Tag Archives: Chevron Deference

Tangled Up In Green Industrial Policy: Joe Biden’s Electrification

28 Thursday Mar 2024

Posted by in Government Failure, Industrial Policy, Liberty

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Industrial policy allows government planners to select favored and disfavored industries or sectors. It thereby bypasses and distorts impersonal market signals that would otherwise direct scarce resources to the uses most valued by market participants. Instead, various forms of aid and penalties are imposed on different sectors in order to accomplish the planners’ objectives, This includes interventions in foreign trade and attempts to steer technological development. Industrial policy often comes under the guise of enhanced national security. Of course, it can also be used to reward cronies. And it has a poor record of accomplishing its objectives and avoiding unintended consequences.

The Sausage Factory

The executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government are loaded with economic interventionists, regardless of party affiliation. In an age of (Chevron) judicial deference to “experts” within the administrative state, it is not uncommon for legislative language to give abundant leeway to those who implement policy within the executive branch (though a couple of upcoming Supreme Court decisions might change that balance). Increasingly, bills are stuffed so full of provisions that lawmakers find it all but impossible to read them in full, let alone make an accurate assessment of their virtues, drawbacks, and internal contradictions.

Even worse is the fact that bills are, in great part, written by relatively youthful legislative staffers with little real world experience in industry, and who harbor the naive belief that whatever is wished, government can make it so. But their work also proceeds under guidance from lawmakers, administration officials, consultants, and lobbyists who have their own agendas and axes to grind. This is how industrial policy is promulgated in the U.S., and it is through this ugly prism that we must view environmental policy.

The Left dictates environmental and energy policy in several states, especially California, where energy costs have soared under renewable energy initiatives. California households now pay almost triple the rate per kilowatt-hour paid in Washington, and more than double what’s paid in Oregon. Something similar may happen in New York, which has highly ambitious goals for renewable energy even as the costs of the state’s offshore wind projects are out of control. These and other state-level “laboratories” are demonstrating that a renewable energy agenda can carry very high costs to the populace. The same is true of the painful experience in Germany with its much-heralded Energiewende.

Net Zero

The Left is also pulling the strings within the federal bureaucracy and the Biden Administration. The objective is an industrial policy to achieve “net zero” CO2 emissions, a practical impossibility for at least several decades (unless it’s faked, of course). Nevertheless, that policy calls for phasing out the use of fossil fuels. Under this agenda, mandates and subsidies are bestowed upon the use of renewable electric power sources, while restrictions and penalties are imposed on the production and use of fossil fuels. A subsequent post on the subject of power generation will address this prototypical failure of central planning.

Electrification

Here, I discuss another key objective of our industrial planners: electrify whatever is not electrified in order to advance the net zero agenda. Of course, for some time to come, more than half of electric power will be generated using fossil fuels (currently about 60%, with another 18% nuclear), so the policy is largely a sham on its face, but we’ll return to that point below. The EV tailpipe is very long, as they say.

Electrification means, among other things, the forced adoption of electronic vehicles (EVs). President Biden’s EPA has issued rules on auto emissions that are expected to require, by 2032, that 60% or more of cars and light trucks sold will be EVs. The USA Today article at the link offers this rich aside:

“…the original proposal — which was always technology-neutral in theory, meaning automakers could sell any cars and light-duty trucks they wanted as long as they hit the fleetwide reductions….”

Technology neutral? Hahaha! We aren’t forcing you to choose technologies as long as you meet our technological requirements!

EV Doldrums

Anyway, the EPA’s targets are completely impractical, partly because the value for drivers is lacking. Not coincidentally, the market for EVs seems to have chilled of late. Hertz has soured on heavy use of EVs in its fleet, and Ford has announced reductions in EV production. The new UAW agreements will make it difficult for some domestic producers to turn a profit on EVs. Fisker is just about broke. Apple has cancelled development of its EV, and several other automakers have reduced their production plans. Toyota was the first producer to raise the red flag on the breakneck transition to EVs in favor of a measured reliance on hybrids. Of course, there are other prominent voices cautioning against rapid attempts at electrification in general.

To be fair, some EVs are marvelous machines, but they and their supporting infrastructure are not yet well-suited to the mass market.

A Tangled Web

Here are some drawbacks of EVs that have yet to be adequately addressed:

