Lawmakers put federal agencies on notice after end to Chevron deference
A coalition of lawmakers are putting federal agencies on notice after the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that overturned “Chevron deference” and as a result, significantly limited their power.
House Oversight Chair James Comer, R-Ky., has helped lead the effort, but the relevant committee chairs with oversight of the federal government, have signed on to similar letters.
“This long-needed reversal should stem the vast tide of federal agencies’ overreach,” Comer said in his letters to the federal government. “Given the Biden administration’s track record, however, I am compelled to underscore the implications of Loper Bright and remind you of the limitations it has set on your authority.”
The push comes on the heels of the Supreme Court overturning part of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and thereby putting an end to “Chevron deference,” a previous legal policy that gave broad license to federal bureaucrats to interpret and enforce laws passed by Congress as they saw fit.
In that vein, House lawmakers held a hearing Wednesday for oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency, the first in what is likely a new era of EPA oversight after the major Supreme Court ruling.
President Joe Biden’s EPA has pushed out a few particularly aggressive regulations that have drawn pushback.
Among those are WOTUS, an Obama-era rule that classified even tiny bodies of water as under federal jurisdiction.
More recently, the EPA’s tailpipe emissions standards are under fire, mainly because they will likely force a nationwide transition from gas to hybrid or electric vehicles in just a few years.
“EPA’s largest regulations, such as the tailpipe emissions rules for light-, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, have been estimated to cost nearly $900 billion to implement,” Comer said at the hearing Wednesday. “Those rules require automakers to completely redesign their operations to produce more electric vehicles – regardless of what consumers are demanding in the actual marketplace.”
Now, that era has likely come to an end.
“The Supreme Court decision has put policy making back into the hands of the Congress where it belongs, and unelected bureaucrats can no longer weaponize their authority to enact their own personal agenda,” Daniel Turner, executive director of the energy workers advocacy group, Power the Future, told The Center Square. “Industry for decades has been chocked by ever-changing regulations with penalties and fines and even criminal prosecution, all whims of the bureaucrat in charge. The American people are sick and tired of big government, and agencies like the EPA are back under the purview of the Congress and not some green billionaire whose think tank feeds the Administrator’s team with propaganda and lies.”
But the EPA is just one of many agencies facing a Congressional effort to undo years of federal rulemaking.
Comer noted that he has also joined lawmakers in sending letters to an array of agencies that face a similar review, including:
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President Donald Trump’s Monday executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) presents a more modest scope for the initiative, focusing primarily on “modernizing federal technology and software.”
The executive order refashions the Obama-era United States Digital Service (USDS) into the United States DOGE Service. Then-President Barack Obama created USDS in 2014 to enhance the reliability and usability of online federal services after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, an insurance exchange website created through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Trump’s USDS will now prioritize “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity” under the order, which makes no mention of slashing the federal budget, workforce or regulations — DOGE’s originally advertised purpose.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” Trump said in his official announcement of the initiative in November. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess government regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The order’s focus on streamlining federal technology and software stands in contrast to some of DOGE’s previously more expansive aims, including Elon Musk’s claim that “we can [cut the federal budget] by at least $2 trillion” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in November. Musk now leads DOGE alone after Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down from the initiative Monday, apparently eying a 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio.
The order says it serves to “advance the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda,” but omits many of the budget-cutting and workforce-slashing proposals during Trump’s campaign. Rather, the order positions DOGE as a technology modernization entity rather than an organization with direct authority to enact sweeping fiscal reforms. There is no mention, for instance, of trillions in budget cuts or a significant reduction in the federal workforce, though the president did separately enact a hiring freeze throughout the executive branch Monday.
“I can’t help but think that there’s more coming, that maybe more responsibilities will be added to it,” Susan Dudley, a public policy professor at George Washington University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Dudley, who was also the top regulatory official in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said the structure of the new USDS could impact the recent lawsuits against the DOGE effort.
“I think it maybe moots the lawsuit that’s been brought for it not being FACA,” Dudley said. “So if this is how it’s organized — that it’s people in the government who bring in these special government employees on a temporary basis, that might mean that the lawsuit doesn’t really have any ground.”
Three organizations — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Security Counselors (NSC) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — separately filed lawsuits against DOGE within minutes of Trump signing the executive order. The suits primarily challenge DOGE’s compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), alleging the department operates without the required transparency, balanced representation and public accountability.
The order also emphasizes not “be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.”
