlenity toward affected persons. Wooden v. UnitedStates, 595 U.S. 360, 388–390 (2022) (Gorsuch, J.,concurring in judgment). That principle upholds due process bysafeguarding individual liberty in the face of ambiguous laws.Ibid. And it fortifies the separation of powers by keepingthe power of punishment firmly “‘in the legislative, not inthe judicial department.’” Id., at 391 (quotingUnited States v. Wiltberger, 5 Wheat. 76, 95 (1820)).But power begets power. And pressing Chevron deference asfar as it can go, the government has sometimes managed to leverage“ambiguities” in the written law to penalize conduct Congress neverclearly proscribed. Compare Guedes v. ATF, 920 F.3d1, 27–28, 31 (CADC 2019), with Garland v. Cargill,602 U.S. 604 (2024).In all these ways, Chevron’s fiction hasled us to a strange place. One where authorities long thoughtreserved for Article III are transferred to Article II, where thescales of justice are tilted systematically in favor of the mostpowerful, where legal demands can change with every election eventhough the laws do not, and where the people are left to guessabout their legal rights and responsibilities. So much tension withso many foundational features of our legal order is surely one moresign that we have “taken a wrong turn along the way.” Kisorv. Wilkie, 588 U.S. 558, 607 (2019) (Gorsuch, J., concurringin judgment).[5]3Finally, consider workability and reliance.If, as I have sought to suggest, these factors may sometimes serveas useful proxies for the question whether a precedent comportswith the historic tide of judicial practice or represents anaberrational mistake, see Part I–C, supra, they certainly dohere.Take Chevron’s “workability.” Throughoutit* short life, this Court has been forced to supplement and reviseChevron so many times that no one can agree on how many“steps” it requires, nor even what each of those “steps” entails.Some suggest that the analysis begins with “step zero” (perhapsitself a tell), an innovation that traces to United Statesv. Mead Corp., 533 U.S.218. Mead held that, before even considering whetherChevron applies, a court must determine whether Congressmeant to delegate to the agency authority to interpret the law in agiven field. 533 U.S., at 226–227. But that exercise faces animmediate challenge: Because Chevron depends on a judiciallyimplied, rather than a legislatively expressed, delegation ofinterpretive authority to an executive agency, Part II–A,supra, when should the fiction apply and when not?Mead fashioned a multifactor test for judges to use. 533U.S., at 229–231. But that test has proved as indeterminatein application as it was contrived in origin. Perhaps for thesereasons, perhaps for others, this Court has sometimes appliedMead and often ignored it. See Brand X, 545U.S., at 1014, n.8 (Scalia, J., dissenting).Things do not improve as we move up theChevron ladder. At “step one,” a judge must defer to anexecutive official’s interpretation when the statute at hand is“ambiguous.” But even today, Chevron’s principalbeneficiary—the federal government—still cannot say when a statuteis sufficiently ambiguous to trigger deference. See, e.g.,Tr. of Oral Arg. in American Hospital Assn. v.Becerra, O. T. 2021, No.20–1114, pp.71–72.Perhaps thanks to this particular confusion, the search forambiguity has devolved into a sort of Snark hunt: Some judges claimto spot it almost everywhere, while other equally fine judges claimnever to have seen it. Compare L. Silberman, Chevron—TheIntersection of Law & Policy, 58 Geo. Wash. L.Rev. 821,826 (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).Nor do courts agree when it comes to “step two.”There, a judge must assess whether an executive agency’sinterpretation of an ambiguous statute is “reasonable.” But whatdoes that inquiry demand? Some courts engage in a comparativelysearching review; others almost reflexively defer to an agency’sviews. Here again, courts have pursued “wildly different”approaches and reached wildly different conclusions in similarcases. See B. Kavanaugh, Fixing Statutory Interpretation, 129 Harv.L. Rev. 2118, 2152 (2016) (Kavanaugh).Today’s cases exemplify some of these problems.We have before us two circuit decisions, three opinions, and atleast as many interpretive options on the Chevron menu. Onthe one hand, we have the D. C. Circuit majority, which deemed theMagnuson-Stevens Act “ambiguous” and upheld the agency’s regulationas “‘permissible.’” 45 F.4th 359, 365 (2022). Onthe other hand, we have the D. C. Circuit dissent, which argues thestatute is “unambiguou[s]” and that it plainly forecloses theagency’s new rule. Id., at 372 (opinion of Walker, J.). Andon yet a third hand, we have the First Circuit, which claimed tohave identified “clear textual support” for the regulation, yetrefused to say whether it would “classify [its] conclusion as aproduct of Chevron step one or step two.” 62 F.4th621, 631, 634 (2023). As these cases illustrate, Chevron hasturned statutory interpretation into a game of bingo underblindfold, with parties guessing at how many boxes there are andwhich one their case might ultimately fall in.Turn now from workability to reliance. Far fromengendering reliance interests, the whole point of Chevrondeference is to upset them. Under Chevron, executiveofficials can replace one “reasonable” interpretation with anotherat any time, all without any change in the law itself. The result:Affected individuals “can never be sure of their legal rights andduties.” Buffington, 598 U.S., at ___ (slip op., at12).How bad is the problem? Take just one example.Brand X concerned a law regulating broadband internetservices. There, the Court upheld an agency rule adopted by theadministration of President George W. Bush because it was premisedon a “reasonable” interpretation of the statute. Later, PresidentBarack Obama’s administration rescinded the rule and replaced itwith another. Later still, during President Donald J. Trump’sadministration, officials replaced that rule with a different one,all before President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.’s administration declaredits intention to reverse course for yet a fourth time. SeeSafeguarding and Securing the Open Internet, 88 Fed. Reg. 76048(2023); Brand X, 545 U.S., at 981–982. Each time, thegovernment claimed its new rule was just as “reasonable” as thelast. Rather than promoting reliance by fixing the meaning of thelaw, Chevron deference engenders constant uncertainty andconvulsive change even when the statute at issue itself remainsunchanged.Nor are these antireliance harms distributedequally. Sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able tokeep pace with rule changes affecting their rights andresponsibilities. They may be able to lobby for new“‘reasonable’” agency interpretations and even capturethe agencies that issue them. Buffington, 598 U.S., at___, ___ (slip op., at 8, 13). But ordinary people can do none ofthose things. They are the ones who suffer the worst kind ofregulatory whiplash Chevron invites.Consider a couple of examples. ThomasBuffington, a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, was injured inthe line of duty. For a time after he left the Air Force, theDepartment of Veterans Affairs (VA) paid disability benefits duehim by law. But later the government called on Mr. Buffington toreenter active service. During that period, everyone agreed, the VAcould (as it did) suspend his disability payments. After he leftactive service for a second time, however, the VA turned hispatriotism against him. By law, Congress permitted the VA tosuspend disability pay only “for any period for which [aservicemember] receives active service pay.” 38 U.S.C.§5304(c). But the VA had adopted a self-serving regulationrequiring veterans to file a form asking for the resumption oftheir disability pay after a second (or subsequent) stint in activeservice. 38 CFR §3.654(b)(2) (2021). Unaware of the regulation, Mr.Buffington failed to reapply immediately. When he finally figuredout what had happened and reapplied, the VA agreed to resumepayments going forward but refused to give Mr. Buffington all ofthe past disability payments it had withheld. Buffington,598 U.S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 1–4).Mr. Buffington challenged the agency’s action asinconsistent with Congress’s direction that the VA may suspenddisability payments only for those periods when a veteran returnsto active service. But armed with Chevron, the agencydefeated Mr. Buffington’s claim. Maybe the self-serving regulationthe VA cited as justification for its action was not premised onthe best reading of the law, courts said, but it represented a“‘permissible’” one. 598 U.S., at ___ (slip op.,at 7). In that way, the Executive Branch was able to evadeCongress’s promises to someone who took the field repeatedly in theNation’s defense.In another case, one which I heard as a court ofappeals judge, De Niz Robles v. Lynch, 803 F.3d 1165(CA10 2015), the Board of Immigration Appeals invokedChevron to overrule a judicial precedent on which manyimmigrants had relied, see Inre Briones, 24 I. &N. Dec. 355, 370 (BIA 2007) (purporting to overrulePadilla–Caldera v. Gonzales, 426 F.3d 1294 (CA10 2005)). The agency then sought to apply itsnew interpretation retroactively to punish thoseimmigrants—including Alfonzo De Niz Robles, who had relied on thatjudicial precedent as authority to remain in this country with hisU.S. wife and four children. See 803 F.3d, at1168–1169. Our court ruled that this retrospective application ofthe BIA’s new interpretation of the law violated Mr. De NizRobles’s due process rights. Id., at 1172. But as a lowercourt, we could treat only the symptom, not the disease. SoChevron permitted the agency going forward to overrule ajudicial decision about the best reading of the law with its owndifferent “reasonable” one and in that way deny relief to countlessfuture immigrants.Those are just two stories among so many thatfederal judges could tell (and have told) about what Chevrondeference has meant for ordinary people interacting with thefederal government. See, e.g., Lambert v.Saul, 980 F.3d 1266, 1268–1276 (CA9 2020); Valent v.Commissioner of Social Security, 918 F.3d 516,525–527 (CA6 