  • They are expensive, even with the rich-man’s subsidy to buyers paid by the government and carbon credit subsidies granted to producers.
  • Costly battery replacement is an eventuality that looms over the wallets of EV owners.
  • EVs have limited range given the state of battery technology, especially when the weather is cold.
  • There presently exist far too few charging stations to make EVs workable for many people. In any case, charging away from home can be extremely time consuming and the charges vary widely.
  • The purchase and installation of EV chargers at home is a separate matter, and can cost $4,000 or more if an upgrade to the service panel is necessary. Installed costs commonly range from $1,175 to $3,300, depending on the type of charger and the region.
  • EVs are much heavier than vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. As a result, EV tire wear can be a surprising cost causer and pollutant.
  • Used EVs are not in demand, given all of the above, so resale value is questionable.
  • Battery fires in EVs are extremely difficult to extinguish, creating a new challenge for emergency responders.
  • Reliance on EVs for local emergency services would be dangerous without duplicative investment by local jurisdictions to offset the down-time required for charging.
  • For decades to come, the power grid will be unable to handle the load required for widespread adoption of EVs. A rapid conversion would be impossible without a great expansion in generating and transmission capacity, including transformer availability.
  • Domestically we lack the natural resources to produce the batteries required by EVs in a quantity that would satisfy the Administration’s goals. This forces dependence on China, our chief foreign adversary.
  • The mining of those resources is destructive to the environment. Much of it is done in China due to the country’s abundance of rare earth minerals, but wherever the mining occurs, it relies heavily on diesel power.
  • Joel Kotkin points out that China now hosts the world’s largest EV producer, BYD. Biden’s mandates might very well allow China to dominate the U.S. auto market, even as its own CO2 emissions are soaring,,
  • Producers of EVs earn carbon credits for each vehicle sold, which they can sell to other auto producers who fall short of their required mix of EVs in total production. Tesla, for example, earned revenue of $1.8 billion from carbon credit sales in 2022. But note again that these so-called zero-emission vehicles use electricity generated with an average of 60% fossil fuels. Thus, the scheme is largely a sham.

The push for EVs has been hampered by the botched rollout of (non-Tesla) charging stations under a huge Biden initiative in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Progress has been bogged down by sheer complexity and expense, including the cost of bringing adequate power supplies to the chargers as well as the difficulty of meeting contracting requirements and operating standards. This is exemplary of the failures that usually await government efforts to engineer outcomes contrary to market forces.

Electric Everything?

Like EVs, electric stoves have drawbacks that limit their popularity, including price and the nature of the heat needed for quality food preparation. In addition to autos and stoves, wholesale electrification would require the replacement or costly reconfiguration of a huge stock of business and household capital that is now powered by fossil fuels, like gas furnaces, tractors, chain saws, and many other tools and appliances. This set of legacy investment choices was guided by market prices that reflect the scarcity and efficiency of the resources, yet government industrial planners propose to lay much of it to waste.

Central Planning: a False Conceit

John Mozena quotes Adam Smith on the social and economic hazards of rejecting the market mechanism and instead accepting governmental authority over the allocation of resources:

“All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”

And Arnold Kling gives emphasis to the disadvantages faced by even the most benevolent central planner:

“As Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek pointed out during the socialist calculation debate, central planners lack the information that is produced by markets. By over-riding market prices and substituting their own judgment, regulators incur the same loss of information.”

Advocates of EV industrial policy have failed to appreciate the large gaps between the technology they are determined to dictate and basic consumer requirements. These gaps are along such margins as range, charging time, tire and battery wear, and perhaps most importantly, affordability. The planners have failed to foresee the massive demands on the power grid of a forced replacement of the internal combustion auto stock with EVs. The planners elide the true nature of EV-driven emissions, which are never zero carbon but instead depend on the mix of power sources used to charge EV batteries. Finally, EV mandates show that the industrial planners are oblivious to other environmental burdens inherent in EVs, whatever their true carbon footprint might be.

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Ubiquitous Guilt: EEOC Disparate Impact Liability

22 Thursday Sep 2022

Posted by in Discrimination, Regulation

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A key part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was Title VII, which dealt with employment discrimination. Title VII applied only to intentional discrimination, but it didn’t take long for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the agency charged with administering Title VII, to find ways to expand the scope of its enforcement mandate under the law. The EEOC eventually managed to convince virtually all parties, including employers, employees, job applicants, attorneys, and even the courts, that the law prohibited employment practices having disparate impacts on groups protected from actual discrimination under the law. Predictably, this warped reinterpretation created severe distortions to the efficiency and fairness of labor market outcomes .

Another Rogue Agency

On the EEOC’s complete and erroneous reimagining of Title VII, Gail Heriot’s “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal” is a must read. Heriot is a Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law and is a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This post attempts to summarize most of the important points in Heriot’s paper, so if you don’t have time for Heriot’s paper, read on. All errors are mine, of course!

Heriot provides an incredible case study on the dangers of regulatory overreach. She first discusses the EEOC’s blatant usurpation of Congressional power:

“It is hardly surprising that EEOC officials would undertake to publish answers to the questions they were hearing repeatedly…. But publishing such ‘guidances’ also had the potential to spin out of control. The temptation would always be to use them to establish what the EEOC staff wanted the law to be rather than what it was. Instead of interpreting Title VII in good faith, guidances would soon become quasi-legislation—disguised as interpretation, but in reality imposing new duties on employers not found in Title VII itself.

None of this should be surprising. It is in the nature of bureaucracy. It naturally seeks to expand its powers, often beginning by occupying niches that are otherwise unoccupied. Over time, a little power often becomes a lot of power. What is surprising is how upfront EEOC officials were about their tactics in accumulating that power.”

