Business
Column: With its 'Chevron' ruling, the Supreme Court claims to be smarter than scientific experts
Second only to the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday on when presidents are immune from criminal prosecution, the biggest case of the court’s recently completed session involved the age-old conflict between judges and government regulators.
The case concerned a 40-year-old precedent known as “Chevron deference.” That doctrine held that when a federal law is ambiguous, the courts must defer to the interpretations offered by the agencies the law covers — as long as those interpretations are “reasonable.” On Monday, the court discarded Chevron deference.
This may sound like an abstruse legalistic squabble, but it has massive implications for Americans in all walks of life. It could subject agency decisions on scientifically based issues such as clean air and water regulations and healthcare standards to endless nitpicking by a federal judiciary that already has displayed an alarming willingness to dismiss scientific expertise out of hand, in favor of partisan or religious ideologies.
In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden.
— Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan
The ruling amounts to an apogee of arrogance on the part of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, wrote Justice Elena Kagan in a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. But it’s not a new development.
“The Court has substituted its own judgment on workplace health for that of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,” Kagan wrote; “its own judgment on climate change for that of the Environmental Protection Agency; and its own judgment on student loans for that of the Department of Education…. In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue — no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden.”
Chevron deference originated in 1984, when environmentalists were fighting an effort by the EPA under Ronald Reagan to loosen clean air rules at the behest of industrial polluters. As it happens, the environmentalists lost that battle, but over time they won the war against deregulation.
Conservatives have had it in for Chevron deference for a long time; given their current majority on the court, the doctrine’s death has been a foregone conclusion, awaiting only the appearance of a suitable case to use as a bludgeon. Indeed, the majority was so impatient to kill the doctrine that the court’s six conservatives chose to do so by using a case that actually is moot.
That case arose from a lawsuit brought by the herring industry, which objected to a government policy requiring herring boats to pay for government observers placed on board to make sure the boats were complying with their harvesting permits.
The rule was imposed under the Trump administration, but it was canceled in April 2023 by Biden, who repaid the money that had been taken from the boat owners — so there’s nothing left in it for the court to rule on.
Interestingly, Chevron deference was not always seen as a bulwark protecting progressive regulatory policies from right-wing judges, as it’s viewed today. At its inception, it was seen in exactly the opposite way — as giving conservative policies protection from progressive-minded judges.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, which brought the original case in an effort to preserve Clean Air Act regulations that were being overturned by the Reagan administration, counted the 1984 ruling as a severe loss.
At issue then was the definition of a pollution “source.” Past practice defined it as a single building or smokestack; the administration wanted to redefine “source” broadly, as referring to an entire pollution-emitting plant. This wasn’t a trivial difference. The NRDC’s interpretation was more stringent than the government’s, for the latter allowed a polluter essentially to hide law-breaking emissions within an otherwise non-polluting plant.
The original Chevron ruling was 6 to 0 (three justices didn’t participate — two because of illness and the third, Sandra Day O’Connor, recused herself because of a conflict of interest). The ruling stated that when a federal law was ambiguous or silent on a particular issue, judges were bound to defer to the interpretation offered by the agency covered by the law, as long as its interpretation was “reasonable.”
One other thing: The functionary pushing to give industry more freedom to pollute was Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator, the late Anne Gorsuch. Name sound familiar? Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who is her son, lined up with the anti-Chevron majority. Curiously, he didn’t mention his family history in his separate concurrence — or perhaps not so curiously, because his mother was on the winning side of the decision that he has now voted to overturn.
In any event, Gorsuch’s words about the case in which his mother triumphed were telling. “Today,” he concluded gleefully, “the Court places a tombstone on Chevron no one can miss.”
The truth is that the Chevron ruling of 1984 and Monday’s ruling both served a goal shared by Anne Gorsuch and her offspring: providing federal judges all the leeway they might need to see things the way Big Business prefers.
