The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a national nonprofit law firm defending American’s property rights, has fought federal agency regulatory overreach since their inception.
To give them and American citizens the ability to discover this overreach, PLF recently announced an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool called the Nondelegation Project that traces most every federal regulation back to the very law enacted by Congress.
Congress granted agencies broad, and sometimes, open-ended powers. Other laws gave an agency narrow and specific instructions. The purpose of the new AI tool is to distinguish between the two powers Congress intended, searching each law to determine if a federal agency abused or overreached on its authority.
PLF realized the need for such a tool after the Supreme Court decided Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (see ASL story). Loper Bright jettisoned what was known as the Chevron deference courts gave to federal agencies giving them great latitude for their interpretation of what authority Congress conveyed.
Overturning Chevron deference now allows federal judges to ignore federal bureaucrats’ interpretations and enhancement of laws and PLF’s AI tool gives the public the ability to search for regulations vulnerable to legal challenge.
PLF states “as of late 2023, the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) contained 1,098,730 regulatory restrictions across 245 volumes and 190,260 pages,” growing more than 86 percent since 1980. When laws give “general delegations of authority, this allows agencies broad discretion to decide what actions to take.”
PLF’s Nondelegation Project lists all the agencies and allows anyone to search their regulations to determine if Congress’ original delegation of authority matches the agency’s promulgated regulations.
Visit www.nondelegationproject.org to explore the tool.
Download the Policy Explainer about the Nondelegation Project.