Having gone this far, one might be tempted to ask the EEOC what limiting principle they actually apply to determine whether various employment and hiring practices are permissible. Are level of education, industry experience, and tests of physical and cognitive faculties verboten? The answer that is there is no consistent, limiting principle. Instead, Heriot says the EEOC “picks its battles” (see below). She also describes the EEOC’s adoption of a so-called “four-fifths rule”, which is about as arbitrary as it gets. It means the EEOC will challenge an employment practice only if it leads to a selection of any protected group at a rate less than 80% of the most-selected group. That is, the “disparate impact” must be less than 20% to rule out a challenge. This rule appears nowhere in Title VII.

Job Qualifications? You’re Guilty!

Unfortunately, as Heriot takes pains to demonstrate, it’s virtually impossible to identify a hiring guideline or method of employee assessment that does not have a disparate impact. The examples she provides on pp. 34 – 37 of her paper, and on p. 40, are convincing. Furthermore, the EEOC’s “four-fifths” rule hardly narrows the potential for challenge at all.

“Selection rates of less than four-fifths relative to the group with the highest rate are extremely common. Just as everything or nearly everything has a disparate impact, everything or nearly everything has a selection rate that fails the ‘four fifths rule’ for some race, color, religion, sex, or national origin group.”

So the EEOC is allowed to operate with tremendous discretion. Again, Heriot says the agency “picks its battles”, focusing on challenges to screening tools like “written tests, physical strength and endurance tests, criminal background tests [sic], high school diploma requirements, personal credit histories, residency requirements, and a few others.”

This regulatory environment encourages employers to keep job requirements vague, sometimes to the point at which potential applicants might not be sure what the job qualifications really are, or exactly what the job function entails. One upshot is that this makes it harder to detect and prove actual discrimination, and it often leads to more arbitrary decisions by hiring managers, which may, in fact, involve real discrimination, including nepotism and/or cronyism.

Unbiased Intent Doesn’t Matter

Heriot points to a disastrous decision by the Supreme Court that, perhaps unintentionally, helped legitimize the concept of disparate impact as legal doctrine, and as a valid cause of action by plaintiffs against employers. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the Court rejected the premise that an employer’s innocence with respect to their intent to discriminate was an inadequate defense of an employment practice that had adverse consequences to a protected group. Heriot quotes the opinion of Chief Justice Warren Burger:

“… good intent or absence of discriminatory intent does not redeem…. Congress directed the thrust of the Act to the consequences of employment practices, not simply the motivation.”

It’s as if the Court convinced itself that adverse consequences prove actual discrimination, even when there is no intent to discriminate. The Court also emphasized that it’s decision was based on “general deference” to the EEOC! And this was years before the unfortunate Chevron Doctrine (judicial deference to administrative agencies on interpretation of law) was formally established by the Court. Heriot and others assert that the decision in Griggs would have astonished the authors of Title VII.

Heriot also discusses changes in the treatment of “business necessity” as a defense against complaints of disparate impact. It is generally the employer’s burden to show the “necessity” of a challenged hiring practice. “Necessity” was the subject of several Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s and 1980s, but the Court stopped short of requiring an employer to show that a practice was “essential”. In one case, the court shifted some of the burden back onto the plaintiff to show that a practiced lacked necessity. In 1990, there was concern in the Bush Administration and Congress that the difficulty of proving business necessity would eventually lead to the adoption of racial quotas by employers in order to prevent EEOC challenges, though the authors of Title VII had staunchly opposed quotas. While the original hope was that the Civil Rights Act of 1991 would resolve questions about “business necessity” and the burden of proof, it did not. Instead, it can be said that it legitimized disparate impact liability, with conditions. The standard for proving necessity, based on Court decisions, evolved to become more strict with time. There are cases in which courts seem to have left the EEOC to define “business necessity”, as if the EEOC would be in a better position to do that than the business itself!

Inviting Discrimination

Heriot devotes part of her paper to the perverse effects of disparate impact. When employers are faced with prohibitions or the threat of action against a certain practice, whether it be tests of aptitude, strength, or screening on criminal or credit records, they may abandon those devices and opt instead for “informal” proxies. The use of proxies, however, often leads to instances of actual discrimination, whether born of conscious or unconscious bias on the part of hiring managers.

Heriot provides a number of examples of the proxy phenomenon, some of which have been confirmed by empirical research. For example, an employer interviewing candidates for a job that requires math proficiency might reasonably use a test of math skill as a key criterion. If such a test is prohibited, the hiring manager might be tempted to hire an Asian candidate, since Asians have a reputation for good math skills. Similarly, an applicant of West European ancestry might be favored for a position requiring excellent grammar skills, absent the ability to explicitly test grammatical skill. Candidates for a job requiring a certain level of physical strength could be evaluated by various tests of strength, but barring that, a hiring manager might be inclined to hire based on gender.