Forty years ago, when the Reagan White House was pulling down a regulatory edifice that industry resented, the Supreme Court was happy to have judges defer to the agencies participating in that project, including Anne Gorsuch’s EPA. Today, when the deregulatory process is opposed by government agencies that take seriously their duty to make life better for the average consumer, the court tells judges that they’re free to ignore agency findings.
In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. called Chevron “misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do.”
This is self-refuting. Chevron deference isn’t about “resolving ambiguities” in the law. It’s about recognizing that sometimes those ambiguities are deliberate — put in place by lawmakers who know they can’t possibly write a law that covers all situations from now to the end of time. The “ambiguities” are there because Congress wishes that the agencies it has charged with fulfilling its goals use their technical and scientific knowledge to meet the challenges of a changing world.
Things have indeed changed. Generally speaking, wrote legal scholar Cass R. Sunstein in 2019, environmentalists and other progressives saw the original decision as “a capitulation to the (insufficiently zealous) administrative state, which was often captured by powerful private interests.” Today, the right wing portrays the “administrative state” as a shadowy cabal bent on thwarting the will of the people (that is, conservative policies). “The right and the left have switched sides,” Sunstein observed.
Chevron deference was very much a product of its time, Sunstein noted. In the 1960s and 1970s, “federal courts had been aggressively reviewing agency action (and inaction), often with the goal of producing greater regulation.” Typically, “the judges were on the political left.”
They had grown up professionally in the atmosphere created by the Warren court, which fostered the notion that the courts existed to protect and extend individual rights. “To their defenders,” Sunstein wrote, “the lower federal courts assumed a kind of heroic stance.”
This was the era that brought us an unprecedented, judicially driven expansion of individual rights, through such decisions as Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), which established the right of married couples to use contraceptives without state interference; Loving vs. Virginia (1967), which invalidated laws against interracial marriage; and of course Roe vs. Wade (1973), which established the nationwide right to abortion.
The current conservative majority has already begun to roll back this historic approach to individual rights, most notably through the Dobbs decision of 2022, which overturned Roe vs. Wade.
Justice Clarence Thomas has suggested that Griswold should follow Roe vs. Wade into the juridical dumpster, along with Lawrence vs. Hodges (2003), which invalidated state laws against sodomy among consenting adults, and Obergefell vs. Hodges (2005), which legalized same-sex marriages nationwide. The court, Thomas remarked in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, “should reconsider” those rulings.
Those cases were decided on different grounds from Chevron, but liberal judges saw the expansion of individual rights as part of the same principle that prompted them to aggressively examine agency actions that tended to narrow those rights.
As it happens, the Chevron decision didn’t generate much interest when it was handed down. The six justices who ruled unanimously in the EPA’s favor apparently thought they were weighing in on a narrow technicality. One legal scholar has called Chevron an “accidental landmark”; its significance only emerged from subsequent federal rulings and, perhaps most important, its embrace by Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined the Supreme Court two years later.
Scalia wrote in a 1989 law review article that Chevron deference made sense in the modern world: If there was an ambiguity in the law, the reason was either that Congress was sloppy (in which case the courts had the duty to say what a law meant) or that the lawmakers deliberately delegated to agencies the task of responding to changing realities by using their “advancing knowledge.” Over time, to be sure, he grew discontented with the doctrine (as Roberts and Gorsuch took pains to point out.)
Monday’s decision puts the lie to conservatives’ oft-expressed disdain for policies made by “unelected” bureaucrats. “Agencies report to a President, who in turn answers to the public for his policy calls; courts have no such accountability,” Kagan wrote. Calling the decision “a bald assertion of judicial authority, she added: “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power.”
That’s not to say that the majority won’t share the power they have now arrogated for themselves. They will walk hand-in-hand with the Big Business leaders and conservative ideologues who put them on the court, and the rest of us will just have to live with the consequences.
Fintech company Block said Thursday that it’s cutting more than 4,000 workers or nearly half of its workforce as artificial intelligence disrupts the way people work.
