Republican leaders of the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure (T&I) Committee are directing key agency leaders to evaluate how the recent Supreme Court ruling that overturned the so-called Chevron doctrine will affect their rulemaking and court decisions. In place since the mid-1980s, the Chevron doctrine provided federal agencies with deference in legal challenges to their rulemaking and other activities.

“Unsurprisingly, Chevron unleashed decades of successively broader, more costly, and more invasive assertions of agency power over citizens’ lives, liberty, and property, as agencies adopted expansive interpretations of assertedly ambiguous statutes, demanding courts defer to them,” said Rep. Sam Graves (R-Missouri), the chairman of the committee, and Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chairman of T&I’s oversight committee, in letters to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and EPA Administrator Michael Regan.

The lawmakers further asserted that the current administration has promulgated “far more major rules, imposing far more costs and paperwork burdens, than either of its recent predecessor administrations.”

They directed the agencies to send “any information” about rules proposed or promulgated, agency adjudications initiated or completed, enforcement actions brought, or interpretive rules proposed or issued since Jan. 20, 2021, when President Biden took office. They further asked for this information by July 23.

The request comes as the FAA has been exploring the potential impact of the latest Supreme Court action. In addition, the industry has been quietly making those same evaluations, anticipating that there will be more to come as the decision to shift the deference on legal determinations away from the federal agencies takes root.