2019) (Kethledge, J., dissenting); Gonzalez v.United States Atty. Gen., 820 F.3d 399, 402–405 (CA11 2016)(percuriam).What does the federal government have to sayabout this? It acknowledges that Chevron sits as a heavyweight on the scale in favor of the government, “oppositional” tomany “categories of individuals.” Tr. of Oral Arg. in No. 22–1219,p.133 (Relentless Tr.). But, according to the government,Chevron deference is too important an innovation to undo. Inits brief reign, the government says, it has become a“fundamenta[l] ... ground rul[e] for how all threebranches of the government are operating together.” Relentless Tr.102. But, in truth, the Constitution, the APA, and our longstandingprecedents set those ground rules some time ago. And under them,agencies cannot invoke a judge-made fiction to unsettle ourNation’s promise to individuals that they are entitled to maketheir arguments about the law’s demands on them in a fair hearing,one in which they stand on equal footing with the government beforean independent judge.CHow could a Court, guided for 200 years byChief Justice Marshall’s example, come to embrace acounter-Marbury revolution, one at war with the APA, timehonored precedents, and so much surrounding law? To answer thesequestions, turn to Lesson 3 and witness the temptation to endow astray passage in a judicial decision with extraordinary authority.Call it “power quoting.”Chevron was an unlikely place for arevolution to begin. The case concerned the Clean Air Act’srequirement that States regulate “stationary sources” of airpollution in their borders. See42U.S.C.§7401 etseq. At thetime, it was an open question whether entire industrial plants ortheir constituent polluting parts counted as “stationary sources.”The Environmental Protection Agency had defined entire plants assources, an approach that allowed companies to replace individualplant parts without automatically triggering the permittingrequirements that apply to new sources. Chevron,467U.S., at 840.This Court upheld the EPA’s definition asconsistent with the governing statute. Id., at 866. Thedecision, issued by a bare quorum of the Court, without concurrenceor dissent, purported to apply “well-settled principles.”Id., at 845. “If a court, employing traditional tools ofstatutory construction, ascertains that Congress had an intentionon the precise question at issue,” Chevron provided, then“that intention is the law and must be given effect.” Id.,at 843, n.9. Many of the cases Chevron cited tosupport its judgment stood for the traditional proposition thatcourts afford respectful consideration, not deference, to executiveinterpretations of the law. See, e.g., Burnet, 285U.S., at 16; United States v. Moore, 95 U.S.760, 763 (1878). And the decision’s sole citation to legalscholarship was to Roscoe Pound, who long championed de novojudicial review. 467 U.S., at 843, n.10; see R. Pound,The Place of the Judiciary in a Democratic Polity, 27A.B.A. J. 133, 136–137 (1941).At the same time, of course, the opinioncontained bits and pieces that spoke differently. The decision alsosaid that, “if [a] statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to[a] specific issue, the question for the court is whether theagency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of thestatute.” 467U.S., at 843. But it seems the governmentdidn’t advance this formulation in its brief, so there was noadversarial engagement on it. T. Merrill, The Story ofChevron: The Making of an Accidental Landmark, 66 Admin.L.Rev. 253, 268 (2014) (Merrill). As we have seen, too, theCourt did not pause to consider (or even mention) the APA. See PartII–A, supra. It did not discuss contrary precedents issuedby the Court since the founding, let alone purport to overrule anyof them. See Part II–B–1, supra. Nor did the Court seek toaddress how its novel rule of deference might be squared with somuch surrounding law. See Part II–B–2, supra. As even itsdefenders have acknowledged, “Chevron barely bothered tojustify its rule of deference, and the few brief passages on thismatter pointed in disparate directions.” Kagan 212–213. “[T]hequality of the reasoning,” they acknowledge, “was not high,” C.Sunstein, Chevron as Law, 107 Geo. L.J. 1613, 1669(2019).If Chevron meant to usher in a revolutionin how judges interpret laws, no one appears to have realized it atthe time. Chevron’s author, Justice Stevens, characterizedthe decision as a “simpl[e] ... restatement of existinglaw, nothing more or less.” Merrill 255, 275. In the “19 arguedcases” in the following Term “that presented some kind of questionabout whether the Court should defer to an agency interpretation ofstatutory law,” this Court cited Chevron just once. Merrill276. By some accounts, the decision seemed “destined to obscurity.”Ibid.It was only three years later when JusticeScalia wrote a concurrence that a revolution began to take shape.Buffington, 598 U.S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). There,he argued for a new rule requiring courts to defer to executiveagency interpretations of the law whenever a “‘statute issilent or ambiguous.’” NLRB v. Food &Commercial Workers, 484 U.S.112, 133–134 (1987) (opinion of Scalia, J.). Eventually, amajority of the Court followed his lead. Buffington, 598U.S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). But from the start, JusticeScalia made no secret about the scope of his ambitions. SeeJudicial Deference to Administrative Interpretations of Law, 1989Duke L. J. 511, 521 (1989) (Scalia). The rule he advocated forrepresented such a sharp break from prior practice, he explained,that many judges of his day didn’t yet “understand” the “oldcriteria” were “no longer relevant.” Ibid. Still, he said,overthrowing the past was worth it because a new deferential rulewould be “easier to follow.” Ibid.Events proved otherwise. As the years wore onand the Court’s new and aggressive reading of Chevrongradually exposed itself as unworkable, unfair, and at odds withour separation of powers, Justice Scalia could have doubled down onthe project. But he didn’t. He appreciated that staredecisis is not a rule of “if I thought it yesterday, I mustthink it tomorrow.” And rather than cling to the pride of personalprecedent, the Justice began to express doubts over the veryproject that he had worked to build. See Perez v.Mortgage Bankers Assn., 575 U.S.92, 109–110 (2015) (opinion concurring in judgment); cf.Decker v. Northwest Environmental Defense Center,568 U.S.597, 617–618, 621 (2013) (opinion concurring in part anddissenting in part). If Chevron’s ascent is a testament tothe Justice’s ingenuity, its demise is an even greater tribute tohis humility.[6]Justice Scalia was not alone in hisreconsideration. After years spent laboring under Chevron,trying to make sense of it and make it work, Member after Member ofthis Court came to question the project. See, e.g.,Pereira v. Sessions, 585 U.S. 198, 219–221 (2018)(Kennedy, J., concurring); Michigan v. EPA, 576 U.S.743, 760–764 (2015) (Thomas, J., concurring); Kisor, 588U.S., at 591 (Roberts, C. J., concurring in part);Gutierrez-Brizuela, 834 F.3d, at 1153;Buffington, 598 U.S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–15);Kavanaugh 2150–2154. Ultimately, the Court gave up. Despiterepeated invitations, it has not applied Chevron deferencesince 2016. Relentless Tr. 81; App. to Brief for Respondents in No.22–1219, p.68a. So an experiment that began only in themid-1980s effectively ended eight years ago. Along the way, anunusually large number of federal appellate judges voiced their ownthoughtful and extensive criticisms of Chevron.Buffington, 598 U.S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–15)(collecting examples). A number of state courts did, too, refusingto import Chevron deference into their own administrativelaw jurisprudence. See 598 U.S., at ___ (slip op., at15).Even if all that and everything else laid outabove is true, the government suggests we should retainChevron deference because judges simply cannot live withoutit; some statutes are just too “technical” for courts to interpret“intelligently.” Post, at 9, 32 (dissenting opinion). Butthat objection is no answer to Chevron’s inconsistency withCongress’s directions in the APA, so much surrounding law, or thechallenges its multistep regime have posed in practice. Nor doeshistory counsel such defeatism. Surely, it would be a mistake tosuggest our predecessors before Chevron’s rise in themid-1980s were unable to make their way intelligently throughtechnical statutory disputes. Following their lead, over the pasteight years this Court has managed to resolve even highly complexcases without Chevron deference, and done so even when thegovernment sought deference. Nor, as far as I am aware, did anyMember of the Court suggest Chevron deference was necessaryto an intelligent resolution of any of those matters.[7] If anything, by affording Chevrondeference a period of repose before addressing whether it should beretained, the Court has enabled its Members to test the proprietyof that precedent and reflect more deeply on how well it fits intothe broader architecture of our law. Others may see thingsdifferently, see post, at 26–27 (dissenting opinion), butthe caution the Court has exhibited before overrulingChevron may illustrate one of the reasons why the currentCourt has been slower to overrule precedents than some of itspredecessors, see Part I–C, supra.None of this, of course, discharges any Memberof this Court from the task of deciding for himself or herselftoday whether Chevron deference itself warrants deference.But when so many past and current judicial colleagues in this Courtand across the country tell us our doctrine is misguided, and whenwe ourselves managed without Chevron for centuries andmanage to do so today, the humility at the core of staredecisis compels us to pause and reflect carefully on the wisdomembodied in that experience. And, in the end, to my mind thelessons of experience counsel wisely against continued reliance onChevron’s stray and unconsidered digression. This Court’sopinions fill over 500 volumes, and perhaps “some printed judicialword may be found to support almost any plausible proposition.” R.Jackson, Decisional Law and Stare Decisis, 30 A.B.A. J.334 (1944). It is not for us to pick and choose passages we happento like and demand total obedience to them in perpetuity. Thatwould turn stare decisis from a doctrine of humility into atool for judicial opportunism. Brown, 596 U.S., at141.IIIProper respect for precedent helps “keep thescale of justice even and steady,” by reinforcing decisional rulesconsistent with the law upon which all can rely. 1 Blackstone 69.But that respect does not require, nor does it readily tolerate, asteadfast refusal to correct mistakes. As early as 1810, this Courthad already overruled one of its cases. See Hudson v.Guestier, 6 Cranch 281, 284 (overruling Rose v.Himely, 4 Cranch 241 (1808)). In recent years, the Court mayhave overruled precedents less frequently than it did during theWarren and Burger Courts. See Part I–C, supra. But the jobof reconsidering past decisions remains one every Member of thisCourt faces from time to time.