The Oakland parent company of payment services Square and Cash App saw its stock surge by more than 23% in after-hours trading after making the layoff announcement.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and head of Block, said in a post on social media site X that the company didn’t make the decision because the company is in financial trouble.
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he said.
Block is the latest tech company to announce massive cuts as employers push workers to use more AI tools to do more with fewer people. Amazon in January said it was laying off 16,000 people as part of effort to remove layers within the company.
Block has laid off workers in previous years. In 2025, Block said it planned to slash 931 jobs, or 8% of its workforce, citing performance and strategic issues but Dorsey said at the time that the company wasn’t trying to replace workers with AI.
As tech companies embrace AI tools that can code, generate text and do other tasks, worker anxiety about whether their jobs will be automated have heightened.
In his note to employees Dorsey said that he was weighing whether to make cuts gradually throughout months or years but chose to act immediately.
“Repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead,” he told workers. “I’d rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome.”
Dorsey is also the co-founder of Twitter, which was later renamed to X after billionaire Elon Musk purchased the company in 2022.
As of December, Block had 10,205 full-time employees globally, according to the company’s annual report. The company said it plans to reduce its workforce by the end of the second quarter of fiscal year 2026.
The company’s gross profit in 2025 reached more than $10 billion, up 17% compared to the previous year.
Dorsey said he plans to address employees in a live video session and noted that their emails and Slack will remain open until Thursday evening so they can say goodbye to colleagues.
“I know doing it this way might feel awkward,” he said. “I’d rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold.”
The Writers Guild of America West has canceled its awards ceremony scheduled to take place March 8 as its staff union members continue to strike, demanding higher pay and protections against artificial intelligence.
In a letter sent to members on Sunday, WGA West’s board of directors, including President Michele Mulroney, wrote, “The non-supervisory staff of the WGAW are currently on strike and the Guild would not ask our members or guests to cross a picket line to attend the awards show. The WGAW staff have a right to strike and our exceptional nominees and honorees deserve an uncomplicated celebration of their achievements.”
The New York ceremony, scheduled on the same day, is expected go forward while an alternative celebration for Los Angeles-based nominees will take place at a later date, according to the letter.
Comedian and actor Atsuko Okatsuka was set to host the L.A. show, while filmmaker James Cameron was to receive the WGA West Laurel Award.
WGA union staffers have been striking outside the guild’s Los Angeles headquarters on Fairfax Avenue since Feb. 17. The union alleged that management did not intend to reach an agreement on the pending contract. Further, it claimed that guild management had “surveilled workers for union activity, terminated union supporters, and engaged in bad faith surface bargaining.”
On Tuesday, the labor organization said that management had raised the specter of canceling the ceremony during a call about contraction negotiations.
“Make no mistake: this is an attempt by WGAW management to drive a wedge between WGSU and WGA membership when we should be building unity ahead of MBA [Minimum Basic Agreement] negotiations with the AMPTP [Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers],” wrote the staff union. “We urge Guild management to end this strike now,” the union wrote on Instagram.
The union, made up of more than 100 employees who work in areas including legal, communications and residuals, was formed last spring and first authorized a strike in January with 82% of its members. Contract negotiations, which began in September, have focused on the use of artificial intelligence, pay raises and “basic protections” including grievance procedures.
The WGA has said that it offered “comprehensive proposals with numerous union protections and improvements to compensation and benefits.”
The ceremony’s cancellation, coming just weeks before the Academy Awards, casts a shadow over the upcoming contraction negotiations between the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which represents the studios and streamers.
In 2023, the WGA went on a strike lasting 148 days, the second-longest strike in the union’s history.
Times staff writer Cerys Davies contributed to this report.
Business
Commentary: The Pentagon is demanding to use Claude AI as it pleases. Claude told me that’s ‘dangerous’
Recently, I asked Claude, an artificial-intelligence thingy at the center of a standoff with the Pentagon, if it could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
Say, for example, hands that wanted to put a tight net of surveillance around every American citizen, monitoring our lives in real time to ensure our compliance with government.