When criminal background checks are prohibited, employers might be tempted to use proxies such as gender and race as a substitute. Likewise, if it’s forbidden to check a candidate’s credit record to gauge reliability, other proxies might lead to discrimination against members of protected classes. Needless to say, these kinds of outcomes are precisely the opposite of what the EEOC hopes to achieve.

As Heriot further notes, the outcomes can be much systematic and destructive than a bit of one-off discrimination in hiring, promotion, pay raises, or task assignment. These may inflict damage reaching well beyond having the wrong people gaining favorable labor market outcomes. For example, an employer might choose to relocate operations to a “safer” or more affluent community, barring an ability to perform criminal background or credit checks. Or businesses might decide to substitute capital for labor, given the interference in their attempts to identify the best job candidates. The difficulty in screening also creates an incentive to automate, just as premature automation is becoming more common with rising wage floors imposed by government.

Killing Jobs and Competition

Like many forms of regulation, however, large firms in less competitive industries are usually better positioned to survive EEOC scrutiny than smaller firms in competitive markets. Indeed, we often see large market players embrace regulation because it gives them a competitive advantage over smaller rivals. In this case, we see large firms adopting their own diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goals. This is not solely related to the threat of EEOC challenges, however. Private lawsuits alleging discrimination or disparate impact are also a concern, as is pleasing activists inside and outside the company. Nevertheless, as Christopher Rufo reveals, there is growing push-back against the corporate DEI regime. Let’s hope it continues to gain traction.

Unconstitutional Executive Discretion

Heriot also dedicates part of her paper to constitutional issues related to the EEOC’s broad discretion in the application of disparate impact to employment practices. For one thing, disparate impact is a direct source of discrimination: when members of “protected groups” are awarded opportunities based on the possibility of disparate statistical outcomes, it means the majority candidates are denied those opportunities, no matter their qualifications. This is outright discrimination, and it’s instigation by a federal agency constitutes an explicit denial of equal protection under the law.

It should be no surprise that many consider disparate impact actions against employers to be denials of due process. Furthermore, when a federal agency like the EEOC exercises broad discretion, the so-called non-delegation doctrine should come into play. That is, the EEOC makes judgements on matters that are not necessarily authorized Congress. Thus, there are legitimate questions as to whether the EEOC’s discretion is a violation of the separation of powers. Granted, the courts have long deferred to administrative agencies in the interpretation of enabling statutes, but the Supreme Court has taken a new tack under Chief Justice Roberts. In some recent decisions, the Court has relied on a new “major questions” doctrine to place certain limits on executive discretion.

Conclusion

Hiring? Creating jobs? Better not get picky about checking your applicants’ skills and backgrounds or you risk liability for contributing to the statistical malaise of one, or of many, protected groups. That’s how it is under “disparate impact” rules imposed by the EEOC. The success of your business be damned!

Gail Heriot’s excellent paper details the way in which the EEOC transformed the meaning of its enabling legislation, expanding its reign over employment practices across the nation. She demonstrates the breadth of disparate impact rules with examples showing that virtually any attempt at systematic screening of job applicants can be held to be illegal. Your intent to hire the most qualified candidate without bias doesn’t matter, under an insane Supreme Court decision that buttressed the EEOC’s authority. As Heriot says, “… everything is presumptively illegal”. She also describes how disparate impact liability leads to employment decisions based on proxy criteria, which often lead to actual (even if unintended) discrimination. Further unintended consequences are the possibility of larger job losses in minority communities and less competition in product and labor markets. Finally, Heriot delineates several constitutional violations inherent in broad EEOC discretion and the enforcement of disparate impact.

One day a court challenge to the EEOC and disparate impact liability might rise to the level of the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia expected it, but it still hasn’t come before the Court. It should! Another way to do battle against the EEOC’s scourge is to challenge corporations who cow-tow to activists and to the EEOC with their own DEI initiatives. This manifestation of stakeholder capitalism is a cancer on the wealth and productivity of the U.S. economy, resting side-by-side with disparate impact liability.

The EPA’s Trip To the Constitutional Woodshed

07 Thursday Jul 2022

Posted by in Administrative State, Constitution, Supreme Court, Uncategorized

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The Supreme Court’s regular docket is done for the year, but one of last week’s rulings is of great interest to those concerned about the constitutional threat posed by the administrative state. In West Virginia v. EPA, the Court held that the Clean Air Act of 1970 does not authorize the EPA to regulate carbon emissions in power generation. Well, that’s getting to be a very old statute and no one thought much about carbon dioxide emissions when it became law, so of course it doesn’t! However, this decision is crucial as a check on the ever-growing, extra-legal power of the administrative bureaucracy. I say “extra-legal” because regulatory agencies are increasingly taking it upon themselves to write rules that reach well beyond their legislative mandates. Only the legislature can make law under our system of government, or at least law that settles “major questions”, a doctrine that the Court has applied in this case.

