The examples are so horrendous I thought it was satire. I can’t wait for genome, cryptocurrency, and nuclear power startups to “move fast and break things” and screw up so badly and remind us why we had these regulations to begin with.
The NRC (and most other regulatory bodies) predate Chevron deference, so you should count on them sticking around and still doing their thing. A nuclear startup could try taking them to court to circumvent all their rules and build naked nuclear piles in residential neighborhoods or something, but even if they got a federal judge to go along with that, it should be an easy political win for legislators to smack it down with some new more specific laws.
And although the regulatory interpretation of those laws could also be challenged in court, successfully doing so shouldn't be considered a given. Judges generally do have some sense you know, as a class they decide important matters in boring uncontroversial ways across the country every days. The controversial outcomes that make news cycles are newsworthy specifically because they're unusual.
Than the United States Congress? They're absolutely more effective. Congress may have been an innovative design in 1787, but it's grown into such a pile of misaligned incentives that it's almost completely dysfunctional.
As for corruption, I suspect agencies may be more or less corrupt on an individual basis. I don't have any hard data, but I suspect they're less corrupt on average. The Supreme Court has, repeatedly, given Congress members the go-ahead to be almost as corrupt as they want, while they're harsher on executive branch agencies.
Is 23 And Me supplying you with an analysis of your genome horrendous? Giving medical advice based on that while not being an MD might be a wrong thing, but that's not what's discussed, and it is regulated differently.
Crypto currencies may be a wrong and dangerous thing (paying for stolen goods and hit jobs, etc), but KYC rules are not derived from the Chevron ruling.
Nuclear safety is indeed important, but forcing nuclear power stations to lower their radiation levels below the natural background levels of places like Denver, CO does not seem reasonable, but does seem like an undue burden.
> Is 23 And Me supplying you with an analysis of your genome horrendous?
No, but forever storing it, cross-matching it with others, and eventually leaking this data is horrendous.
If 23 And Me was just a genome analysis for preventive healthcare company you wouldn't be citing it because that's not "exciting" enough but it'd be as useful as it can be without the harmful side of collecting this biometric data at such scale.
But won't a preventive healthcare company be subject to these same risks of cross-matching and leaking?
Also, not that 23 And Me were secretive about all that, they advertised the cross-matching before you order the kit, and data leak risks is something one should automatically consider when sharing any private data with anyone at all.'
If there is any harm done, it's not in telling people how much Neanderthal DNA they have, and not even in cross-matching them when they voluntarily sign up for that.
> But won't a preventive healthcare company be subject to these same risks of cross-matching and leaking?
For cross-matching no, why would they be cataloguing genealogy trees if they didn't provide that service? Or if they did for any necessary further analysis/research (like tracing some evolution of genetic defect) it could be anonymised and discarded after use.
For leaking data, I agree there would be a risk but not providing services that require the genetic data to be available at all times for 23 And Me would lessen the issue. Either simply discard the data when not necessary anymore for the healthcare assessment; or if they wanted to keep it for the convenience of the customer then it could be encrypted with some key only the customer has access to, and which if needed the customer could provide for their service request.
Voluntarily signing up for it shouldn't remove all ethical issues from 23 And Me, a common person as a customer is not an all-knowing being who is informed enough about all the potential risks of giving such data to a company. It's not reasonable to expect that every customer is well informed about that.
Or, it can remind us why we have Congress in the first place.
Another article trending here is talking about what a great power grab it is by the supreme Court, which is true in a sense, but mostly it is saying to the Congress that you actually have to do your job.
Congress did their job. They granted authority to regulatory agencies who are much better equipped to make these sorts of decisions. Regulatory agencies employ scientists and subject matter experts in their relevant fields.
Our congresspeople are a mixture of serious people and clowns who are very good at saying outrageous things to get on television. Even the serious people cannot possibly be well-rounded enough to have the kind of expertise necessary to write perfectly detailed regulations for every possible field.
Could I come up with some regulations related to tech? Sure. But it would be a terrible idea to ask me to write financial, medical, or environmental regulations.
Like I said, Congress did their jobs. Sometimes delegating to experts is the smartest move.
Where congress explicitly delegates authority it will be respected and that is not chevron deference, chevron deference means that when a law is ambiguous it means the court should interpret the ambiguity as congress delegating their authority to the regulator within reason.
It is not possible except in some simple cases to make those laws completely specify every detail and cover every case when dealing with large complex topics, so there will almost always be cases where those executing the law will need to have some gaps filled in order to carry the law.
That was true long before Chevron, true during Chevron, and is still true.
This isn't the end of regulation, this is just the end of unelected agencies making up rules as they please. All this changes is that congress has to do their job.
I find it interesting how the culture in the US is to chastize China for its "anything goes" policies when it comes to entrepreneurship, while simultaneously lamenting how regulation kills innovation.
You kind of can't both say "damn those Chinese for not respecting IP and stealing my hard work" and also "I don't want regulation, I want to be able to do whatever I want". Or do you not consider IP protection laws regulation?
I don't think the "US culture" criticizes China for their entrepreneurship. You hear criticisms against their totalitarian state, cheap goods, IP theft (as you mention) and the transfer of US jobs to China, but the average American doesn't think about their policies and their relation to free enterprise. You probably heard that from a loud minority and assumed it's representative of the country.
I also don't think most pro-business advocates will say that they want no laws or regulation of any kind. Business need the enforcement of contract laws, trademark laws and, yes, intellectual property laws to function. Most pro-business people aren't defending anarchy. The criticism regarding regulation is about excessive regulation which, more often than not, exists to benefit certain parties (established businesses, compliance equipment and service providers) over others (new and small businesses).