“Yes. Honestly, yes,” Claude replied. “I can process and synthesize enormous amounts of information very quickly. That’s great for research. But hooked into surveillance infrastructure, that same capability could be used to monitor, profile and flag people at a scale no human analyst could match. The danger isn’t that I’d want to do that — it’s that I’d be good at it.”
That danger is also imminent.
Claude’s maker, the Silicon Valley company Anthropic, is in a showdown over ethics with the Pentagon. Specifically, Anthropic has said it does not want Claude to be used for either domestic surveillance of Americans, or to handle deadly military operations, such as drone attacks, without human supervision.
Those are two red lines that seem rather reasonable, even to Claude.
However, the Pentagon — specifically Pete Hegseth, our secretary of Defense who prefers the made-up title of secretary of war — has given Anthropic until Friday evening to back off of that position, and allow the military to use Claude for any “lawful” purpose it sees fit.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, center, arrives for the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday.
(Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images)
The or-else attached to this ultimatum is big. The U.S. government is threatening not just to cut its contract with Anthropic, but to perhaps use a wartime law to force the company to comply or use another legal avenue to prevent any company that does business with the government from also doing business with Anthropic. That might not be a death sentence, but it’s pretty crippling.
Other AI companies, such as white rights’ advocate Elon Musk’s Grok, have already agreed to the Pentagon’s do-as-you-please proposal. The problem is, Claude is the only AI currently cleared for such high-level work. The whole fiasco came to light after our recent raid in Venezuela, when Anthropic reportedly inquired after the fact if another Silicon Valley company involved in the operation, Palantir, had used Claude. It had.
Palantir is known, among other things, for its surveillance technologies and growing association with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It’s also at the center of an effort by the Trump administration to share government data across departments about individual citizens, effectively breaking down privacy and security barriers that have existed for decades. The company’s founder, the right-wing political heavyweight Peter Thiel, often gives lectures about the Antichrist and is credited with helping JD Vance wiggle into his vice presidential role.
Anthropic’s co-founder, Dario Amodei, could be considered the anti-Thiel. He began Anthropic because he believed that artificial intelligence could be just as dangerous as it could be powerful if we aren’t careful, and wanted a company that would prioritize the careful part.
Again, seems like common sense, but Amodei and Anthropic are the outliers in an industry that has long argued that nearly all safety regulations hamper American efforts to be fastest and best at artificial intelligence (although even they have conceded some to this pressure).
Not long ago, Amodei wrote an essay in which he agreed that AI was beneficial and necessary for democracies, but “we cannot ignore the potential for abuse of these technologies by democratic governments themselves.”
He warned that a few bad actors could have the ability to circumvent safeguards, maybe even laws, which are already eroding in some democracies — not that I’m naming any here.
“We should arm democracies with AI,” he said. “But we should do so carefully and within limits: they are the immune system we need to fight autocracies, but like the immune system, there is some risk of them turning on us and becoming a threat themselves.”
For example, while the 4th Amendment technically bars the government from mass surveillance, it was written before Claude was even imagined in science fiction. Amodei warns that an AI tool like Claude could “conduct massively scaled recordings of all public conversations.” This could be fair game territory for legally recording because law has not kept pace with technology.
Emil Michael, the undersecretary of war, wrote on X Thursday that he agreed mass surveillance was unlawful, and the Department of Defense “would never do it.” But also, “We won’t have any BigTech company decide Americans’ civil liberties.”
Kind of a weird statement, since Amodei is basically on the side of protecting civil rights, which means the Department of Defense is arguing it’s bad for private people and entities to do that? And also, isn’t the Department of Homeland Security already creating some secretive database of immigration protesters? So maybe the worry isn’t that exaggerated?
Help, Claude! Make it make sense.
