Explaining the Major Questions Doctrine
By Lucas Miller ’29
Background
On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that President Donald Trump lacked constitutional authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). (1)
Trump’s attorneys unsuccessfully claimed that under IEEPA, Congress had delegated the right to set tariff policy to the president. (2) Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the plurality, rejected that claim: “We have long expressed ‘reulctan[ce] to read into ambiguous statutory text’ extraordinary delegations of Congress’s powers.” (3) Roberts’ words cite the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA (2022). In that case, the Court named the major questions doctrine in a majority opinion for the first time. (4)
The Emergence of Administrative Agencies & Judicial Responses
The United States Constitution reads, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” while “all legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” (5) It also provides that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” (6) The Constitution thus establishes that the responsibility for making the law resides with Congress and the enforcement authority within the executive branch.
The executive branch has significantly expanded since the Framers wrote those words in the Constitution. Susan E. Dudley, director and founder of the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University, writes in Daedalus that Congress created the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), the “first modern regulatory agency,” in 1887. (7) In 1892, the Supreme Court declared that “Congress cannot delegate legislative power to the President,” (8) and called that principle “universally recognized as vital to the integrity and maintenance of the system of government ordained by the Constitution.” (9)
In J.W. Hampton v. United States (1928), the Supreme Court altered its view of the nondelegation doctrine, and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, writing for the majority, stated that, so long as “Congress shall lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to fix such rates is directed to conform, such legislative action is not a forbidden delegation of legislative power.” (10)
The Court’s decision in Hampton opened the door for the expansion of the administrative state. Just more than a year after the Court’s 1928 decision, the Great Depression began, and the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt promised an ambitious expansion of the administrative state. The New Deal brought with it new regulatory agencies and granted others expanded jurisdiction. (11)
In 1935, the Supreme Court curtailed Congress’s delegations of its power. In A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp v. United States, the Court struck down a standardless delegation of executive power, writing that “Congress may leave to selected instrumentalities the making of subordinate rules within prescribed limits, and the determination of facts to which the policy, as declared by Congress, is to apply; but it must itself lay down the policies and establish standards.” (12) In other words, Congress may delegate power to administrative agencies so long as it outlines clear policies and standards for those agencies to follow; the agencies themselves cannot create those policies and standards.
Schechter’s significance is not only that it limited Congress’s ability to delegate its powers to administrative agencies. It also represents an inflection point in the Supreme Court’s approach to the nondelegation doctrine. After Franklin Roosevelt threatened to pack the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court adopted a more favorable view of his New Deal programs and began approving his agencies. (13)
The Court’s view of congressional delegations has evolved to grant administrative agencies greater power since the New Deal. In Mistretta v. United States (1989), the Court found that “in our increasingly complex society, replete with ever changing and more technical problems, Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives.” (14) The Court’s job, per its own estimation, evolved through the 1900s from aggressively stemming the growth of the administrative state to permitting Congress to exercise broad discretion and outline only general guidelines when delegating its powers.
Chevron Deference
The Supreme Court’s evolving jurisprudence culminated in the Chevron deference principle, established in the landmark 1984 decision Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. In Chevron, Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the majority opinion, wrote that “If the intent of Congress is clear” regarding the scope of administrative power, then “that is the end of the matter.” (15) However, Stevens continued, “if the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” (16)
The Court’s basing an administrative agency’s power on its own “permissible construction” established Chevron deference, a doctrine that, until recently, gave administrative agencies leeway to determine the scope of their authority when Congress failed to specifically outline it. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), the Court overruled the Chevron doctrine, holding that “the Administrative Procedure Act requires courts to exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, and courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous,”(17) as was the standard procedure under Chevron. Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, continued that “Chevron has proved to be fundamentally misguided [...] For its entire existence, Chevron has been a rule in search of a justification, if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at all.” (18)
The major questions doctrine complements the Court’s dismantling of Chevron in Loper Bright Enterprises (2024). In West Virginia v. EPA (2022), where the term “major questions doctrine” appears in a majority opinion for the first time at the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts explains the majority’s rationale for its decision.
