Low‐Level Bureaucrats Shouldn’t Be Changing Federal Law
The debate over transgender rights has risen in prominence in recent years, with the fight over access to public restrooms and locker rooms receiving particularly heavy public attention. The legal question at the heart of the first such lawsuit to reach the Supreme Court, however, is one not of civil rights, but of administrative law: Should courts defer to agency interpretations of their own regulations, even when those interpretations constitute major, substantive changes to public policy via informal, non-binding pronouncements?
G.G. is a transgender high school student—minors are identified by letters in sensitive cases—who argues that Gloucester (Va.) High School’s policy disallowing him from using the facilities that correspond with his preferred gender identity violates federal law (Title IX of the Education Amendments) regarding sex discrimination in education. Upon being informed of G.G.’s conflict with the Gloucester County School Board, James Ferg-Cadima—a civil servant in the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR)—wrote a letter purporting to interpret the relevant regulation. This letter stated that “[w]hen a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex in [situations like this], a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.”
While the federal district court rejected this interpretation, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed that ruling and deferred to the agency’s new understanding of its Title IX regulations. The Supreme Court took the case and Cato, along with the Cause of Action Institute and four respected law professors (Jonathan Adler, James Blumstein, Richard Epstein, and Michael McConnell), has filed an amicus brief supporting the school board.
We do so not because we necessarily oppose OCR’s position as a matter of policy or even whether the relevant federal law can properly be read to support that policy—those are questions for another day—but because we oppose its unconstitutional method of enacting that policy. OCR seeks to change federal law not through the procedures spelled out in the Administrative Procedure Act, but via an informal, unpublished letter written by a low-level bureaucrat.
Current Supreme Court precedent under Auer v. Robbins (1997) says that courts must give such agency interpretations of their own regulations controlling deference. But deferring in this way incentivizes agencies to write vague regulations because they will then be free to reinterpret them at a later date without having to go through the trouble and expense of the rulemaking process—changing the law with no notice to regulated entities or the general public. Auer deference also allows executive agencies to consolidate legislative and judicial power by effectively rewriting regulations beyond the scope delegated by Congress and then judging for themselves whether they’ve overstepped that authority.
The Court appears unwilling to overrule Auer in its entirety, but we call on it to take this opportunity to limit Auer to a more appropriate scope by holding that only agency interpretations that have received the public scrutiny of notice-and-comment rulemaking merit judicial deference.
One final note: The justices are expected to hear Gloucester County School Board v. G.G. this spring and decide it by the end of June, but the case could be made moot before it's heard or decided. The Trump administration could simply withdraw the Ferg-Cadima letter or take other actions that would moot the case and leave the important issues it raises unsettled. Considering the importance Gloucester County may hold for the state of administrative law, we chose to file our amicus brief under the assumption that it will remain a live controversy—and to make a strong statement about constitutional structure and the rule of law.