Consequential Side Issues

While many critics of the West Virginia decision might find this hard to believe, it has nothing to do with the Court’s views about the prospects for climate change. That is not the Court’s job and it knows it, or at least most of the justices know it. Even if climate change poses a real threat of global catastrophe, and it does not, that is not the Court’s job. Its primary function is to preserve constitutional law, and that is what this decision is about. (For more on the folly of climate alarmism, see here, here, and here.)

Apart from its constitutional implications, growth in the number of regulatory rules and their complexity also imposes massive costs on the economy, robbing the private sector of productive opportunities, often with little or no demonstrable public benefit. The unbridled promulgation of rules does, however, benefit special interests. That includes bureaucrats, litigators, and private parties who derive side benefits from regulation, such as protection of monopoly status, competitive advantages, and expanded professional opportunities. Leveraging government and political privilege for private benefit is rent seeking at its very heart, and it’s also at the very heart of fascistic corporatism.

A Little History

Regulation has been a channel for rent seeking going back to the earliest days of the Republic and even before. But a Great Leap Forward in federal regulatory intervention came in the late 1880s with several Supreme Court decisions involving railroad rates, and then the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The railroads practically begged to be regulated. At the last link, Sheldon Richmsn quotes historian Gabriel Kolko:

“The first regulatory effort, the Interstate Commerce Commission, had been cooperative and fruitful; indeed, the railroads themselves had been the leading advocates of extended federal regulation after 1887.”

The railroads wanted stability, of course, and less competition, and that’s what they got, though in the end they didn’t do themselves any favors. Here’s historian Clarence Carson on the ultimate result:

“Since the railroads could not effectively compete in so many ways, such opportunity for improving their situation as existed would usually be to combine roads cover­ing the same general area so as to maintain some control over rates and get as much of the profitable business as possible within an area. This is what rail­road financiers tended to do. The result, as far as the public was concerned, was a nonintegrated rail system, reduced competition, poorer service, and higher rates.”

Later, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt had strong roles in advancing the regulatory state. Wilson was smitten with the scientism inherent in centralized decision making and administrative expertise. He was also loath to concede his vision of administrative planning to democratic ideals. Justice Neil Gorsuch, in his concurrence on the EPA decision, offers some rather disturbing quotes from Wilson:

“Woodrow Wilson famously argued that ‘popular sovereignty’ ‘embarrasse[d]’ the Nation because it made it harder to achieve ‘executive expertness.’ The Study of Administration, 2 Pol. Sci. Q. 197, 207 (1887) (Administration). In Wilson’s eyes, the mass of the people were ‘selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.’ Id., at 208. He expressed even greater disdain for particular groups, defending ‘[t]he white men of the South’ for ‘rid[ding] themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant [African-Americans].’ 9 W. Wilson, History of the American People 58 (1918). He likewise denounced immigrants ‘from the south of Italy and men of the meaner sort out of Hungary and Poland,’ who possessed ‘neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence.’ 5 id., at 212. To Wilson, our Republic ‘tr[ied] to do too much by vote.’ Administration 214.”

FDR’s New Deal was responsible for a huge expansion in the administrative apparatus, as this partial list of federal agencies created under his leadership indicates. Many of these agencies were subsequently ruled unconstitutional, but quite a few live on today with greatly expanded scope and presumed powers.

The Great Society policies of Lyndon B. Johnson also created new agencies and programs, with additional burdens on the ability of the private economy to function properly. Of course, the complexity of the administrative state has increased many-fold with more recent actions such as the Clean Air Act and the Affordable Care Act.

Major Questions

The agencies, despite any expertise they might have in-house, cannot create major rules and mandates without fairly specific statutory authorization. That is a constitutional imperative. It’s not quite clear, however, what test might distinguish a “major question” requiring enabling legislation from lesser matters. There is certainly some room for interpretation. According to Kevin O. Leske:

“Under the [major questions] doctrine, a court will not defer to an agency’s interpretation of a statutory provision in circumstances where the case involves an issue of deep economic or political significance or where the interpretive question could effectuate an enormous and transformative expansion of the agency’s regulatory authority.”

Unfortunately, this judicial deference to agency rule-making and interpretation led to further erosion of the separation of powers and due process rights. Vague legislation, aggressive special interests and rent seekers, and judicial deference have allowed agencies excessive latitude to interpret and stretch their mandates, to enforce expansive regulatory actions, and to adjudicate disputes with regulated entities in proceedings internal to the agencies themselves.

At issue in EPA v. West Virginia were the agency’s steps to radically transform the energy mix used in power generation, with potentially dramatic, negative impacts on the public. The Court said that won’t fly unless Congress gives the EPA more specific instructions along those lines. Agency expertise, by itself, is not enough to override the legitimate democratic interests of the public in such consequential matters.

But what about executive actions of the sort increasingly taken by presidents over the years? Why are those legal? Article Two of the Constitution grants discretion to the president for enforcement of laws and managing the executive branch. Furthermore, pieces of legislation can specifically grant discretionary power to the executive branch in particular areas. Nevertheless, it might be possible for even executive orders issued by the president to “go too far” in interpreting congressional intent. That is within the purview of courts in case of legal challenges.

