San Francisco Invokes Supreme Court’s Bureaucracy-Weakening Ruling in Lawsuit Against EPA

San Francisco will invoke the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling from last month that weakened federal regulators’ power in its upcoming case challenging federal wastewater discharge regulations, according to a brief the city filed with the court on July 19.

The city is arguing that Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials misinterpreted a provision of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 when they issued a discharge permit. In issuing the permit, the officials deviated from the framework of the statute so much that they revived the old regulatory approach the law replaced, the city says.

The city says the Supreme Court’s June 28 decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which invalidated the 40-year-old bureaucracy-empowering Chevron deference doctrine, has a bearing on the case. Critics say the now-defunct doctrine, which required judges to defer to the legal interpretations of unelected federal agency officials when enforcing federal laws they deemed ambiguous, led to the explosive growth of the federal government in recent decades.

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