CNN
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Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will rely on two recent Supreme Court decisions that they say will make it easier to overturn numerous federal regulations.
The pair, whom President-elect Donald Trump has named to head the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, known as DOGE, are responsible for the 2022 West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency decision and Roper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo earlier this year. points out the judgment. Both would limit the regulatory power of federal agencies.
But multiple legal and regulatory experts told CNN that Musk and Ramaswamy misunderstood the decision, which could actually make it harder to overturn existing rules.
“Recent Supreme Court decisions do not make it any easier to reduce the stock of existing regulations,” said James Broell, a senior fellow at the Institute for Competitive Enterprise, a free-market think tank that aims to reduce regulation. . “Decisions like Roper Bright’s work against them,” he says.
In Roper-Bright, the justices reversed longstanding precedent that required courts to respect federal agency rulemakings when the law is ambiguous; This means further investigation. To make. In the West Virginia case, the Supreme Court curtailed the agency’s authority to address economically and politically significant issues, even though Congress had not explicitly given the agency that authority.
“Taken together, these cases suggest that the current amount of federal regulation exceeds the authority given by Congress under the law.” Musk and Ramaswamy wrote in a recent op-ed for The Wall. Street Journal. “DOGE will present this list of regulations to President Trump, who can immediately halt enforcement of these regulations through executive action and begin the process of review and repeal. It will free us from unprecedented and illegal regulations and stimulate the American economy.”
But Nicholas Bagley, an administrative law expert and professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said there are several problems with both men’s claims.
“These are cases that limit the agency’s discretion,” he told CNN. “This lawsuit does nothing to strengthen the executive branch’s authority to revisit outdated regulations.”
Additionally, to overturn a rule, federal officials must follow an administrative process by issuing a new rule in its place. The agency would need to justify its reasons for changing the regulation and allow the public to comment on the proposed rule. This cumbersome effort requires significant agency resources, could take years, and is likely to be subject to legal challenges once the new regulations are finalized.
“This is a very arduous, very difficult process, and most likely to fail,” said Richard Pierce Jr., a law professor at George Washington University who specializes in administrative law and government regulation. said.
Additionally, the effort will require significant help from agency staff, the very people Musk and Ramaswamy promised to cut. In their editorial, the two argue that any reduction in the number of federal employees should be at least “proportional” to the number of regulations that are repealed, and that in the future the number of employees needed to write and enforce regulations will be He added that it would be less.
Experts say that could backfire.
“We’re going to need people like this to review all these regulations,” Broell said. “If we really want to significantly improve our regulatory stock, we’re going to need people who are working on these regulations every day, and that’s career civil servants.”
President Trump also promised major deregulation during his first term, but Broell said he was more successful in slowing the pace of new regulations than in cutting many existing ones. .
During the first Trump administration, the Council of Economic Advisers released a report in 2019 that found that the president’s deregulatory measures would increase household income by $3,100 over five to 10 years. He also pointed out that the introduction of new regulations has been kept to a minimum.
But there are ways to eliminate some of the regulations recently put in place by the Biden administration. Republican lawmakers can use the Congressional Review Act to overturn rules enacted in the final months of President Joe Biden’s term, and these overturning measures are not subject to the Senate filibuster, allowing Republicans to It would only take 50 votes in the Senate to wipe out the enacted rules. Biden ignores the books. About 100 rules could be affected, according to a list compiled by consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
Musk, the owner of X and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and Ramaswamy, a biotech entrepreneur, both face potential disruption to their companies’ vast business portfolios. There are reasons to want to reduce regulations. For example, last month at City Hall in City X, Musk repeatedly criticized government regulations for interfering with his company.
“It’s very difficult to get regulatory approval,” Musk said, talking about his startup Neuralink, which is developing an implantable brain-computer interface. “It does slow us down, but I think we should be able to move faster in the U.S. by advancing Neuralink technology and other technologies that are out there that are not affiliated with my company. Masu.”
CNN’s Tierney Sneed contributed to this report.
