The Constitution vests Congress—not federal agencies or their employees—with the power to decide when Americans must fund government programs. In Relentless v. U.S. Department of Commerce, however, regulators at a fisheries division within the Department claim sweeping authority over Atlantic herring fishermen. The agency requires fishermen not only to carry government compliance monitors aboard their small vessels at sea, a 2020 rulemaking newly required them to pay the monitors’ salaries. These new costs can be economically crippling, and the fishermen sued, alleging violations of law and the Constitution.

After the district court ruled in favor of the government, the fishermen appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Cato has filed an amicus brief supporting the fishermen.

The government and the district court relied upon the broad and open-ended language in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA). That statute contains a catch-all provision authorizing the agency to impose fishery management regulations it deems “necessary and appropriate.”

Our brief explains why that language cannot bear the weight the government places on it. The Constitution vests the power of the purse in Congress alone, and ambiguity and implication cannot sustain a statutory reading that undermines the separation of powers.

Here, the Executive branch unilaterally shifted the funding of a regulatory program from the government to regulated parties. The Framers understood that the power to compel payments is uniquely susceptible to abuse. Article I therefore grants Congress the exclusive authority to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” and requires that revenue bills originate in the House of Representatives. Congress was designed to be closest to the people, and the Framers rejected allowing the Executive branch the revenue-raising power—lest it free itself from Congress’s oversight.

For those reasons, our brief urges the First Circuit to adopt a clear-statement rule: when Congress has not spoken clearly, courts may not infer revenue-taking authority from silence or ambiguity. That rule reflects constitutional structure, not judicial preference. Treating a general regulatory provision as an implicit revenue statute would allow agencies to transform broad regulatory language into a license to fund existing and new programs.

The district court erred in deriving such a novel premise—that regulated parties must pay the salaries of their government monitors—from vague statutory language. At stake in Relentless is not merely the livelihood of fishermen, but a fundamental question of constitutional structure. The First Circuit should reverse the district court and reject agencies’ attempts to exploit statutory ambiguity to seize the power of the purse from Congress.