Where the statute at issue is one that confers authority upon an administrative agency, that inquiry must be “shaped, at least in some measure, by the nature of the question presented”—whether Congress in fact meant to confer the power the agency has asserted. In the ordinary case, that context has no great effect on the appropriate analysis. Nonetheless, our precedent teaches that there are “extraordinary cases” that call for a different approach—cases in which the “history and the breadth of the authority that [the agency] has asserted,” and the “economic and political significance” of that assertion, provide a “reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress” meant to confer such authority. (19)
In other words, the major questions doctrine allows a court to strike down an administrative agency's action if the court deems the action significant enough to have required explicit Congressional authorization. Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, argues that the expertise of administrative agencies—and the lack thereof in Congress—is reason enough to allow an expansive view of delegated authority.
A key reason Congress makes broad delegations like Section 111 is so an agency can respond, appropriately and commensurately, to new and big problems. Congress knows what it doesn’t and can’t know when it drafts a statute; and Congress therefore gives an expert agency the power to address issues—even significant ones—as and when they arise. (20)
For Kagan, the majority decision amounts not to a proper constraint on bureaucratic authority, but a muzzling of “legislative choice.”
The Court’s ruling in West Virginia v. EPA, a 6-3 decision, was fractured along ideological lines. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett all joined in Roberts’s majority. Justice Gorsuch also wrote a concurrence joined by Justice Alito. Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kagan’s dissent.
The Doctrine in Practice
Most recently, the major questions doctrine came into the spotlight in the Supreme Court’s decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the President lacks the authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in peacetime, because Congress had not explicitly delegated that authority, and the power to tax constitutes a major question.
Importantly, the Learning Resources case revealed unsettled territory in the application of the major questions doctrine: Roberts secured only 2 additional votes on the major questions section of his opinion in a fractured decision. Justices Gorsuch and Barrett wrote separate concurrences—Gorsuch defending the major questions doctrine, Barrett interpreting it more narrowly—while Justices Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson all rejected reliance on the doctrine in the case. Justice Kavanaugh dissented, joined by Thomas and Alito, arguing that the Court’s interpretation of the major questions doctrine was too capacious in Learning Resources.
If anything, the decision in Learning Resources v. Trump reveals that the justices struggle to agree when the major questions doctrine—which critics have attacked as standardless—should and should not apply. The major questions doctrine emerged from the ambiguity of Congress’s statutes. Now, it faces challenges due to its own ambiguity: what counts as major remains a hotly contested question among the country’s leading legal minds. Without a clear standard for what constitutes a major question, the major questions doctrine risks becoming a quasi-legislative tool that the Court applies differently with each new iteration of the bench.
Endnotes
(1) Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, 607 U.S. ___, 2 (2026)
(2) Ibid.
(3) Ibid.
(4) West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S., slip op., (2022)
(5) U.S. Const. Art. I, § 1.
(6) Ibid., Art. II § 3.
(7) Dudley, S. E. (2021, Summer). “Milestones in the Evolution of the Administrative State.” Daedalus. American Academy of Arts & Sciences. https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/milestones-evolution-administrative-state
(8) Ibid.
(9) Ibid.
(10) J.W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States, 276 U.S. 394, 409 (1928)
(11) Dudley. “Milestones in the Evolution.”
(12) A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495, 495 (1935)
(13) Dudley. “Milestones in the Evolution.”
(14) Mistretta v. United States, 488 U.S. 361, 372 (1989)
(15) Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837, 842 (1984)
(16) Ibid.
(17) Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S., slip op., 1 (2024)
(18) Ibid.
(19) West Virginia, 597 U.S., slip op., 4 (2022)
(20) West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, 597 U.S., slip op., 5 (2022) (Kagan, E., dissenting)