“And the only mention of OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is some kind of boilerplate at the end — that it doesn’t affect that. But that’s kind of general stuff you often see in executive orders,” Dudley continued, adding she doesn’t “have an inside track” on whether further DOGE-related executive orders will follow.
“It’s certainly, certainly more modest than I think Musk was anticipating,” Dudley said.
Trump’s order also establishes “DOGE Teams” consisting of at least four employees: a team lead, a human resources specialist, an engineer and an attorney. Each team will be assigned an executive agency with which it will implement the president’s “DOGE agenda.”
It remains unclear whether Monday’s executive order comprehensively defines DOGE, or if additional orders will be forthcoming to broaden its mandate.
Andrew Bridgen says UK security agencies ignored detailed information about child trafficking, including names of people involved and where the children were being taken.
A former UK Member of Parliament says the top security agencies of Britain, including the police and MI5, are refusing to act on detailed information they’ve been given about child trafficking into the country.
Andrew Bridgen, who served as a popular Conservative MP for North West Leicestershire from 2010 until 2024, told Infowars founder Alex Jones in a Friday interview how he had raised concerns while in Parliament about “a number of individuals” who were evidently pedophiles.
“It was always passed to the police, to the National Crime Agency, and it involves senior politicians, very senior police officers, and nothing was ever done about it,” Bridgen told Jones.
He had explained that early in his career he had seen London police quash an investigation into child prostitution — and so this appeared to be a repeating pattern of cover-up of child sex crimes.
A former policeman named Jon Wedger had discovered that “children were being taken from children’s homes in the UK and prostituted on the weekend,” and were returning “under the influence of drugs and often with terrible venereal diseases, and the people at the homes were doing nothing about it.”
Upon further investigation, Wedger “wrote a report he sent to his superiors pointing out that child prostitution in London had not been investigated for decades.” However, instead of attempting to protect the children and stop the abuse, the police “threatened” Wedger, told him to retract the report, and fired him from the police force “on false pretenses,” according to Bridgen.
Later, Bridgen met a man who conducted a two-year investigation into sex abuse by pedophile and deceased Prime Minister Edward Heath. The police concluded that, were Heath alive, “he would have been arrested and charged with pedophilia.”
“If a former MP could have been a pedophile and it was covered up, then anything is possible,” Bridgen remarked.
He then told how last year a source approached him with “information about child trafficking into the UK,” including “detailed names of people involved on the ground; where the children were being brought in; where they were being taken; where their photographs were being taken; and the name of the company that was instrumental in laundering the money” used to buy these children.
The source had brought this information to the police, to the counter-intelligence agency MI5, and to the National Crime Agency, and “nothing was done” by any of these groups. Not only did they fail to act on the information, but “mysteriously, within two days of dropping the file with the National Crime Agency,” the source’s LinkedIn profile was “visited and investigated by someone who worked at the company who was named in the file.”
“Meaning they were tipped off,” Jones noted.
Bridgen told how the source had recorded all of his phone calls with MI5, the police force, and the National Crime Agency, and when they failed to act, Bridgen “sent a file with all the information to senior politicians.”
“Eventually, all I got back was, ‘Take it to the police.’ I pointed out this had already been to the police, and it had been to MI5. There actually was an MI5 officer who had been very sympathetic and realized how important this evidence was. And he tried to push it. He was removed from the service. That’s how deep the corruption runs.”
In a June 2024 interview on the Resistance Podcast, Bridgen elaborated, “And then when you see the names, you see why. They are known names.”
He shared further horrifying details about the final end of the children who are trafficked and abused.
“They use them in the sex trade for about three years and then when they’re worn out they organ harvest them,” Bridgen shared.
“No one’s interested. No one wants to talk about it. No one wants to talk about a lot of things.”
Bridgen believes this demand for child trafficking is an explanation for the drive to continue wars around the world, including the war in Ukraine, because the conflicts present “a huge opportunity for child trafficking.”
Jones pointed out it was publicly admitted that decades ago, sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein entered war zones in Kosovo and Serbia and bought “nine- and 10-year-old girls” in order to sell them into sex slavery in the U.S. The father of Epstein’s girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was one of the main directors of the “blackmail pedophile operations” of “MI6 and Mossad,” according to Jones.
“Ultimately, I think it’s the glue that holds the self-proclaimed elites around the world together, because once they’re involved in pedophilia or profiting from child trafficking, it’s the ultimate blackmail,” Bridgen said. “There’s no way out of the club for them. They all have to go down together.”