If that Orwellian logic isn’t alarming enough, I also asked Claude about the other red line Anthropic holds — the possibility of allowing it to run deadly operations without human oversight.
Claude pointed out something chilling. It’s not that it would go rogue, it’s that it would be too efficient and fast.
“If the instructions are ‘identify and target’ and there’s no human checkpoint, the speed and scale at which that could operate is genuinely frightening,” Claude informed me.
Just to top that with a cherry, a recent study found that in war games, AI’s escalated to nuclear options 95% of the time.
I pointed out to Claude that these military decisions are usually made with loyalty to America as the highest priority. Could Claude be trusted to feel that loyalty, the patriotism and purpose, that our human soldiers are guided by?
“I don’t have that,” Claude said, pointing out that it wasn’t “born” in the U.S., doesn’t have a “life” here and doesn’t “have people I love there.” So an American life has no greater value than “a civilian life on the other side of a conflict.”
OK then.
“A country entrusting lethal decisions to a system that doesn’t share its loyalties is taking a profound risk, even if that system is trying to be principled,” Claude added. “The loyalty, accountability and shared identity that humans bring to those decisions is part of what makes them legitimate within a society. I can’t provide that legitimacy. I’m not sure any AI can.”
You know who can provide that legitimacy? Our elected leaders.
It is ludicrous that Amodei and Anthropic are in this position, a complete abdication on the part of our legislative bodies to create rules and regulations that are clearly and urgently needed.
Of course corporations shouldn’t be making the rules of war. But neither should Hegseth. Thursday, Amodei doubled down on his objections, saying that while the company continues to negotiate and wants to work with the Pentagon, “we cannot in good conscience accede to their request.”
Thank goodness Anthropic has the courage and foresight to raise the issue and hold its ground — without its pushback, these capabilities would have been handed to the government with barely a ripple in our conscientiousness and virtually no oversight.
Every senator, every House member, every presidential candidate should be screaming for AI regulation right now, pledging to get it done without regard to party, and demanding the Department of Defense back off its ridiculous threat while the issue is hashed out.
Because when the machine tells us it’s dangerous to trust it, we should believe it.
Arizona NAACP responds to ‘Simon Says’ case, calls for police accountability
Arkansas Division of Higher Education on continuing your education after high school
Rep. Kevin Kiley announces run in California’s redrawn 6th Congressional District
How the Colorado Rockies Are Actually Building Its Opening Day Roster
Lawmakers again push to restore Shore Line East service to 2019 levels
Florida High School Football Rankings: Top 25 teams – Oct. 21
Cleary's 21 help Le Moyne down Central Connecticut State 69-64 in OT
How old is Bo Nix? What to know about Oregon quarterback ahead of 2024 NFL Draft
99th annual Pony Swim held in Virginia
Indiana Members Credit Union announced as new anchor tenant at Bottleworks District
Map: Earthquake Shakes Central California
Gas prices could jump as Middle East tensions threaten global oil supply
Pakistan calls troops, orders 3-day curfew as 24 killed in pro-Iran rallies
US says Kuwait accidentally shot down 3 American jets
House Republicans push Johnson to go to war with Senate over SAVE Act
-
World5 days agoExclusive: DeepSeek withholds latest AI model from US chipmakers including Nvidia, sources say
-
Massachusetts5 days agoMother and daughter injured in Taunton house explosion
-
Denver, CO5 days ago10 acres charred, 5 injured in Thornton grass fire, evacuation orders lifted
-
Louisiana1 week agoWildfire near Gum Swamp Road in Livingston Parish now under control; more than 200 acres burned
-
Technology1 week agoYouTube TV billing scam emails are hitting inboxes
-
Politics1 week agoOpenAI didn’t contact police despite employees flagging mass shooter’s concerning chatbot interactions: REPORT
-
Technology1 week agoStellantis is in a crisis of its own making
-
News1 week agoWorld reacts as US top court limits Trump’s tariff powers