[8]Justice William O. Douglas served longer on thisCourt than any other person in the Nation’s history. During histenure, he observed how a new colleague might be inclined initiallyto “revere” every word written in an opinion issued before hearrived. W. Douglas, Stare Decisis, 49 Colum. L. Rev. 735, 736(1949). But, over time, Justice Douglas reflected, his newcolleague would “remembe[r] ... that it is theConstitution which he swore to support and defend, not the glosswhich his predecessors may have put on it.” Ibid. And “[s]ohe [would] com[e] to formulate his own views, rejecting someearlier ones as false and embracing others.” Ibid. Thisprocess of reexamination, Justice Douglas explained, is a“necessary consequence of our system” in which each judge takes anoath—both “personal” and binding—to discern the law’s meaning forhimself and apply it faithfully in the cases that come before him.Id., at 736–737.Justice Douglas saw, too, how appeals toprecedent could be overstated and sometimes even overwrought.Judges, he reflected, would sometimes first issue “new andstartling decision[s],” and then later spin around and “acquire anacute conservatism” in their aggressive defense of “their newstatus quo.” Id., at 737. In that way, even the mostnovel and unlikely decisions became “coveted anchorage[s],”defended heatedly, if ironically, under the banner of “staredecisis.” Ibid.; see also Edwards v.Vannoy, 593 U.S. 255, 294, n.7 (2021) (Gorsuch, J.,concurring).That is Chevron’s story: A revolutionmasquerading as the status quo. And the defense of it follows thesame course Justice Douglas described. Though our dissentingcolleagues have not hesitated to question other precedents in thepast, they today manifest what Justice Douglas called an “acuteconservatism” for Chevron’s “startling” development,insisting that if this “coveted anchorage” is abandoned the heavenswill fall. But the Nation managed to live with busy executiveagencies of all sorts long before the Chevron revolutionbegan to take shape in the mid-1980s. And all today’s decisionmeans is that, going forward, federal courts will do exactly asthis Court has since 2016, exactly as it did before the mid-1980s,and exactly as it had done since the founding: resolve cases andcontroversies without any systemic bias in the government’sfavor.Proper respect for precedent does not begin tosuggest otherwise. Instead, it counsels respect for the writtenlaw, adherence to consistent teachings over aberrations, andresistance to the temptation of treating our own stray remarks asif they were statutes. And each of those lessons points toward thesame conclusion today: Chevron deference is inconsistentwith the directions Congress gave us in the APA. It represents agrave anomaly when viewed against the sweep of historic judicialpractice. The decision undermines core rule-of-law values rangingfrom the promise of fair notice to the promise of a fair hearing.Even on its own terms, it has proved unworkable and operated toundermine rather than advance reliance interests, often to thedetriment of ordinary Americans. And from the start, the wholeproject has relied on the overaggressive use of snippets and strayremarks from an opinion that carried mixed messages. Staredecisis’s true lesson today is not that we are bound to respectChevron’s “startling development,” but bound to interit.

SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES_________________Nos. 22–451 and 22–1219_________________LOPER BRIGHT ENTERPRISES, etal.,PETITIONERS22–451v.GINA RAIMONDO, SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,etal.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the district of columbia circuitRELENTLESS, INC., et al.,PETITIONERS22–1219v.DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE, et al.on writ of certiorari to the united statescourt of appeals for the first circuit[June 28, 2024]Justice Kagan, with whom Justice Sotomayor andJustice Jackson join,[1]*dissenting.For 40 years, Chevron U.S.A.Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.,467 U.S.837 (1984), has served as a cornerstone of administrative law,allocating responsibility for statutory construction between courtsand agencies. Under Chevron, a court uses all its normalinterpretive tools to determine whether Congress has spoken to anissue. If the court finds Congress has done so, that is the end ofthe matter; the agency’s views make no difference. But if the courtfinds, at the end of its interpretive work, that Congress has leftan ambiguity or gap, then a choice must be made. Who should givecontent to a statute when Congress’s instructions have run out?Should it be a court? Or should it be the agency Congress hascharged with administering the statute? The answer Chevrongives is that it should usually be the agency, within the bounds ofreasonableness. That rule has formed the backdrop against whichCongress, courts, and agencies—as well as regulated parties and thepublic—all have operated for decades. It has been applied inthousands of judicial decisions. It has become part of the warp andwoof of modern government, supporting regulatory efforts of allkinds—to name a few, keeping air and water clean, food and drugssafe, and financial markets honest.And the rule is right. This Court has longunderstood Chevron deference to reflect what Congress wouldwant, and so to be rooted in a presumption of legislative intent.Congress knows that it does not—in fact cannot—write perfectlycomplete regulatory statutes. It knows that those statutes willinevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have toresolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And itwould usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not acourt. Some interpretive issues arising in the regulatory contextinvolve scientific or technical subject matter. Agencies haveexpertise in those areas; courts do not. Some demand a detailedunderstanding of complex and interdependent regulatory programs.Agencies know those programs inside-out; again, courts do not. Andsome present policy choices, including trade-offs between competinggoods. Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to thepublic for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability andno proper basis for making policy. And of course Congress hasconferred on that expert, experienced, and politically accountableagency the authority to administer—to make rules about andotherwise implement—the statute giving rise to the ambiguity orgap. Put all that together and deference to the agency is thealmost obvious choice, based on an implicit congressionaldelegation of interpretive authority. We defer, the Court hasexplained, “because of a presumption that Congress” would have“desired the agency (rather than the courts)” to exercise “whateverdegree of discretion” the statute allows. Smiley v.Citibank (South Dakota), N.A., 517U.S. 735, 740–741 (1996).Today, the Court flips the script: It is now“the courts (rather than the agency)” that will wield power whenCongress has left an area of interpretive discretion. A rule ofjudicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris. In recentyears, this Court has too often taken for itself decision-makingauthority Congress assigned to agencies. The Court has substitutedits own judgment on workplace health for that of the OccupationalSafety and Health Administration; its own judgment on climatechange for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its ownjudgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education.See, e.g., National Federation of IndependentBusiness v. OSHA, 595 U.S. 109 (2022); WestVirginia v. EPA, 597 U.S. 697 (2022); Biden v.Nebraska, 600 U.S. 477 (2023). But evidently that was, forthis Court, all too piecemeal. In one fell swoop, the majoritytoday gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matterhow expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning ofregulatory law. As if it did not have enough on its plate, themajority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar. Itdefends that move as one (suddenly) required by the (nearly80-year-old) Administrative Procedure Act. But the Act makes nosuch demand. Today’s decision is not one Congress directed. It isentirely the majority’s choice.And the majority cannot destroy one doctrine ofjudicial humility without making a laughing-stock of a second. (Ifopinions had titles, a good candidate for today’s would be HubrisSquared.) Stare decisis is, among other things, a way toremind judges that wisdom often lies in what prior judges havedone. It is a brake on the urge to convert “every new judge’sopinion” into a new legal rule or regime. Dobbs v.Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215, 388(2022) (joint opinion of Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, JJ.,dissenting) (quoting 1 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws ofEngland 69 (7th ed. 1775)). Chevron is entrenched precedent,entitled to the protection of stare decisis, as even themajority acknowledges. In fact, Chevron is entitled to thesupercharged version of that doctrine because Congress could alwaysoverrule the decision, and because so many governmental and privateactors have relied on it for so long. Because that is so, themajority needs a “particularly special justification” for itsaction. Kisor v. Wilkie, 588 U.S. 558, 588 (2019)(opinion of the Court). But the majority has nothing that wouldqualify. It barely tries to advance the usual factors this Courtinvokes for overruling precedent. Its justification comes down, inthe end, to this: Courts must have more say over regulation—overthe provision of health care, the protection of the environment,the safety of consumer products, the efficacy of transportationsystems, and so on. A longstanding precedent at the crux ofadministrative governance thus falls victim to a bald assertion ofjudicial authority. The majority disdains restraint, and grasps forpower.IBegin with the problem that gave rise toChevron (and also to its older precursors): The regulatorystatutes Congress passes often contain ambiguities and gaps.Sometimes they are intentional. Perhaps Congress “consciouslydesired” the administering agency to fill in aspects of thelegislative scheme, believing that regulatory experts would be “ina better position” than legislators to do so. Chevron, 467U.S., at 865. Or “perhaps Congress was unable to forge acoalition on either side” of a question, and the contending parties“decided to take their chances with” the agency’s resolution.Ibid. Sometimes, though, the gaps or ambiguities are whatmight be thought of as predictable accidents. They may be theresult of sloppy drafting, a not infrequent legislative occurrence.Or they may arise from the well-known limits of language orforesight. Accord, ante, at 7, 22. “The subject matter” of astatutory provision may be too “specialized and varying” to“capture in its every detail.” Kisor, 588 U.S., at 566(plurality opinion). Or the provision may give rise, years ordecades down the road, to an issue the enacting Congress could nothave anticipated. Whichever the case—whatever the reason—the resultis to create uncertainty about some aspect of a provision’smeaning.Consider a few examples from the caselaw. Theywill help show what a typical Chevron question looks like—orreally, what a typical Chevron question is. Becausewhen choosing whether to send some class of questions mainly to acourt, or mainly to an agency, abstract analysis can only go sofar; indeed, it may obscure what matters most. So I begin with theconcrete:Under the Public Health Service Act, the Foodand Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological product[s],”including “protein[s].” 42 U.S.C. §262(i)(1). When doesan alpha amino acid polymer qualify as such a “protein”? Must ithave a specific, defined sequence of amino acids? See TevaPharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. FDA, 514 F. Supp. 3d 66,79–80, 93–106 (DC 2020).Under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish andWildlife Service must designate endangered “vertebrate fish orwildlife” species, including “distinct population segment[s]” ofthose species. 16 U.S.C. §1532(16); see §1533. Whatmakes one population segment “distinct” from another? Must theService treat the Washington State population of western graysquirrels as “distinct”00because it is geographically separated fromother western gray squirrels? Or can the Service take into accountthat the genetic makeup of the Washington population does notdiffer markedly from the rest? See Northwest EcosystemAlliance v. United States Fish and Wildlife Serv., 475F.3d 1136, 1140–1145, 1149 (CA9 2007).Under the Medicare program, reimbursem*nts tohospitals are adjusted to reflect “differences in hospital wagelevels” across “geographic area[s].” 42 U.S.C.§1395ww(d)(3)(E)(i). How should the Department of Health and HumanServices measure a “geographic area”? By city? By county? Bymetropolitan area? See Bellevue Hospital Center v.Leavitt, 443 F.3d 163, 174–176 (CA2 2006).Congress directed the Department of theInterior and the Federal Aviation Administration to reduce noisefrom aircraft flying over Grand Canyon National Park—specifically,to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet.”§3(b)(1), 101 Stat. 676; see §3(b)(2). How much noise is consistentwith “the natural quiet”? And how much of the park, for how manyhours a day, must be that quiet for the “substantial restoration”requirement to be met? See Grand Canyon Air Tour Coalitionv. FAA, 154 F.3d 455, 466–467, 474–475 (CADC 1998).Or take Chevron itself. In amendments tothe Clean Air Act, Congress told States to require permits formodifying or constructing “stationary sources” of air pollution. 42U.S.C. §7502(c)(5). Does the term “stationarysource[]” refer to each pollution-emitting piece of equipmentwithin a plant? Or does it refer to the entire plant, and thusallow escape from the permitting requirement when increasedemissions from one piece of equipment are offset by reductions fromanother? See 467 U.S., at 857, 859.In each case, a statutory phrase has more thanone reasonable reading. And Congress has not chosen among them: Ithas not, in any real-world sense, “fixed” the “single, bestmeaning” at “the time of enactment” (to use the majority’s phrase).Ante, at 22. A question thus arises: Who decides which ofthe possible readings should govern?This Court has long thought that the choiceshould usually fall to agencies, with courts broadly deferring totheir judgments. For the last 40 years, that doctrine has gone bythe name of Chevron deference, after the 1984 decision thatformalized and canonized it. In Chevron, the Court set out asimple two-part framework for reviewing an agency’s interpretationof a statute that it administers. First, the reviewing court mustdetermine whether Congress has “directly spoken to the precisequestion at issue.” 467 U.S., at 842. That inquiry isrigorous: A court must exhaust all the “traditional tools ofstatutory construction” to divine statutory meaning. Id., at843, n.9. And when it can find that meaning—a “single rightanswer”—that is “the end of the matter”: The court cannot deferbecause it “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intentof Congress.” Kisor, 588 U.S., at 575 (opinion of theCourt); Chevron, 467 U.S., at 842–843. But if thecourt, after using its whole legal toolkit, concludes that “thestatute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue”in dispute—for any of the not-uncommon reasons discussed above—thenthe court must cede the primary interpretive role. Ibid.;see supra, at 4–5. At that second step, the court asks onlywhether the agency construction is within the sphere of“reasonable” readings. Chevron, 467 U.S., at 844. Ifit is, the agency’s interpretation of the statute that it every dayimplements will control.That rule, the Court has long explained, restson a presumption about legislative intent—about what Congress wantswhen a statute it has charged an agency with implementing containsan ambiguity or a gap. See id., at 843–845; Smiley,517 U.S., at 740–741. An enacting Congress, as noted above,knows those uncertainties will arise, even if it does not know whatthey will turn out to be. See supra, at 4–5. And every oncein a while, Congress provides an explicit instruction for dealingwith that contingency—assigning primary responsibility to thecourts, or else to an agency. But much more often, Congress doesnot say. Thus arises the need for a presumption—really, a defaultrule—for what should happen in that event. Does a statutory silenceor ambiguity then go to a court for resolution? Or to an agency?This Court has long thought Congress would choose an agency, withcourts serving only as a backstop to make sure the agency makes areasonable choice among the possible readings. Or said otherwise,Congress would select the agency it has put in control of aregulatory scheme to exercise the “degree of discretion” that thestatute’s lack of clarity or completeness allows. Smiley,517 U.S., at 741. Of course, Congress can always refute thatpresumptive choice—can say that, really, it would prefer courts towield that discretionary power. But until then, the presumptioncuts in the agency’s favor.[2]The next question is why.For one, because agencies often know thingsabout a statute’s subject matter that courts could not hope to. Thepoint is especially stark when the statute is of a “scientific ortechnical nature.” Kisor, 588 U.S., at 571 (pluralityopinion). Agencies are staffed with “experts in the field” who canbring their training and knowledge to bear on open statutoryquestions. Chevron, 467 U.S., at 865. Consider, forexample, the first bulleted case above. When does an alpha aminoacid polymer qualify as a “protein”? See supra, at 5. Idon’t know many judges who would feel confident resolving thatissue. (First question: What even is an alpha amino acidpolymer?) But the FDA likely has scores of scientists on staff whocan think intelligently about it, maybe collaborate with each otheron its finer points, and arrive at a sensible answer. Or take theperhaps more accessible-sounding second case, involving theEndangered Species Act. See supra, at 5–6. Deciding when onesquirrel population is “distinct” from another (and thus warrantsprotection) requires knowing about species more than it doesconsulting a dictionary. How much variation of whatkind—geographic, genetic, morphological, or behavioral—should berequired? A court could, if forced to, muddle through that issueand announce a result. But wouldn’t the Fish and Wildlife Service,with all its specialized expertise, do a better job of the task—ofsaying what, in the context of species protection, the open-endedterm “distinct” means? One idea behind the Chevronpresumption is that Congress—the same Congress that charged theService with implementing the Act—would answer that question with aresounding “yes.”A second idea is that Congress would value theagency’s experience with how a complex regulatory regime functions,and with what is needed to make it effective. Let’s stick withsquirrels for a moment, except broaden the lens. In construing aterm like “distinct” in a case about squirrels, the Service likelywould benefit from its “historical familiarity” with how the termhas covered the population segments of other species. Martinv. Occupational Safety and Health Review Comm’n, 499 U.S.144, 153 (1991); see, e.g., Center for BiologicalDiversity v. Zinke, 900 F.3d 1053, 1060–1062 (CA9 2018)(arctic grayling); Center for Biological Diversity v.Zinke, 868 F.3d 