Unaccountable Agency Power

So called “administrative expertise” was given some degree of deference by the Supreme Court as early as the 1930s. In 1947, the Court decided the application of such expertise should often take precedence over pre-established rules. There was also a recognition that legislators often lacked the expertise to formulate certain regulatory guidelines. The expanding scope and complexity of regulations gave rise to increasing legal disputes, however. This strained the judicial system for at least two reasons: the sheer limits of its capacity and the lack of technical expertise needed to settle many disputes. This ultimately led to the adjudication of many disputes within the agencies themselves. Agency tribunals of subject matter experts were formed to meet these growing demands. This was said to facilitate “cheap justice”, not to mention more rapid decisions. The passage of the Administrative Procedures Act in 1947 was a recognition that administrative law was necessary and required certain standards, though they differ from normal judicial standards, such as rules of evidence. This left very little to brake aggressive and extra-legal rule-making and enforcement by the agencies.

Another disturbing aspect of the growth in administrative power has been the advent of agencies said to be “independent” from the other branches of government, as if to intimate their existence as a fourth branch. As Francis Menton (the Manhattan Contrarian) says, agencies:

“… can create rules for your conduct free from the Congress, and … can prosecute you free from the President. In 1935, in a case called Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court upheld the part of the FTC Act that made the Commissioners immune from discharge by the President other than in very limited circumstances. Humphrey’s Executor has not been overruled to this day.

The FTC was only the beginning of an explosion of creation of such ‘independent’ agencies and otherwise un-separated powers in the federal government. The Federal Reserve was created about the same time (actually 1913), and things really took off during Roosevelt’s New Deal, with agencies like the FCC, SEC, and NLRB.”

Later, the Supreme Court adopted a two-part test to determine whether courts may defer to administrative expertise in interpreting legislative intent, rather than substituting their own judgement or insisting on a clearer legislative mandate. This was the principle of so-called Chevron deference, named for the case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, in which the Court ruled for the EPA’s definition of a “stationary source” of pollution as “plantwide”. The test for Chevron deference was whether an agency’s rule was a “reasonable” statutory interpretation and whether Congress had not directly addressed the point in question.

Rolling It Back

Philip Hamburger, in his book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”, addressed the struggle between administrative power and “regular law” back to the days of “royal prerogative”. The advent of constitutional law was designed to prevent anything resembling the latter.

“… administrative law has returned American government and society to precisely the sort of consolidated or absolute power that the US Constitution―and constitutions in general―were designed to prevent.”

But now we have some very promising developments. Again, in the West Virginia case, the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions in power generation has been denied by the Court, pending any future legislation that would specifically enable that authority. There was no mention of Chevron in this decision whatsoever! That’s a big win for constitutional principle. In another recent case before the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans, Jarkesy v. SEC, an administrative law judge (ALJ) at the SEC had assessed damages and fines against Jarkesy, but he challenged the SEC in court, as Menton describes:

“Jarkesy claimed that he was deprived of his Seventh Amendment right to have his case decided by a jury, and also that the SEC had unconstitutionally exercised legislative powers when deciding to try his case before an ALJ without having been given any guiding principles by Congress on how to make that decision. The Fifth Circuit ruled for Jarkesy on both points. This decision has the potential to force some significant changes on how the SEC does business. However, Mr. Jarkesy still does have to continue to run a gantlet that will likely include a request by the government for en banc review by the Fifth Circuit, and then a request for review by the Supreme Court.”

Conclusion

Here is a nice summary of the constitutional issues from an earlier post by Menton:

“… (1) the combining of powers into agencies that would enact, and also enforce, and also adjudicate regulations (directly contrary to the Constitution’s separation of powers into three branches of government); (2) agencies enacting regulations with the force of law on their own say so (contrary to the Constitution’s requirement that all laws be passed by both houses of Congress and presented to the President for signature); and (3) many agencies claiming to be “independent” of the President (contrary to the Constitution’s vesting all ‘ executive power’ in the President).

This is echoed by Jonathan Tobin, who says:

“Government by fiat of intellectuals or scientific experts may or may not be good policy. But it is alien to the U.S. Constitution, and it has nothing to do with democracy.”

One other critical point made by Charles Lipson is that the Court’s West Virginia decision, while sending an unmistakeable message to federal agencies, should also raise awareness in Congress that it is not enough to legislate vague statutes and rely on bureaucrats to make all the decisions about implementation. Instead, “major questions” must be dealt with legislatively and with full accountability to voters. Congress must address these issues, if not up-front, then whenever they arise as disputes in the courts or otherwise. Certainly, the West Virginia decision should make individuals or entities subject to regulatory action less likely to allow major questions to be settled by ALJ rulings within the agencies themselves. The Supreme Court has expressed a willingness for such cases to be reviewed in normal courts of law. That is a very positive development for liberty.

