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Administrative Law Grab Bag: Chevron and State Farm Developments

Posted on July 18, 2016

Last week’s post Treasury on the Right Side of the APA in Altera highlighted the importance of administrative law generally as well as some landmark cases such as Chevron and State Farm. In today’s post I offer some general developments on both Chevron and State Farm, one in the form of proposed legislation that if enacted would overrule Chevron and shift the power to interpret statutes from agencies to courts. The other is a Supreme Court decision from late June that elaborated on State Farm in a way that may have specific relevance for challenges to Treasury regulations when parties allege that Treasury has failed to adequately explain its reasons for promulgating regulations.

First some background. As most tax people know in the post-Mayo world, Chevron provides a two-step inquiry for reviewing agency interpretations of statutes that is easy to state but challenging to apply. Under Chevron the court first (under Step 1) determines if Congress directly spoke to the question at issue. If a court finds that Congress did, then the court defers to the statute and the agency’s interpretation falls if it is inconsistent with the statutory language. If Congress did not address the issue in question in the statute itself or if the language is ambiguous then the inquiry (under Step 2) is whether the agency’s answer is based on a “permissible” construction of the statute. A permissible construction is one that is not “arbitrary, capricious, or manifestly contrary to the statute.” If it is permissible then the court defers to the agency.

In PT we have also discussed principles relating to State Farm, issues that are front and center in the Altera dispute. As Pat Smith discussed for us in his post discussing the IRS’s Altera defeat, “[u]nder the Supreme Court’s landmark 1983 State Farm decision, in order for agency action to satisfy the arbitrary and capricious standard, the agency action must be the product of “reasoned decision-making,” and the agency must, at the time it takes the action being reviewed, provide a reasoned explanation for why it made the particular decision it did.”

Proposed Legislation on Chevron

Last week the House passed the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, a bill that if enacted would overturn Chevron and amend the APA to provide that courts review “de novo all relevant questions of law, including the interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions and rules.” The legislation is the product of efforts of the Article I Project, a network of House and Senate legislators that describes itself as working on a “new agenda of government reform and congressional rehabilitation.” The Article I Project Web Page states that its mission is to “develop, advance, and ultimately enact an agenda of structural reforms to strengthen Congress by reclaiming its constitutional legislative powers that today are being improperly exercised by the Executive Branch.”

Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe of Texas is the sponsor of the legislation in the House. He has a post in the Hill Separation of Powers Restoration Act Key to Rebalancing Government describing the legislation:

This critical measure reverses the 1984 Supreme Court decision that established the “Chevron doctrine,” placing the power to determine ambiguous laws back into the hands of the Judiciary. This would help stop future abuse of power by preventing administrative agencies from establishing regulations with the intent of leveraging the “Chevron doctrine” to implement them however they so choose, fully free from judicial review. Instead, agencies will be forced to adhere to the courts’ interpretation of the laws they implement – keeping them from “grading their own papers,” as they’re allowed under the “Chevron doctrine.”

There is also a Senate version of the bill (co-sponsored by Senators Hatch, Lee and Grassley) though that has yet to move out of committee. An article in the Dallas Morning News indicates that the President would veto this bill if it came to his desk.

Does Chevron Make a Difference?

Does Chevron deference make a difference in agency outcomes in court? In a working paper called Chevron Deference and the Courts Professor Kent Barnett of University of Georgia Law School and Professor (and former PT guest blogger) Christopher Walker from Ohio State Moritz College of Law suggest that it does. They looked at every published decision citing Chevron in a ten year period and “found that the circuit courts overall upheld 71% of interpretations and applied Chevron deference 75% of the time. But there was nearly a twenty-five percentage-point difference in agency-win rates when the circuit courts applied Chevron deference than when they did not.”

The study found differences across circuits and a difference between Supreme Court and circuit court outcomes, with the authors concluding that Chevron may not have as much of an effect on agency outcomes at the Supreme Court but that it may be “an effective tool to supervise lower courts’ review of agency statutory interpretations.”

Supreme Court Developments on State Farm

So while there are some rumblings in Congress to overturn Chevron, there are some preliminary questions that arise before one gets into the Chevron inquiry. For example, what has been called Chevron Step Zero asks whether Congress intended to defer to agencies in the first place. To that end if issues implicated are extraordinary and of great importance, as in King v Burwell last year (involving the IRS’s regulatory definition of exchanges for purposes of tax credits), the courts may conclude that the issue is one that Congress did not intend for agencies to play a role in filling statutory gaps. The upshot in those cases is that courts take a de novo crack at the statute in the manner that the Separation of Powers Act legislation proposes.

Another of those preliminary questions presents itself in the Supreme Court case Encino Motorcars v Navarro, decided this past June. Bloggers and law profs Michael Pollock and Daniel Hemel at the Notice & Comment blog discuss the Encino Motorcar case and its relationship to general administrative law principles in the post Chevron Step .5 Their post is terrific. I highly recommend that readers with an interest in the area read the whole post, though I hit some of the high points here.

