The Future of Scientist-Bureaucrats
December 6, 2024
Every new administration brings with it a churn of new priorities and new personnel throughout the executive branch. This generally happens above the steady work of federal employees keeping government agencies and services running. But a recent US Supreme Court decision may prefigure deeper changes in how agencies operate. The court’s ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo ended four decades of Chevron deference—a policy of deferring to expert agencies when congressional statutes are ambiguous.
Discussion of the court’s decision has focused on how it might affect regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Food and Drug Administration. But, as Natalie B. Aviles argues in Issues, the end of Chevron could also reshape how federal science agencies such as the National Cancer Institute (NCI) do their work.
Aviles tells a fascinating story about the NCI’s development of a cancer vaccine, in which “scientist-bureaucrats leveraged the agency’s mission to create new policies and programs to help develop life-saving innovations and distribute them to populations in need.” She argues that limiting the NCI’s bureaucratic discretion could have real effects on how cancer breakthroughs are developed, and who is able to benefit from them.