Administrative Supremacy, Lost Checks and Balances

16 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Regulation

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The two-for-one regulatory order issued by the Trump White House in January raises some practical difficulties in implementation. It requires that federal agencies eliminate two regulatory rules for every new rule promulgated, both in terms of the number of rules and any incremental regulatory costs imposed. Two out for every one in. Questions surrounding the meaning of “a regulation”, how to define incremental costs, and whether a particular rule is actually mandated by legislation are not trivial. Nevertheless, the spirit of this order is admirable and it serves as the leading edge of the Administration’s attempt to roll back the scope and impact of excessive government authority.

The cost of regulation is vast. Economists at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University have estimated the total cumulative cost of regulation in the U.S., finding that regulation has reduced economic growth by 0.8 percent per year since 1980. Without the additional regulatory growth since 1980, the U.S. economy would have been about 25 percent larger than it was in 2012. That’s a $4 trillion shortfall, or roughly $13,000 per person.

While regulation and administrative control over the private economy takes an increasing toll on economic growth and human welfare, the problem goes beyond economic considerations: administrative agencies have “progressively” usurped not just legislative but also judicial power. The concentration of executive, legislative and judicial power constitutes a “fourth branch of government“, a development inimical to the principles enshrined in our Constitution and a prescription for slow-boil tyranny. It facilitates rent seeking and corporatism just as surely as it creates a ruling class of individuals who act on their personal and arbitrary inclinations. We are ruled by men backed by police power, not impartial laws.

Glenn Reynolds writes that unelected rule makers and central planners are able to manipulate decisions across a broad swath of the economy and society. He quotes a new book by Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School called “The Administrative Threat“:

“Government agencies regulate Americans in the full range of their lives, including their political participation, their economic endeavors, and their personal conduct. Administrative power has thus become pervasively intrusive. But is this power constitutional?

A similar sort of power was once used by English kings, and this book shows that the similarity is not a coincidence. In fact, administrative power revives absolutism. On this foundation, the book explains how administrative power denies Americans their basic constitutional freedoms, such as jury rights and due process. No other feature of American government violates as many constitutional provisions or is more profoundly threatening. As a result, administrative power is the key civil liberties issue of our era.“

Two previous posts on Sacred Cow Chips have dealt with Hamburger’s work. The first, “Hamburger Nation: An Administrative Nightmare“(1) provides the following explanation of his position:

“Hamburger examines the assertion that rule-making must be delegated by Congress to administrative agencies because legislation cannot reasonably be expected to address the many details and complexities encountered in the implementation of new laws. Yet this is a delegation of legislative power. Once delegated, this power has a way of metastasizing at the whim of agency apparatchiks, if not at the direction of the chief executive. If you should want to protest an administrative ruling, your first stop will not be a normal court of law, but an administrative review board or a court run by the agency itself! You’ll be well advised to hire an administrative attorney to represent you. Eventually, and at greater expense, an adverse decision can be appealed to the judicial branch proper.“

The exercise of rule-making authority, and even extra-legal legislative action by the administrative state, has economic costs that are bad enough. Hamburger also emphasizes the breakdown of the separation of executive and judicial powers inherent in the enforcement and adjudication of disputes under administrative law. This was the subject of the second Sacred Cow Chips post referenced above: “Courts and Their Administrative Masters“. It reviewed an unfortunate standard established by court precedent involving judicial (“Chevron”) deference to administrative agency fact-finding and even interpretation of law. While the decisions of administrative courts, which are run by the agencies themselves, can be appealed to the judicial branch, such appeals often amount to exercises in futility.

“…courts apply a test of judgement as to whether the administrative agency’s interpretation of the law is “reasonable”, even if other “reasonable” interpretations are possible. This gets particularly thorny when the original legislation is ambiguous with respect to a certain point.

…the courts should not abdicate their role in reviewing an agency’s developmental evidence for any action, and the reasonability of an agency’s applications of evidence relative to alternative courses of action. Nor should the courts abdicate their role in ruling on the law itself.“

This paper on Judicial Deference to Agencies by Evan D. Bernick of Georgetown Law makes the case that judicial deference is a violation of the constitutional separation of powers, concluding that:

“… in cases involving administrative deprivations of core private rights to ‘life, liberty, or property,’ fact deference violates Article III’s vesting of ‘[t]he judicial power’ in the federal courts; constitutes an abdication of the duty of independent judgment that Article III imposes upon federal judges; and violates the Fifth Amendment by denying litigants ‘due process of law,’ which requires (1) judicial proceedings in an Article III court prior to any individualized deprivation of ‘life, liberty, or property’; and (2) fact-finding by independent, impartial fact-finders.“

Inez and Jarrett Stepman in Townhall note that there are almost three million well-paid federal employees with job security that would make most private sector workers envious.

