PIERRE, S.D. (MITCHELLNOW) The U-S Supreme Court overruled a decades-long precedent on how federal agencies make decisions. Now livestock corporations, animal advocates and others wait for the fallout. The nation’s highest court in June overruled a nearly 40-year-old practice known as Chevron deference, which says that when it comes to interpreting a vague law, courts should defer to agency expertise instead of interpreting law themselves. Larissa Leibmann with the Animal Legal Defense Fund says the overturned rule will likely change the work federal agencies do, including around wildlife and livestock.

  “If this Chevron decision makes it easier for courts to overturn the stronger environmental review regulations, that could in the end also end up taking away tools we use to try and protect animals.”

Those affected include the Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and the roughly 31-thousand farming operations covering 43-million acres in South Dakota. Leibmann says the decision is evidence of a “tipping of the scales” toward deregulation. In the court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Chevron kept judges from judging.

Leibmann says the Biden administration has been undoing Trump-era regulations that weakened the environmental review process. That work could be threatened by the overturning of Chevron. Leibmann says another policy at risk is a rule recently proposed by the E-P-A that would raise water pollution standards for slaughterhouses.

  “Right now, the standards are super weak, and essentially slaughterhouses are allowed to just dump a lot of their pollution in the water, which, of course, hurts both communities and animals.”

Leibmann notes that the change also opens the door for courts to go the other way. A court could interpret rules in a way that either strengthens or weakens environmental and animal protections. She also notes that state courts are not bound by the Supreme Court ruling.