Nicole Shaked | After Loper Bright, What Role Remains for Agency Expertise?

In 2024, the Supreme Court fundamentally reshaped administrative law when it overruled Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837 (1984), ending the longstanding rule requiring courts to defer to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes. For decades before that decision, judicial review operated under two related but distinct doctrines. Under Chevron, courts deferred to reasonable agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, while Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134 (1944), recognized agency interpretations as persuasive authority grounded in their reasoning, consistency, and expertise.

Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), held that courts must exercise independent judgment to determine a statute’s best meaning and that statutory ambiguity alone does not justify judicial deference. The Court emphasized that statutory interpretation remains the responsibility of the judiciary while acknowledging that agency interpretations may still provide guidance as a “body of experience and informed judgment.” Id. at 374 (quoting Skidmore v. Swift & Co., 323 U.S. 134, 140 (1944)).

Although Loper Bright eliminated mandatory deference, it left unresolved a central question: what role, if any, agency expertise plays in a regime requiring courts to identify a statute’s single best meaning.

If courts must independently determine statutory meaning, they now disagree about whether agency expertise still plays any meaningful interpretive role. Lower courts have uniformly recognized that Chevron deference is no longer permissible, but they have diverged over how agency interpretations fit into Loper Bright statutory interpretation.

As appellate courts confront statutory interpretation disputes in the post-Chevron era, they have begun to articulate answers to that question. Early appellate decisions suggest that courts are converging around three competing Loper Bright models: a Skidmore-like persuasive approach preserving a consultative role for agency expertise, a strictly judicial model treating statutory interpretation as exclusively the court’s task, and a delegation-centered framework grounding agency authority in congressional authorization rather than interpretive persuasion.

Issue

After Loper Bright, what role—if any—does agency expertise play in statutory interpretation?

The Split

Sixth Circuit

In Dayton Power & Light Co. v. FERC, 126 F.4th 1107 (6th Cir. 2025), the Sixth Circuit held that although courts no longer defer to agency statutory interpretations after Loper Bright, they may still “seek aid” from an agency’s experience and informed judgment when resolving interpretive questions. Id. at 1123. The court treated agency reasoning not as an independent source of legal authority, but as informational guidance that may assist courts applying traditional tools of statutory interpretation. Because agency interpretations reflect technical expertise and practical experience within complex regulatory schemes, they may remain relevant insofar as they help courts reach the statute’s best meaning.

Dayton Power reflects one Loper Bright approach in the Sixth Circuit, consulting agency experience as a persuasive aid rather than deferring as a matter of law. Through this approach, courts retain interpretive authority while agency views continue to function as consulting inputs within judicial analysis. See id. at 1135–36.

D.C. Circuit

Unlike the Sixth Circuit, the D.C. Circuit’s reasoning suggests that agency interpretation plays no independent role once a court determines a statute’s meaning. In Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, No. 25-5181, 2026 U.S. App. LEXIS 5387 (D.C. Cir. Feb. 24, 2026), the court adopted a strongly court-centered understanding of Loper Bright review, emphasizing that courts must exercise their own independent judgment to determine the best reading of a statute separate from existing agency interpretations.

The court explained that once a court identifies the statute’s proper interpretation, agency action must conform to that judicial conclusion, observing that “no explanation could justify or make lawful” an interpretation inconsistent with the statute itself. Id. at 42. Rather than evaluating the persuasiveness of the agency’s reasoning as a separate inquiry, the court resolved the dispute through its own textual analysis and treated the agency’s interpretation as legally irrelevant once the statute’s meaning was established. Id. at 38, *42.

This approach leaves little functional role for agency expertise in statutory interpretation: agency views matter only insofar as they coincide with the court’s independently derived reading of the statute. Centro de Trabajadores Unidos therefore reflects a model in which Loper Bright transforms statutory interpretation into a fully court-driven enterprise, leaving little space for an independent interpretive role for agencies.

Fifth Circuit

The Fifth Circuit reflects a delegation-centered approach that treats agency interpretive persuasion as secondary to congressional delegation. In Mayfield v. U.S. Dep’t of Lab., 117 F.4th 611 (5th Cir. 2024), the court explained that although determining statutory meaning remains a judicial task performed through independent judgment, agency authority derives from congressional authorization rather than interpretive expertise. Id. at 616–18.

Under this approach, courts first determine the statute’s best meaning using traditional interpretive tools. The inquiry then shifts to whether Congress delegated policymaking discretion within that statutory framework and whether the agency acted within the scope of that delegation. The court upheld the Department of Labor’s rule because Congress authorized the agency to “define and delimit” the exemption at issue. Id. at 621. The court also acknowledged ongoing debate about what work, if any, Skidmore can do after Loper Bright, suggesting that any persuasive use of agency reasoning operates within, and cannot override, the court’s best reading of the statute.

Agency interpretations thus influence the analysis not because they carry persuasive interpretive authority, but because Congress empowered the agency to make policy choices within defined statutory boundaries. This delegation-centered approach reframes Loper Bright review: agencies do not influence courts through persuasion, nor are they ignored entirely; instead, they exercise authority only where Congress has affirmatively assigned policymaking discretion. Id. at 619–20.

Looking Forward

The emerging disagreement among the circuits reflects competing understandings of what Loper Bright requires in a post-Chevron world. Although courts agree that judges must exercise independent judgment when interpreting statutes, they on what becomes of agency expertise once mandatory deference disappears. Some courts continue to treat agency reasoning as a persuasive interpretive resource, others regard it as irrelevant to statutory interpretation, and still others ground agency authority in Congress’s delegation of policymaking discretion rather than interpretive persuasion.

These competing approaches carry significant institutional consequences, shaping how courts review agency action and redefining the balance between judicial authority and administrative expertise. If the divergence continues, the Supreme Court may soon be required to clarify whether Loper Bright merely eliminated mandatory deference or fundamentally restructured post-Chevron judicial review. The answer will determine whether agency expertise remains a meaningful feature of statutory interpretation or yields to a more exclusively judicial model of administrative law.

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