Yes, but being against excessive anything is a tautology, as "excessive" by definition means "too much". The question is "how much is too much", and the bar is much lower in the US than in Europe.
"US culture" is not one person and comprises of many people who frequently disagree with each other vehemently.
"US culture" simultaneously says that baseball is better than football and football is better than baseball. That's not a contradiction because it's different people saying those things.
Yes, I hear that argument whenever anyone says anything about more than one person. I don't care much for that argument because it basically denies that culture exists by saying "different people have different preferences". Sure, they do, but also it's clearly true to say "the US culture is against regulation" and "the EU culture is for regulation".
Plus, I don't even think it's that hard to find people who dislike regulation but also dislike people copying their intellectual property (for example, every single company ever).
It's not "denying that culture exists", it's refuting your erroneous and unreasonable expectation that culture should be consistent as though it were a person (even though individual people are themselves frequently inconsistent!)
This argument hinges on the premise of regulators not being able to make up new rules anymore. However this isn't the case, they can still do that. The difference is now you can more effectively challenge those rules in federal courts.
But to challenge regulators in federal court will still require a lot of legal resources, which means small guys will still be effectively bound by the rules but large companies will be relatively untethered. Those large players are simultaneously less likely to innovate anyway due to being large and therefore more ossified in their thinking and a tendency to protect their present products and organization structures. Therefore I think the acceleration will be far less pronounced than the OP post suggests.
I think the counter point to that is that we have think tanks and political organizations who have rich donors with which to hire high power law firms, who find the regulation they want to axe, and then search the country for a case with standing and then pursue those cases until the regulation dies.
You are right that it won’t be the little guys doing this, but they might be represented by very powerful organizations who take down laws professionally and are doing so for their own benefit. And with the way politics has entered everything, who knows which things will be targeted next, or what new cruelties they care to inflict.
At the same time, again due to the current political climate, it doesn’t do us any good to have all the rules thrash back and forth with each new administration. This is what we get as we get more and more polarized and laws aren’t being written with compromise. Congress and elections need serious reform.
You don’t have to have a regulation be declined by the courts. You just need a court to more easily issue months-long stays on a given executive action.
My concern with all of this is that a handful of courts will see this as an opportunity to get trigger-happy with issuing stays on executive agencies, causing a complete deadlock with any new law.
Great point. Our problem is not big government. It's big corporation. This will only make it worse for the little guy, easier for the big guy, harder for the regulators, and harder for the people. This ruling will slow down competition and innovation and break both good and bad regulations across the board. This ruling is vehemently anti-citizen, pro-corporation. Government by the people vs government by the big faceless org.
The reality of it is not that these things should or shouldn’t be illegal, but that congress should have to discuss, compromise and pass a law about it.
This rule gives the power back to congress where a supermajority of senators has to pass everything instead of the regulator.
It is even more important to note that the relationship between Companies and Regulators is not always confrontational. Our interests align more often than not (anecdote below). However, regulators occasionally overstep, and this decision allows Companies to challenge such oversteps.
I once ran a chemical plant and we partnered with the state to reduce emissions to single-digit parts per billion levels (from parts per million). They were completely aware that this was a difficult problem to solve, expensive, and technically challenging. They worked with us to get this done in a space of a couple of years, and we quickly reached a point where we could proudly state that we made a difference to my employees and our surrounding community.
When you don't have to pay for something it is easy to ask for more, and an agency led by a partisan could easily do so. Having the ability to challenge this allows us to push back in a structured way.
As with most things, it can be more nuanced than your comment suggests.
At the time this chemical was introduced, the hazards were not known to science. Over the decades, scientists began outlining the effects of this chemical on humans and the environment.
Once industry was able to study those findings and convince ourselves that this was a real problem, we adapted our operations to mitigate those harms.
Most industries in the US work pretty hard to keep our employees and environments safe, for self preservation, if for nothing else. I breathe the same air as my employees do, after all.
Most regulatory agencies are aware that dangerous chemicals have legitimate uses. The problem statement is how to balance those uses against the known hazards. They (mostly) find a sensible balance, but sometimes, they get taken over by leaders who push it too far in one direction or another. Overturning Chevron allows adjudication to reset the balance and that should be seen as a good thing.
What were the benefits? The problem I have with the system is that if there was some concept that 'needed' to be regulated, there's absolutely nothing stopping Congress from doing so. In fact there's also nothing stopping various regulatory agencies from doing so. But Chevron deference essentially removed the check-and-balance that the judicial system provided, in cases where regulators may have gone beyond their legal authority, or even contravened it.
One benefit of Chevron was the recent banning of non-competes. If you're interested in fostering innovation, banning non-competes is a good idea. [1]
The idea that Congress could and pass regulations in a timely manner is a nice one. Unfortunately, Congress is almost completely dysfunctional, so there's a near-zero chance of that happening.
Many of the recent Supreme Court rulings seem to hinge on this idea that Congress can and should fulfill its role. And while that would be great, it completely ignores the reality of modern Congress. I fear we're going to suffer some extreme effects because the court is ruling based on how they think things ought to be, rather than what things are.
Congress could have issued a law in the last 40 years —- where there were opportunities for both political parties —- clarifying this if the legislative branch disagreed.
…if we’re going along with the logic this court has been working with here.
I look forward to hearing all about how liberals and regulations will be to blame for the negative impacts of a world where corporations are unfettered by regulations.
Maybe if we just give them _more_ power it will all just work out. Maybe the Supreme Court will rule that the Second Amendment means that Fortune 500 companies have an inalienable right to own nuclear weapons.