1054, 1056 (CA9 2017) (desert eagle). Justas a common-law court makes better decisions as it sees multiplevariations on a theme, an agency’s construction of a statutory termbenefits from its unique exposure to all the related ways the termcomes into play. Or consider, for another way regulatoryfamiliarity matters, the example about adjusting Medicarereimbursem*nt for geographic wage differences. See supra, at6. According to a dictionary, the term “geographic area” could beas large as a multi-state region or as small as a census tract. Howto choose? It would make sense to gather hard information aboutwhat reimbursem*nt levels each approach will produce, to explorethe ease of administering each on a nationwide basis, to survey howregulators have dealt with similar questions in the past, and toconfer with the hospitals themselves about what makes sense. SeeKisor, 588 U.S., at 571 (plurality opinion) (notingthat agencies are able to “conduct factual investigations” and“consult with affected parties”). Congress knows the Department ofHealth and Human Services can do all those things—and that courtscannot.Still more, Chevron’s presumptionreflects that resolving statutory ambiguities, as Congress wellknows, is “often more a question of policy than of law.”Pauley v. BethEnergy Mines, Inc., 501 U.S.680, 696 (1991). The task is less one of construing a text thanof balancing competing goals and values. Consider the statutorydirective to achieve “substantial restoration of the [GrandCanyon’s] natural quiet.” See supra, at 6. Someone is goingto have to decide exactly what that statute means for air trafficover the canyon. How many flights, in what places and at whattimes, are consistent with restoring enough natural quiet on theground? That is a policy trade-off of a kind familiar toagencies—but peculiarly unsuited to judges. Or considerChevron itself. As the Court there understood, the choicebetween defining a “stationary source” as a whole plant or as apollution-emitting device is a choice about how to “reconcile” two“manifestly competing interests.” 467 U.S., at 865. Theplantwide definition relaxes the permitting requirement in theinterest of promoting economic growth; the device-specificdefinition strengthens that requirement to better reduce airpollution. See id., at 851, 863, 866. Again, that is achoice a judge should not be making, but one an agency properlycan. Agencies are “subject to the supervision of the President, whoin turn answers to the public.” Kisor, 588 U.S., at571–572 (plurality opinion). So when faced with a statutoryambiguity, “an agency to which Congress has delegated policymakingresponsibilities” may rely on an accountable actor’s “views of wisepolicy to inform its judgments.” Chevron, 467 U.S., at865.None of this is to say that deference toagencies is always appropriate. The Court over time has fine-tunedthe Chevron regime to deny deference in classes of cases inwhich Congress has no reason to prefer an agency to a court. Themajority treats those “refinements” as a flaw in the scheme,ante, at 27, but they are anything but. Consider the rulethat an agency gets no deference when construing a statute it isnot responsible for administering. See Epic Systems Corp. v.Lewis, 584 U.S. 497, 519–520 (2018). Well, of course not—ifCongress has not put an agency in charge of implementing a statute,Congress would not have given the agency a special role in itsconstruction. Or take the rule that an agency will not receivedeference if it has reached its decision without using—or withoutusing properly—its rulemaking or adjudicatory authority. SeeUnited States v. Mead Corp., 533U.S. 218, 226–227 (2001); Encino Motorcars, LLC v.Navarro, 579 U.S. 211, 220 (2016). Again, that should not besurprising: Congress expects that authoritative pronouncements on alaw’s meaning will come from the procedures it has enacted tofoster “fairness and deliberation” in agency decision-making.Mead, 533 U.S., at 230. Or finally, think of the“extraordinary cases” involving questions of vast “economic andpolitical significance” in which the Court has declined to defer.King v. Burwell, 576 U.S.473, 485–486 (2015). The theory is that Congress would not haveleft matters of such import to an agency, but would instead haveinsisted on maintaining control. So the Chevron refinementsproceed from the same place as the original doctrine. Takentogether, they give interpretive primacy to the agency when—butonly when—it is acting, as Congress specified, in the heartland ofits delegated authority.That carefully calibrated framework “reflects asensitivity to the proper roles of the political and judicialbranches.” Pauley, 501 U.S., at 696. Where Congresshas spoken, Congress has spoken; only its judgments matter. Andcourts alone determine when that has happened: Using all theirnormal interpretive tools, they decide whether Congress hasaddressed a given issue. But when courts have decided that Congresshas not done so, a choice arises. Absent a legislative directive,either the administering agency or a court must take the lead. Andthe matter is more fit for the agency. The decision is likely toinvolve the agency’s subject-matter expertise; to fall within itssphere of regulatory experience; and to involve policy choices,including cost-benefit assessments and trade-offs betweenconflicting values. So a court without relevant expertise orexperience, and without warrant to make policy calls, appropriatelysteps back. The court still has a role to play: It polices theagency to ensure that it acts within the zone of reasonableoptions. But the court does not insert itself into an agency’sexpertise-driven, policy-laden functions. That is the arrangementbest suited to keep every actor in its proper lane. And it is theone best suited to ensure that Congress’s statutes work in the wayCongress intended.The majority makes two points in reply, neitherconvincing. First, it insists that “agencies have no specialcompetence” in filling gaps or resolving ambiguities in regulatorystatutes; rather, “[c]ourts do.” Ante, at 23. Score one forself-confidence; maybe not so high for self-reflection or-knowledge. Of course courts often construe legal texts, hopefullywell. And Chevron’s first step takes full advantage of thattalent: There, a court tries to divine what Congress meant, even inthe most complicated or abstruse statutory schemes. The deferencecomes in only if the court cannot do so—if the court must admitthat standard legal tools will not avail to fill a statutorysilence or give content to an ambiguous term. That is when theissues look like the ones I started off with: When does an alphaamino acid polymer qualify as a “protein”? How distinct is“distinct” for squirrel populations? What size “geographic area”will ensure appropriate hospital reimbursem*nt? As between twoequally feasible understandings of “stationary source,” should onechoose the one more protective of the environment or the one morefavorable to economic growth? The idea that courts have “specialcompetence” in deciding such questions whereas agencies have“no[ne]” is, if I may say, malarkey. Answering those questionsright does not mainly demand the interpretive skills courtspossess. Instead, it demands one or more of: subject-matterexpertise, long engagement with a regulatory scheme, and policychoice. It is courts (not agencies) that “have no specialcompetence”—or even legitimacy—when those are the things a decisioncalls for.Second, the majority complains that an ambiguityor gap does not “necessarily reflect a congressional intent that anagency” should have primary interpretive authority. Ante, at22. On that score, I’ll agree with the premise: It doesn’t“necessarily” do so. Chevron is built on apresumption. The decision does not maintain that Congress inevery case wants the agency, rather than a court, to fill in gaps.The decision maintains that when Congress does not expressly pickone or the other, we need a default rule; and the best defaultrule—agency or court?—is the one we think Congress would generallywant. As to why Congress would generally want the agency:The answer lies in everything said above about Congress’sdelegation of regulatory power to the agency and the agency’sspecial competencies. See supra, at 9–11. The majorityappears to think it is a showstopping rejoinder to note that manystatutory gaps and ambiguities are “unintentional.” Ante, at22. But to begin, many are not; the ratio between the two isuncertain. See supra, at 4–5. And to end, why should thatmatter in any event? Congress may not have deliberately introduceda gap or ambiguity into the statute; but it knows that pretty mucheverything it drafts will someday be found to contain such a“flaw.” Given that knowledge, Chevron asks, what wouldCongress want? The presumed answer is again the same (for the samereasons): The agency. And as with any default rule, if Congressdecides otherwise, all it need do is say.In that respect, the proof really is in thepudding: Congress basically never says otherwise, suggesting thatChevron chose the presumption aligning with legislativeintent (or, in the majority’s words, “approximat[ing] reality,”ante, at 22). Over the last four decades, Congress hasauthorized or reauthorized hundreds of statutes. The drafters ofthose statutes knew all about Chevron. See A. Gluck & L.Bressman, Statutory Interpretation From the Inside—An EmpiricalStudy of Congressional Drafting, Delegation, and the Canons: PartI, 65 Stan. L. Rev. 901, 928 (fig. 2), 994 (2013). So if they hadwanted a different assignment of interpretive responsibility, theywould have inserted a provision to that effect. With just a pair ofexceptions I know of, they did not. See 12 U.S.C.