Americans for Prosperity Foundation Applauds Return of Endangered Species Act Regulation to Statutory Text “Based On” Loper Bright 

The Departments of Interior and Commerce announced the finalization of a rule rescinding regulations issued by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service that had dramatically expanded the scope of the Endangered Species Act to potentially criminalize conduct and private land use decisions Congress did not statutorily authorize the Services to reach. The announcement explains that “[t]his reform is based on the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo[.]”  The Services concluded that their regulations were not the best reading of the law and, moving forward, will stand on the statutory text Congress enacted without regulatory gloss. Americans for Prosperity Foundation filed a comment supporting the Services’ authority to rescind their prior regulations. Additional background here. AFPF applauds this decision, which is a win for the separation of powers and property rights that also respects the ESA’s statutory protections of the environment. 

Background 

The ESA is a sweeping federal environmental law with dramatic impacts on private property rights and land use decisions, which, while well intentioned, may well exceed constitutional limits on federal power. ESA violations can carry both civil and criminal penalties. The statute prohibits “takes” of listed threatened or endangered species without a permit.  In an unusually detailed list, Congress defined the statutory term “take” to mean “to harass, harm, pursue, hunt, shoot, wound, kill, trap, capture, or collect, or to attempt to engage in any such conduct.” The statute does not expressly delegate to the Services the power to alter, add to, or expand this list, let alone obligate them to do so. Nonetheless, the Services’ now-repealed regulations added significant interpretive gloss on the word “harm” in the statutory definition of “take” to “include significant habitat modification or degradation” and extend to activities “significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns” of listed species, among other things.  

In 1995, in Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision upheld the USFWS’s interpretation of word “harm” in the statutory definition of “take” by relying on Chevron deference and legislative history and concluded that “Congress did not unambiguously manifest its intent to adopt” a narrower reading of “harm” to exclude habitat modification and that USFWS’s broader reading was “reasonable.” Justice Scalia, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justice Thomas, dissented, rejecting this reading as inconsistent with the ESA’s text and structure and concluding that the regulation was ultra vires even under Chevron. 

 In 2024, the Supreme Court overruled Chevron in Loper Bright. After Loper Bright, federal regulations and other agency statutory interpretations that could only be defended under the Chevron regime as “permissible” interpretations of putatively ambiguous statutory provisions—but which depart from the statute’s single best meaning—cannot be grounded in an actual statutory delegation of discretion and thus fall outside of the agency’s statutory authority. However, there is a caveat: in overruling Chevron, the Loper Court wrote, it did “not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron framework. The holdings of those cases that specific agency actions are lawful—including the Clean Air Act holding of Chevron itself—are still subject to statutory stare decisis despite our change in interpretive methodology.” To date, that passage has been the subject of debate in lower courts, including whether it refers to the specific agency decision upheld under Chevron or the agency’s interpretation of the statute, as we have previously discussed here and here.  

Loper Bright’s Impact on the Final Rule’s Rationale  

The Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright appears to have played a material, if not dispositive, role in the Services’ rationale for repealing their regulations broadly defining the word “harm” in the ESA’s statutory definition of “take” to expand the statute’s prohibitions. The final rule frames the relevant inquiry “[a]fter Loper Bright” as “whether ‘the statute authorizes the challenged agency action’ . . . . In other words, does the agency’s regulation match the single, best meaning of the statute?” Applying Loper Bright, the Services “concluded that the Services’ existing regulations, which contain the definition of ‘harm’ contested in Sweet Home, do not match the single, best meaning of the statute,” instead “adopt[ing] Justice Scalia’s rationale as articulated in Sweet Home and conclude[ing] that the Services’ regulatory definitions are unlawful, notwithstanding the Court’s prior upholding of the regulatory definition under Chevron deference.” 

In the final rule, the Services explained that “[t]he ESA itself defines ‘take,’ and the regulatory elaboration of one subcomponent of that definition—‘harm’—has had the effect of exceeding the proper bounds of the statute and asserting power that Congress never actually gave to the executive branch.” In light of the statute’s detailed definition of “take,” the Services found that “maintaining a freestanding definition of ‘harm’ is unnecessary,” choosing to “[r]eturn[] to the statutory definition as the operative language” without adding a regulatory gloss on a single word within that statutory definition. Importantly, the Services’ recission of their regulatory definition of “harm” does not undermine the ESA’s wildlife protections, leaving untouched its statutory prohibition against “takes” of threatened wildlife as Congress chose to define that term. 

How did the Services’ final rule reconcile the passage of Loper Bright discussing statutory stare decisis for Chevron-era decisions with the Court’s Sweet Home decision? In the final rule, the Services stake out the following position: 

Though, in Loper Bright, the Court declared that statutory stare decisis would protect specific regulations upheld under Chevron from future litigation challenges, the Court left open the possibility that the executive branch could itself depart from regulations that do not match the single, best meaning of the statute—so long as the new regulations reflect that best meaning . . . . This makes particular sense given Loper Bright’s focus on the propriety of executing the laws as written by Congress and the Executive Branch’s constitutional obligation to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]” 

That is an interesting justification, tying Loper Bright’s core teaching that statutes enacted by Congress have a single best meaning with the Constitution’s Take Care Clause, which requires the Executive branch to faithfully follow the laws Congress has enacted. This approach has logical and intuitive appeal insofar as the Chevron-era regulations that are being repealed depart from the best reading of the statute they purport to implement and are thus ultra vires. And it will be interesting to see the extent to which this understanding of Loper Bright’s statutory stare decisis passage is adopted by courts and whether the Administration advances a similar rationale in other post-Loper rulemakings repealing old regulations previously upheld under the Chevron regime. Responding to commenters opposing the final rule on statutory stare decisis grounds, the Services raise another interesting argument as to why it doesn’t lock in Sweet Home’s interpretation post-Loper, suggesting that “the idea of applying stare decisis to agency action is inconsistent with a core tenet of administrative law: agencies may change positions. . . . In other words, there is no such thing as stare decisis for agency interpretation.” 

Opponents of the Services’ decision to repeal the “harm” definition have indicated that they will bring legal challenges. It remains to be seen how the Loper Bright-implementation questions raised by that litigation will be resolved by lower courts and, if necessary, the Supreme Court. This one is worth watching. 

AFPF’s full comment is available here.  

Michael Pepson is regulatory counsel at Americans for Prosperity Foundation.