The Encino case involved Labor Department rules that provided that service employees at car dealers were entitled to overtime pay. The service employees sued the car dealers asking for overtime; the dealers claimed that Department of Labor failed to adequately explain why it changed its mind and promulgated rules that said that service employees at car dealers were not exempt from overtime pay (a statute exempts overtime for “any salesman, partsman, or mechanic primarily engaged in selling or servicing automobiles, trucks, or farm implements, if he is employed by a nonmanufacturing establishment primarily engaged in the business of selling such vehicles or implements to ultimate purchasers.”). The Labor Department had gone back and forth on the issue for decades and in 2011 took the view that service employees were not exempt from overtime.

The 9th Circuit applied a traditional two step Chevron inquiry and found that the statute was ambiguous (Step 1) and the agency’s interpretation was reasonable (Step 2). In Encino Motorcars the Supreme Court stated that the Labor Department failed to explain its reasons in coming up with its 2011 rules, remanding the case back to the 9th Circuit to interpret the statute:

One of the basic procedural requirements of administrative rulemaking is that an agency must give adequate reasons for its decisions. The agency “must examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action including a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.” Motor Vehicle Mfrs. Assn. of United States, Inc. v. State Farm Mut. Automobile Ins. Co., 463 U. S. 29, 43 (1983) . . . .

Applying those principles here, the unavoidable conclusion is that the 2011 regulation was issued without the reasoned explanation that was required in light of the Department’s change in position and the significant reliance interests involved. In promulgating the 2011 regulation, the Department offered barely any explanation. . . . This lack of reasoned explication for a regulation that is inconsistent with the Department’s longstanding earlier position results in a rule that cannot carry the force of law. See 5 U.S.C. § 706(2)(A); State Farm, supra, at 42-43. It follows that this regulation does not receive Chevron deference in the interpretation of the relevant statute.

How does this relate to Chevron and State Farm? Using a helpful example, bloggers Pollock and Hemel suggest that there is a preliminary step that arises prior to the two-step Chevron test and after Step Zero, a Chevron “.5” step:

To put the point starkly, imagine an agency had been granted the authority to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking and wrote a new regulation (on a matter within its jurisdiction and expertise) on the back of a napkin nailed to a signpost outside the White House. The regulation contains an interpretation of an ambiguous statutory provision, again within the agency’s jurisdiction. If that agency then claimed its interpretation written on that napkin was entitled to Chevron deference, it would (we think) be laughed out of court. But why? Congress intended for the agency to fill gaps in the statute (Chevron step zero) and the statute is indeed ambiguous (Chevron step one). Suppose, too, that the interpretation adopted by the agency on the napkin is entirely reasonable (indeed, maybe even the best reading of the statute), and that the agency actually explained its reasoning quite thoroughly despite the napkin’s surface-area limits. So the interpretation should pass muster at Chevron step two—and would even satisfy State Farm’s reason-giving requirement. But no one (we don’t think) believes that an agency can get Chevron deference for a position taken on a napkin. Why not? Because the agency failed to follow the proper procedure for exercising its gap-filling authority. The napkin rule flunks at Chevron step 0.5.

The post goes on to explain why it is likely that winning a Step .5 challenge does not automatically result in a victory, as agency interpretations will still be given heightened (though not quite Chevron) deference under Skidmore, where the weight of an agency interpretation “depend[s] upon the thoroughness evident in its consideration, the validity of its reasoning, its consistency with earlier and later pronouncements, and all those factors which give it power to persuade, if lacking power to control.” Skidmore, 323 U.S. 134, 140 (1944)).

Moreover, using some administrative law acrobatics, the post explains why in many other challenges involving a party bringing an action against an agency (except tax cases), courts generally resolve procedural defects such not under this type of Step .5 analysis but under the APA itself.

Some Parting Thoughts

A decade or so ago there were only a handful of tax cases that leaned on administrative law principles. Now, litigants look to administrative law and its complexities as a principal means of attacking IRS and Treasury actions. No doubt that Treasury and IRS are deeply aware of the administrative law sharks circling agency actions; the extensive discussion of comments in the preamble to Treasury’s recently promulgated regulations under Section 7602 addressing the use of private contractors to assist in interviewing summoned witnesses reflects that sensitivity (note Keith commented on those regs last week in Tax Notes; a free link is not available).

With Altera and other cases teeing up an application of some basic administrative law principles in the tax context, and many other cases in the pipeline where litigants are looking to administrative law principles to challenge IRS rulemaking and other practices we will likely see many more cases and posts in PT struggling to come to terms with how tax cases fit in with the many nuances of administrative law.

UPDATE 7.18 10:30 PM: Florida State’s Steve Johnson has written a taxprof blog Op-Ed on the proposed legislation. It raises some questions in the event of passage (unlikely at least for now as Steve acknowledges) and is full of good references to other works and Steve’s prolific writings on Chevron and related topics over the years. It does a nice job as well situating Steve’s support for dispensing with Chevron.

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