§25b(b)(5)(A) (exception #1); 15 U.S.C. §8302(c)(3)(A)(exception #2). Similarly, Congress has declined to enact proposedlegislation that would abolish Chevron across the board. SeeS. 909, 116th Cong., 1st Sess., §2 (2019) (still a bill, not alaw); H. R. 5, 115th Cong., 1st Sess., §202 (2017) (same). So tothe extent the majority is worried that the Chevronpresumption is “fiction[al],” ante, at 26—as all legalpresumptions in some sense are—it has gotten less and less so everyday for 40 years. The congressional reaction shows as well asanything could that the Chevron Court read Congressright.IIThe majority’s principal arguments are in adifferent vein. Around 80 years after the APA was enacted and 40years after Chevron, the majority has decided that theformer precludes the latter. The APA’s Section 706, the majoritysays, “makes clear” that agency interpretations of statutes “arenot entitled to deference.” Ante, at 14–15 (emphasisin original). And that provision, the majority continues, codifiedthe contemporaneous law, which likewise did not allow fordeference. See ante, at 9–13, 15–16. But neither the APA northe pre-APA state of the law does the work that the majorityclaims. Both are perfectly compatible with Chevrondeference.Section 706, enacted with the rest of the APA in1946, provides for judicial review of agency action. It states: “Tothe extent necessary to decision and when presented, the reviewingcourt shall decide all relevant questions of law, interpretconstitutional and statutory provisions, and determine the meaningor applicability of the terms of an agency action.” 5U.S.C. §706.That text, contra the majority, “does notresolve the Chevron question.” C. Sunstein, ChevronAs Law, 107 Geo. L. J. 1613, 1642 (2019) (Sunstein). Or said a bitdifferently, Section 706 is “generally indeterminate” on the matterof deference. A. Vermeule, Judging Under Uncertainty 207 (2006)(Vermeule). The majority highlights the phrase “decide all relevantquestions of law” (italicizing the “all”), and notes that theprovision “prescribes no deferential standard” for answering thosequestions. Ante, at 14. But just as the provision does notprescribe a deferential standard of review, so too it does notprescribe a denovo standard of review (in which thecourt starts from scratch, without giving deference). In point offact, Section 706 does not specify any standard of reviewfor construing statutes. See Kisor, 588 U.S., at 581(plurality opinion). And when a court uses a deferentialstandard—here, by deciding whether an agency reading isreasonable—it just as much “decide[s]” a “relevant question[]of law” as when it uses a denovo standard. §706. Thedeferring court then conforms to Section 706 “by determiningwhether the agency has stayed within the bounds of its assigneddiscretion—that is, whether the agency has construed [the statuteit administers] reasonably.” J. Manning, Chevron and theReasonable Legislator, 128 Harv. L.Rev. 457, 459 (2014); seeArlington v. FCC, 569 U.S.290, 317 (2013) (Roberts, C. J., dissenting) (“We do not ignore[Section 706’s] command when we afford an agency’s statutoryinterpretation Chevron deference; we respect it”).[3]Section 706’s references to standards of reviewin other contexts only further undercut the majority’s argument.The majority notes that Section 706 requires deferential review foragency fact-finding and policy-making (under, respectively, asubstantial-evidence standard and an arbitrary-and-capriciousstandard). See ante, at 14. Congress, the majority claims,“surely would have articulated a similarly deferential standardapplicable to questions of law had it intended to depart” fromdenovo review. Ibid. Surely? In another part ofSection 706, Congress explicitly referred to denovoreview. §706(2)(F). With all those references to standards ofreview—both deferential and not—running around Section 706, what is“telling” (ante, at 14) is the absence of any standard forreviewing an agency’s statutory constructions. That silence leftthe matter, as noted above, “generally indeterminate”: Section 706neither mandates nor forbids Chevron-style deference.Vermeule 207.[4]And contra the majority, most “respectedcommentators” understood Section 706 in that way—as allowing, evenif not requiring, deference. Ante, at 16. The finestadministrative law scholars of the time (call them thatgeneration’s Manning, Sunstein, and Vermeule) certainly did.Professor Louis Jaffe described something very like theChevron two-step as the preferred method of reviewing agencyinterpretations under the APA. A court, he said, first “must decideas a ‘question of law’ whether there is ‘discretion’ in thepremises.” Judicial Control of Administrative Action 570 (1965).That is akin to step 1: Did Congress speak to the issue, or did itleave openness? And if the latter, Jaffe continued, the agency’sview “if ‘reasonable’ is free of control.” Ibid. That ofcourse looks like step 2: defer if reasonable. And just in casethat description was too complicated, Jaffe conveyed his main pointthis way: The argument that courts “must decide all questions oflaw”—as if there were no agency in the picture—“is, in my opinion,unsound.” Id., at 569. Similarly, Professor Kenneth CulpDavis, author of the then-preeminent treatise on administrativelaw, noted with approval that “reasonableness” review of agencyinterpretations—in which courts “refused to substitutejudgment”—had “survived the APA.” Administrative Law 880, 883, 885(1951) (Davis). Other contemporaneous scholars and experts agreed.See R. Levin, The APA and the Assault on Deference, 106 Minn. L.Rev. 125, 181–183 (2021) (Levin) (listing many of them). They didnot see in their own time what the majority finds theretoday.[5]Nor, evidently, did the Supreme Court. In theyears after the APA was enacted, the Court “never indicated thatsection 706 rejected the idea that courts might defer to agencyinterpretations of law.” Sunstein 1654. Indeed, not a singleJustice so much as floated that view of the APA. To the contrary,the Court issued a number of decisions in those years deferring toan agency’s statutory interpretation. See, e.g.,Unemployment Compensation Comm’n of Alaska v. Aragon,329 U.S.143, 153–154 (1946); NLRB v. E. C. Atkins &Co., 331 U.S.398, 403 (1947); Cardillo v. Liberty Mut. Ins.Co., 330 U.S.469, 478–479 (1947). And that continued right up untilChevron. See, e.g., Mitchell v. Budd,350 U.S.473, 480 (1956); Zenith Radio Corp. v. UnitedStates, 437 U.S.443, 450 (1978). To be clear: Deference in those years was notalways given to interpretations that would receive it underChevron. The practice then was more inconsistent and lessfully elaborated than it later became. The point here is only thatthe Court came nowhere close to accepting the majority’s view ofthe APA. Take the language from Section 706 that the majority mostrelies on: “decide all relevant questions of law.” See ante,at 14. In the decade after the APA’s enactment, those words wereused only four times in Supreme Court opinions (all infootnotes)—and never to suggest that courts could not defer toagency interpretations. See Sunstein 1656.The majority’s view of Section 706 likewise getsno support from how judicial review operated in the years leadingup to the APA. That prior history matters: As the majorityrecognizes, Section 706 was generally understood to“restate[] the present law as to the scope of judicialreview.” Dept. of Justice, Attorney General’s Manual on theAdministrative Procedure Act 108 (1947); ante, at 15–16. Theproblem for the majority is that in the years preceding the APA,courts became ever more deferential to agencies. New Dealadministrative programs had by that point come into their own. Andthis Court and others, in a fairly short time, had abandoned theirinitial resistance and gotten on board. Justice Breyer, wearing hisadministrative-law-scholar hat, characterized the pre-APA periodthis way: “[J]udicial review of administrative action wascurtailed, and particular agency decisions were frequentlysustained with judicial obeisance to the mysteries ofadministrative expertise.” S. Breyer etal., AdministrativeLaw and Regulatory Policy 21 (7th ed. 2011). And that descriptionextends to review of an agency’s statutory constructions. Aninfluential study of administrative practice, published five yearsbefore the APA’s enactment, described the state of play: Judicial“review may, in some instances at least, be limited to the inquirywhether the administrative construction is a permissible one.”Final Report of Attorney General’s Committee on AdministrativeProcedure (1941), reprinted in Administrative Procedure inGovernment Agencies, S. Doc. No. 8, 77th Cong., 1st Sess., 78(1941). Or again: “[W]here the statute is reasonably susceptible ofmore than one interpretation, the court may accept that of theadministrative body.” Id., at 90–91.[6]Two prominent Supreme Court decisions of the1940s put those principles into action. Gray v.Powell, 314 U.S.402 (1941), was then widely understood as “the leading case” onreview of agency interpretations. Davis 882; see ibid.(noting that it “establish[ed] what is known as ‘the doctrine ofGray v. Powell’”). There, the Court deferred to an agencyconstruction of the term “producer” as used in a statutoryexemption from price controls. Congress, the Court explained, hadcommitted the scope of the exemption to the agency because its“experience in [the] field gave promise of a better informed, moreequitable, adjustment of the conflicting interests.” Gray,314 U.S., at 412. Accordingly, the Court concluded that itwas “not the province of a court” to “substitute its judgment” forthe agency’s. Ibid. Three years later, the Court decidedNLRB v. Hearst Publications, Inc., 322 U.S.111 (1944), another acknowledged “leading case.” Davis 882; seeid., at 884. The Court again deferred, this time to anagency’s construction of the term “employee” in the National LaborRelations Act. The scope of that term, the Court explained,“belong[ed] to” the agency to answer based on its “[e]verydayexperience in the administration of the statute.” Hearst,322 U.S., at 130. The Court therefore “limited” its review towhether the agency’s reading had “warrant in the record and areasonable basis in law.” Id., at 131.