Companies challenging an EPA rule on the phasedown of potent heat-trapping chemicals are asking the Supreme Court to revive a legal doctrine limiting the power Congress can hand off to federal regulators.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represents a company that participates in refrigerant aftermarkets, has asked the high court to overturn a 2025 ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld EPA’s method of allocating production and consumption of hydrofluorocarbons.
EPA’s HFC phasedown was mandated by the American Innovation and Manufacturing Act, a 2020 law signed by President Donald Trump during his first term. The law gave EPA authority to cut back production and industrial use of the compounds used in cooling and refrigeration, as well as in fire suppression.
But the New Civil Liberties Alliance has argued the 2020 law failed to supply clear direction to EPA as to how it should allocate 98 percent of the allowances in the multibillion-dollar HFCs market. In its petition, the group invoked the long-dormant nondelegation doctrine, which says Congress cannot hand off its lawmaking power to executive agencies like EPA.
The petition marks the latest effort by conservative groups to resurrect the doctrine, which has not been used since 1935. The Supreme Court had an opportunity to revive the legal theory last year but declined to do so.
“Congress’ abject failure to supply meaningful guardrails cannot stand, and neither can the D.C. Circuit’s effort to supply the guardrails that Congress did not,” the group said in its petition to the Supreme Court. The justices take up about 1 percent of petitions that come their way.
The D.C. Circuit did not deny that a failure to constrain EPA would be an “impermissible delegation” of legislative power, the New Civil Liberties Alliance said, but the court took “snippets of legislative history” to fashion limits on the agency.
“If anything,” the petition said, the D.C. Circuit’s decision “just makes the present state of affairs worse, as it strongly signals that a nondelegation challenge is more likely to embolden policymaking by the even less-accountable judicial branch than to spur courts to force Congress to actually do its job.”
The group urged the Supreme Court to take up the case “and make clear once and for all that, if Congress wants to reshape critical segments of the economy, then it must make the hard choices itself.”
The group wrote that the case is an “excellent vehicle to explore and/or revisit the contours” of the nondelegation doctrine.
A revival of the doctrine could restrain Congress from granting EPA and other agencies authority to tackle climate change and would be a powerful tool in the hands of conservative groups seeking to roll back environmental regulations.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance argued in its petition that EPA’s decisions on HFCs have “decimated” the market share for Choice Refrigerants, a Georgia-based business.
“EPA took roughly one-third of Choice Refrigerants’ market share because Congress was lazy,” said Zhonette Brown, general counsel and senior litigation counsel for the alliance. “Congress told EPA to shrink the market but let EPA choose any reason for taking (or giving) rights to any company.”
Brown called on the Supreme Court to “hold Congress to doing its duty rather than let Congress leave hard choices to an unaccountable executive agency.”
EPA does not generally comment on pending litigation.
The Air-Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, an industry coalition, had defended EPA before the D.C. Circuit, saying Congress had “lawfully delegated” the agency authority to set the HFCs program.
