The decision did not choose a direction. It changed where the energy sits.
Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) ended Chevron deference — the rule that a court reading an ambiguous statute deferred to the implementing agency's reasonable interpretation. Nothing in the holding favors more regulation or less. It is policy-neutral in the way a change of state is neutral: what had been agency kinetic energy becomes potential energy again, and where that energy ends up is for Congress to decide.
It does not stop Congress delegating. An agency may still be handed vast discretion — Congress simply has to say so explicitly. The trade is not between know-nothing members of Congress and career experts at the agencies. It is between explicit delegation and presumed delegation.
Nor is it deregulatory in itself. The Administrative Procedure Act already directs that the reviewing court "shall decide all relevant questions of law," and it treats a repeal as it treats any other rule change — same process, same standard of review. A regime in which courts read statutes for themselves cuts in whichever direction the statute cuts.
Chevron was decided in 1984. That year the House employed 9,556 staff; today it employs 9,247, three percent fewer. House committee staff have fallen from 1,947 in 1994 to 1,170, a decline of forty percent. Nobody believes the work has become simpler since 1984.
Ambiguity is the handmaiden of compromise — the less defined a proposition is, the easier it is to agree to it.
No quantity of drafting expertise removes that incentive, and perfect specificity was never an achievable standard. But lacking the wherewithal to understand the modern administrative state does not get Congress any closer to it either.
The decision was not a power grab by the Supreme Court. It was a rerouting of legislative authority back toward the branch that holds it — and it is not self-executing. Authority Congress declines to exercise does not sit idle. Before Loper Bright it flowed to the agencies. After it, absent that capacity, it flows to the courts.