[7] Recall here that even the majority accepts thatSection 706 was meant to “restate[] the present law” as tojudicial review. See ante, at 15–16; supra, at 19–20.Well then? It sure would seem that the provision allows a deferenceregime.The majority has no way around those twonoteworthy decisions. It first appears to distinguish between “purelegal question[s]” and the so-called mixed questions in Grayand Hearst, involving the application of a legal standard toa set of facts. Ante, at 11. If in drawing that distinction,the majority intends to confine its holding to the pure type oflegal issue—thus enabling courts to defer when law and facts areentwined—I’d be glad. But I suspect the majority has no suchintent, because that approach would preserve Chevron in asubstantial part of its current domain. Cf. Wilkinson v.Garland, 601 U.S. 209, 230 (2024) (Alito, J., dissenting)(noting, in the immigration context, that the universe of mixedquestions swamps that of pure legal ones). It is frequently in theconsideration of mixed questions that the scope of statutory termsis established and their meaning defined. See H. Monaghan,Marbury and the Administrative State, 83 Colum. L. Rev. 1,29 (1983) (“Administrative application of law is administrativeformulation of law whenever it involves elaboration of thestatutory norm”). How does a statutory interpreter decide, as inHearst, what an “employee” is? In large part through casesasking whether the term covers people performing specific jobs,like (in that case) “newsboys.” 322 U.S., at 120. Or considerone of the examples I offered above. How does an interpreter decidewhen one population segment of a species is “distinct” fromanother? Often by considering that requirement with respect toparticular species, like western gray squirrels. So the distinctionthe majority offers makes no real-world (or even theoretical)sense. If the Hearst Court was deferring to an agency onwhether the term “employee” covered newsboys, it was deferring tothe agency on the scope and meaning of the term “employee.”The majority’s next rejoinder—that “the Courtwas far from consistent” in deferring—falls equally flat.Ante, at 12. I am perfectly ready to acknowledge that in thepre-APA period, a deference regime had not yet taken complete hold.I’ll go even further: Let’s assume that deference was then anon-again, off-again function (as the majority seems to suggest, seeante, at 11–12, and 13, n.3). Even on that assumption,the majority’s main argument—that Section 706 prohibiteddeferential review—collapses. Once again, the majority agrees thatSection 706 was not meant to change the then-prevailing law. Seeante, at 15–16. And even if inconsistent, that law cannotpossibly be thought to have prohibited deference. Orotherwise said: “If Section 706 did not change the law of judicialreview (as we have long recognized), then it did not proscribe adeferential standard then known and in use.” Kisor, 588U.S., at 583 (plurality opinion).The majority’s whole argument for overturningChevron relies on Section 706. But the text of Section 706does not support that result. And neither does the contemporaneouspractice, which that text was supposed to reflect. So today’sdecision has no basis in the only law the majority deems relevant.It is grounded on air.IIIAnd still there is worse, because abandoningChevron subverts every known principle of staredecisis. Of course, respecting precedent is not an “inexorablecommand.” Payne v. Tennessee, 501U.S. 808, 828 (1991). But overthrowing it requires far morethan the majority has offered up here. Chevron is entitledto stare decisis’s strongest form of protection. Themajority thus needs an exceptionally strong reason to overturn thedecision, above and beyond thinking it wrong. And it has nothingapproaching such a justification, proposing only a bewilderingtheory about Chevron’s “unworkability.” Ante, at 32.Just five years ago, this Court in Kisor rejected a plea tooverrule Auer v. Robbins, 519U.S. 452 (1997), which requires judicial deference to agencies’interpretations of their own regulations. See 588 U.S., at586–589 (opinion of the Court). The case against overrulingChevron is at least as strong. In particular, the majority’sdecision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system,“cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions” of statutes andthreatening the interests of many parties who have relied on themfor years. 588 U.S., at 587 (opinion of the Court).Adherence to precedent is “a foundation stone ofthe rule of law.” Michigan v. Bay Mills IndianCommunity, 572 U.S.782, 798 (2014). Stare decisis “promotes the evenhanded,predictable, and consistent development of legal principles.”Payne, 501 U.S., at 827. It enables people to ordertheir lives in reliance on judicial decisions. And it “contributesto the actual and perceived integrity of the judicial process,” byensuring that those decisions are founded in the law, and not inthe “personal preferences” of judges. Id., at 828;Dobbs, 597 U.S., at 388 (dissenting opinion). Perhapsabove all else, stare decisis is a “doctrine of judicialmodesty.” Id., at 363. In that, it shares somethingimportant with Chevron. Both tell judges that they do notknow everything, and would do well to attend to the views ofothers. So today, the majority rejects what judicial humilitycounsels not just once but twice over.And Chevron is entitled to a particularlystrong form of stare decisis, for two separate reasons.First, it matters that “Congress remains free to alter what we havedone.” Patterson v. McLean Credit Union, 491 U.S.164, 173 (1989); see Kisor, 588 U.S., at 587(opinion of the Court) (making the same point for Auerdeference). In a constitutional case, the Court alone can correctan error. But that is not so here. “Our deference decisions areballs tossed into Congress’s court, for acceptance or not as thatbranch elects.” 588 U.S., at 587–588 (opinion of the Court).And for generations now, Congress has chosen acceptance. Throughoutthose years, Congress could have abolished Chevron acrossthe board, most easily by amending the APA. Or it could haveeliminated deferential review in discrete areas, by amending oldlaws or drafting new laws to include an anti-Chevronprovision. Instead, Congress has “spurned multiple opportunities”to do a comprehensive rejection of Chevron, and has hardlyever done a targeted one. Kimble v. Marvel Entertainment,LLC, 576 U.S.446, 456 (2015); see supra, at 14–15. Or to put thepoint more affirmatively, Congress has kept Chevron as isfor 40 years. It maintained that position even as Members of thisCourt began to call Chevron into question. See ante,at 30. From all it appears, Congress has not agreed with the viewof some Justices that they and other judges should have morepower.Second, Chevron is by now much more thana single decision. This Court alone, acting as Chevronallows, has upheld an agency’s reasonable interpretation of astatute at least 70 times. See Brief for United States in No.22–1219, p. 27; App. to id., at 68a–72a (collecting cases).Lower courts have applied the Chevron framework on thousandsupon thousands of occasions. See K. Barnett & C. Walker,Chevron and Stare Decisis, 31 Geo. Mason L.Rev. 475,477, and n.11 (2024) (noting that at last count,Chevron was cited in more than 18,000 federal-courtdecisions). The Kisor Court observed, when upholdingAuer, that “[d]eference to reasonable agency interpretationsof ambiguous rules pervades the whole corpus of administrativelaw.” 588 U.S., at 587 (opinion of the Court). So too doesdeference to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguousstatutes—except more so. Chevron is as embedded as embeddedgets in the law.The majority says differently, because thisCourt has ignored Chevron lately; all that is left of thedecision is a “decaying husk with bold pretensions.” Ante,at 33. Tell that to the D.C. Circuit, the court that reviewsa large share of agency interpretations, where Chevronremains alive and well. See, e.g., Lissack v.Commissioner, 68 F. 4th 1312, 1321–1322 (2023); SolarEnergy Industries Assn. v. FERC, 59 F. 4th 1287,1291–1294 (2023). But more to the point: The majority’s argument isa bootstrap. This Court has “avoided deferring under Chevronsince 2016” (ante, at 32) because it has been preparing tooverrule Chevron since around that time. That kind ofself-help on the way to reversing precedent has become almostroutine at this Court. Stop applying a decision where one should;“throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions”; issuea few separate writings “question[ing the decision’s] premises”(ante, at 30); give the whole process a few years... and voila!—you have a justification for overrulingthe decision. Janus v. State, County, and MunicipalEmployees, 585 U.S. 878, 950 (2018) (Kagan, J., dissenting)(discussing the overruling of Abood v. Detroit Bd. ofEd., 431 U.S.209 (1977)); see also, e.g., Kennedy v.Bremerton School Dist., 597 U.S. 507, 571–572 (2022)(Sotomayor, J., dissenting) (similar for Lemon v.Kurtzman, 403 U.S.602 (1971)); Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S.529, 587–588 (2013) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting) (similar forSouth Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383U.S. 301 (1966)). I once remarked that thisoverruling-through-enfeeblement technique “mock[ed] staredecisis.” Janus, 585 U.S., at 950 (dissentingopinion). I have seen no reason to change my mind.The majority does no better in its mainjustification for overruling Chevron—that the decision is“unworkable.” Ante, at 30. The majority’s first theory onthat score is that there is no single “answer” about what“ambiguity” means: Some judges turn out to see more of it thanothers do, leading to “different results.” Ante, at 30–31.But even if so, the legal system has for many years, in manycontexts, dealt perfectly well with that variation. Take contractlaw. It is hornbook stuff that when (but only when) a contract isambiguous, a court interpreting it can consult extrinsic evidence.See CNH Industrial N.V. v. Reese, 583 U.S. 133, 139(2018) (per curiam). And when all interpretive tools stillleave ambiguity, the contract is construed against the drafter. SeeLamps Plus, Inc. v. Varela, 587 U.S. 176, 186–187(2019). So I guess the contract rules of the 50 States areunworkable now. Or look closer to home, to doctrines this Courtregularly applies. In deciding whether a government has waivedsovereign immunity, we construe “[a]ny ambiguities in the statutorylanguage” in “favor of immunity.” FAA v. Cooper,566 U.S.284, 290 (2012). Similarly, the rule of lenity tells us toconstrue ambiguous statutes in favor of criminal defendants. SeeUnited States v. Castleman, 572U.S. 157, 172–173 (2014). And the canon of constitutionalavoidance instructs us to construe ambiguous laws to avoiddifficult constitutional questions. See