“Though the abolishment of the spoils system [which allowed civil service hiring and firing based on political party] was meant to mitigate corruption and incompetence, it has resulted in a toxic combination of enhanced agency power and an entrenched civil servant class with its own institutional—and frequently political—interests, virtually unaccountable to the president or any other elected official.“

The Stepmans discuss legislation that might stem the usurpation of lawmaking power by the administrative state. They are convinced that the administrative state must be reigned-in. Ironically, expanded executive authority means that the process of reversal is not that difficult in many cases. By way of example, here’s a piece on the ease of undoing certain Obama era regulations. Executive orders, or “the pen and the phone” in Obama’s charming parlance, lack legitimate legislative authority and can be reversed by new executive orders. I firmly believe that reversing the earlier orders is the right thing to do at the moment, but the unchecked authority that makes it possible (and the supremacy of the administrative state) is a source of economic instability, and it must end. Eric Boehm makes this point eloquently in Reason at the last link above:

“New policies that affect wide swaths of the economy and reshape entire business models should go through Congress, or at the very least should be subject to the public rulemaking process. Guidance documents and other ‘dark matter’ regulations that by-pass those processes can be un-made as quickly as they were made, leaving businesses to deal with an ever-changing and unpredictable regulatory state that does not really help anyone, no matter which side you’re on in any individual policy fight.“

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(1) The principle title “Hamburger Nation” was intended as a play on Glenn Reynolds’ paper “Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is a Crime“, in which he discussed the judicial implications of over-criminalization and regulatory overreach.

 

Courts and Their Administrative Masters

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by in Big Government, Regulation

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Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch says the judicial branch should not be obliged to defer to government agencies within the executive branch in interpreting law. Gorsuch’s  opinion, however, is contrary to an established principle guiding courts since the 1984 Supreme Court ruling in Chevron USA vs. The Natural Resources Defense Council. In what is known as Chevron deference, courts apply a test of judgement as to whether the administrative agency’s interpretation of the law is “reasonable”, even if other “reasonable” interpretations are possible. This gets particularly thorny when the original legislation is ambiguous with respect to a certain point. Gorsuch believes the Chevron standard subverts the intent of Constitutional separation of powers and judicial authority, a point of great importance in an age of explosive growth in administrative rule-making at the federal level.

Ilya Somin offers a defense of Gorsuch’s position on Chevron deference, stating that it violates the text of the Constitution authorizing the judiciary to decide matters of legal dispute without ceding power to the executive branch. The agencies, for their part, seem to be adopting increasingly expansive views of their authority:

“Some scholars argue that in many situations, agencies are not so much interpreting law, but actually making it by issuing regulations that often have only a tenuous basis in congressional enactments. When that happens, Chevron deference allows the executive to usurp the power of Congress as well as that of the judiciary.”

Jonathan Adler quotes a recent decision by U.S. Appeals Court Judge Kent Jordan in which he expresses skepticism regarding the wisdom of Chevron deference:

Deference to agencies strengthens the executive branch not only in a particular dispute under judicial review; it tends to the permanent expansion of the administrative state. Even if some in Congress want to rein an agency in, doing so is very difficult because of judicial deference to agency action. Moreover, the Constitutional requirements of bicameralism and presentment (along with the President’s veto power), which were intended as a brake on the federal government, being ‘designed to protect the liberties of the people,’ are instead, because of Chevron, ‘veto gates’ that make any legislative effort to curtail agency overreach a daunting task.

In short, Chevron ‘permit[s] executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power and concentrate federal power in a way that seems more than a little difficult to square with the Constitution of the [F]ramers’ design.’

The unchecked expansion of administrative control is a real threat to the stability of our system of government, our liberty, and the health of our economic system. It imposes tremendous compliance costs on society and often violates individual property rights. Regulatory actions are often taken without performing a proper cost-benefit analysis, and the decisions of regulators may be challenged initially only within a separate judicial system in which courts are run by the agencies themselves! I covered this point in more detail one year ago in “Hamburger Nation: An Administrative Nightmare“, based on Philip Hamburger’s book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?“.

Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute gives further perspective on the regulatory-state-gone-wild in “Mapping Washington’s Lawlessness: An Inventory of Regulatory Dark Matter“. He mentions some disturbing tendencies that may go beyond the implementation of legislative intent: agencies sometimes choose to wholly ignore some aspects of legislation; agencies tend to apply pressure on regulated entities on the basis of interpretations that stretch the meaning of such enabling legislation as may exist; and as if the exercise of extra-legislative power were not enough, administrative actions have a frequent tendency to subvert the price mechanism in private markets, disrupting the flow of accurate information about resource-scarcity and the operation of incentives that give markets their great advantages. All of these behaviors fit Crews’ description of “regulatory dark matter.”

Chevron deference represents an unforced surrender by the judicial branch to the exercise of power by the executive. As Judge Jordan notes in additional quotes provided by Adler at a link above, this does not deny the usefulness or importance of an agency’s specialized expertise. Nevertheless, the courts should not abdicate their role in reviewing an agency’s developmental evidence for any action, and the reasonability of an agency’s applications of evidence relative to alternative courses of action. Nor should the courts abdicate their role in ruling on the law itself. Judge Gorsuch is right: Chevron deference should be re-evaluated by the courts.