Document Type
Article
Publication Title
Environmental Law
Publication Date
Spring 2025
Page Number
279
Keywords
statutory mandates, environmental regulations, administrative agencies
Disciplines
Environmental Law | Law
Abstract
Federal administrative agencies frequently undertake regulatory impact analyses to provide the basis for promulgating new regulations and justify the reasonableness of regulations upon judicial re- view. Using analytical methods, agencies quantify and compare the relative costs and benefits of regulatory alternatives, seeking policies that maximize net societal benefits, subject to statutory constraints. Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo threatens to upend this methodological check on the rationality of agency action in two distinct ways: first by limiting the permissibility of regulatory impact analysis as a basis for regulation, and second by replacing technical and scientific-informed components of the analysis with judicial interpretations of ambiguous statutory provisions. This threat is most unsettling in the context of environmental regulations, which comprise the greatest share of new federal regulations. The monetization of environmental harms is essential to demonstrate that the benefits of remedial regulations outweigh their costs, and the promulgation of new regulations to confront emerging climatic issues frequently relies on ambiguous statutory provisions. This Article explores the far-reaching effects of Loper Bright that go to the analytical foundations of policy analysis and evaluation. It argues that assessing the impact of Loper Bright requires consideration not only of the consistency between regulatory policies and the agency's enabling statute but also of the harmony between the underlying justification for regulations and the statutory prescriptions regarding the factors that should be considered in regulatory policy design. The Article concludes that, while judicial review will become more scrutinizing of the compatibility between agencies' statutory mandate and the substantive policies underlying regulatory impact analysis, the regulatory state can and indeed must evolve or else risk ossification.
Recommended Citation
Sydney C. Schoonover and W. Kip Viscusi,
Reconciling Regulatory Impact Analyses and Agencies, 55 Environmental Law. 279
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/1734