United States v.Oakland Cannabis Buyers’ Cooperative, 532 U.S.483, 494 (2001). I could go on, but the point is made. Thereare ambiguity triggers all over the law. Somehow everyone seems toget by.And Chevron is an especially puzzlingdecision to criticize on the ground of generating too much judicialdivergence. There’s good empirical—meaning,non-impressionistic—evidence on exactly that subject. And it showsthat, as compared with denovo review, use of theChevron two-step framework fosters agreement amongjudges. See K. Barnett, C. Boyd, & C. Walker, AdministrativeLaw’s Political Dynamics, 71 Vand. L.Rev. 1463, 1502 (2018)(Barnett). More particularly, Chevron has a “powerfulconstraining effect on partisanship in judicial decisionmaking.”Barnett 1463 (italics deleted); see Sunstein 1672 (“[A] predictableeffect of overruling Chevron would be to ensure a fargreater role for judicial policy preferences in statutoryinterpretation and far more common splits along ideologicallines”). So if consistency among judges is the majority’s lodestar,then the Court should not overrule Chevron, but return tousing it.The majority’s second theory on workability islikewise a makeweight. Chevron, the majority complains, hassome exceptions, which (so the majority says) are “difficult” and“complicate[d]” to apply. Ante, at 32. Recall that courtsare not supposed to defer when the agency construing a statute (1)has not been charged with administering that law; (2) has not useddeliberative procedures—i.e., notice-and-comment rulemakingor adjudication; or (3) is intervening in a “major question,” ofgreat economic and political significance. See supra, at11–12; ante, at 27–28. As I’ve explained, thoseexceptions—the majority also aptly calls them “refinements”—fitwith Chevron’s rationale: They define circ*mstances in whichCongress is unlikely to have wanted agency views to govern.Ante, at 27; see supra, at 11–12. And on thedifficulty scale, they are nothing much. Has Congress put theagency in charge of administering the statute? In 99 of 100 cases,everyone will agree on the answer with scarcely a moment’s thought.Did the agency use notice-and-comment or an adjudication beforerendering an interpretation? Once again, I could stretch my mindand think up a few edge cases, but for the most part, the answer isan easy yes or no. The major questions exception is, I acknowledge,different: There, many judges have indeed disputed its nature andscope. Compare, e.g., West Virginia, 597U.S., at 721–724, with id., at 764–770 (Kagan, J.,dissenting). But that disagreement concerns, on everyone’s view, atiny subset of all agency interpretations. For the most part, theexceptions that so upset the majority require merely a rote,check-the-box inquiry. If that is the majority’s idea of a“dizzying breakdance,” ante, at 32, the majority needs toget out more.And anyway, difficult as compared to what? Themajority’s prescribed way of proceeding is no walk in the park.First, the majority makes clear that what is usually calledSkidmore deference continues to apply. See ante, at16–17. Under that decision, agency interpretations “constitute abody of experience and informed judgment” that may be “entitled torespect.” Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S.134, 140 (1944). If the majority thinks that the same judgeswho argue today about where “ambiguity” resides (see ante,at 30) are not going to argue tomorrow about what “respect”requires, I fear it will be gravely disappointed. Second, themajority directs courts to comply with the varied ways in whichCongress in fact “delegates discretionary authority” to agencies.Ante, at 17–18. For example, Congress may authorize anagency to “define[]” or “delimit[]” statutory terms orconcepts, or to “fill up the details” of a statutory scheme.Ante, at 17, and n.5. Or Congress may use, indescribing an agency’s regulatory authority, inherently“flexib[le]” language like “appropriate” or “reasonable.”Ante, at 17, and n. 6. Attending to every such delegation,as the majority says, is necessary in a world withoutChevron. But that task involves complexities of its own.Indeed, one reason Justice Scalia supported Chevron was thatit replaced such a “statute-by-statute evaluation (which wasassuredly a font of uncertainty and litigation) with anacross-the-board presumption.” A. Scalia, Judicial Deference toAdministrative Interpretations of Law, 1989 Duke L. J. 511, 516. Asa lover of the predictability that rules create, Justice Scaliathought the latter “unquestionably better.” Id., at 517.On the other side of the balance, the mostimportant stare decisis factor—call it the “jolt to thelegal system” issue—weighs heavily against overrulingChevron. Dobbs, 597 U.S., at 357 (Roberts,C.J., concurring in judgment). Congress and agencies alikehave relied on Chevron—have assumed its existence—in much oftheir work for the last 40 years. Statutes passed during that timereflect the expectation that Chevron would allocateinterpretive authority between agencies and courts. Rules issuedduring the period likewise presuppose that statutory ambiguitieswere the agencies’ to (reasonably) resolve. Those agencyinterpretations may have benefited regulated entities; or they mayhave protected members of the broader public. Either way, privateparties have ordered their affairs—their business and financialdecisions, their health-care decisions, their educationaldecisions—around agency actions that are suddenly now subject tochallenge. In Kisor, this Court refused to overruleAuer because doing so would “cast doubt on” manylongstanding constructions of rules, and thereby upset settledexpectations. 588 U.S., at 587 (opinion of the Court).Overruling Chevron, and thus raising new doubts about agencyconstructions of statutes, will be far more disruptive.The majority tries to alleviate concerns about apiece of that problem: It states that judicial decisions that haveupheld agency action as reasonable under Chevron should notbe overruled on that account alone. See ante, at 34–35. Thatis all to the good: There are thousands of such decisions, manysettled for decades. See supra, at 26. But first, reasonablereliance need not be predicated on a prior judicial decision. Someagency interpretations never challenged under Chevron nowwill be; expectations formed around those constructions thus couldbe upset, in a way the majority’s assurance does not touch. Andanyway, how good is that assurance, really? The majority says thata decision’s “[m]ere reliance on Chevron” is not enough tocounter the force of stare decisis; a challenger will needan additional “special justification.” Ante, at 34. Themajority is sanguine; I am not so much. Courts motivated tooverrule an old Chevron-based decision can always come upwith something to label a “special justification.” Maybe a courtwill say “the quality of [the precedent’s] reasoning” was poor.Ante, at 29. Or maybe the court will discover something“unworkable” in the decision—like some exception that has to beapplied. Ante, at 30. All a court need do is look to today’sopinion to see how it is done.IVJudges are not experts in the field, andare not part of either political branch of the Government.— ChevronU.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources DefenseCouncil, Inc., 467 U.S.837, 865 (1984)Those were the days, when we knew what we arenot. When we knew that as between courts and agencies, Congresswould usually think agencies the better choice to resolve theambiguities and fill the gaps in regulatory statutes. Becauseagencies are “experts in the field.” And because theyare part of a political branch, with a claim to makinginterstitial policy. And because Congress has charged them, not us,with administering the statutes containing the open questions. Atit* core, Chevron is about respecting that allocation ofresponsibility—the conferral of primary authority over regulatorymatters to agencies, not courts.Today, the majority does not respect thatjudgment. It gives courts the power to make all manner ofscientific and technical judgments. It gives courts the power tomake all manner of policy calls, including about how to weighcompeting goods and values. (See Chevron itself.) It putscourts at the apex of the administrative process as to everyconceivable subject—because there are always gaps and ambiguitiesin regulatory statutes, and often of great import. What actions canbe taken to address climate change or other environmentalchallenges? What will the Nation’s health-care system look like inthe coming decades? Or the financial or transportation systems?What rules are going to constrain the development of A.I.? In everysphere of current or future federal regulation, expect courts fromnow on to play a commanding role. It is not a role Congress hasgiven to them, in the APA or any other statute. It is a role thisCourt has now claimed for itself, as well as for other judges.And that claim requires disrespecting, too, thisCourt’s precedent. There are no special reasons, of the kindusually invoked for overturning precedent, to eliminateChevron deference. And given Chevron’s pervasiveness,the decision to do so is likely to produce large-scale disruption.All that backs today’s decision is the majority’s belief thatChevron was wrong—that it gave agencies too much power andcourts not enough. But shifting views about the worth of regulatoryactors and their work do not justify overhauling a cornerstone ofadministrative law. In that sense too, today’s majority has lostsight of its proper role.And it is impossible to pretend that today’sdecision is a one-off, in either its treatment of agencies or itstreatment of precedent. As to the first, this very Term presentsyet another example of the Court’s resolve to roll back agencyauthority, despite congressional direction to the contrary. SeeSEC v. Jarkesy, 603 U.S. ___ (2024); see alsosupra, at 3. As to the second, just my own defenses ofstare decisis—my own dissents to this Court’s reversals ofsettled law—by now fill a small volume. See Dobbs, 597U.S., at 363–364 (joint opinion of Breyer, Sotomayor, andKagan, JJ.); Edwards v. Vannoy, 593 U.S. 255, 296–297(2021); Knick v. Township of Scott, 588 U.S. 180,207–208 (2019); Janus, 585 U.S., at 931–932.Once again, with respect, I dissent.