Supreme Court Skips Challenge to Federal Agency Power (Correct)

The Supreme Court on Monday declined to take up a Georgia company’s case arguing Congress gave the EPA too much authority in creating a cap-and-trade program to phase down the use of planet-warming refrigerants.

A ruling in favor of the company could have revived the nondelegation doctrine and sharply curtailed how much authority Congress can hand over to agencies, in a way reminiscent of the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in West Virginia v. EPA. That decision curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to push the nation toward renewable energy, on the grounds that the Clean Air Act didn’t clearly authorize the policy shift.

In the cap-and-trade case, RMS of Georgia LLC, doing business as Choice Refrigerants, argued Congress violated the Constitution by giving the EPA “unbounded discretion” to choose which companies are allowed to participate in a multibillion-dollar market for planet-warming hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs). The cap-and-trade program was created under the 2020 American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act.

The Supreme Court recognizes Congress must provide an “intelligible principle” that tells agencies what they must do and which lines they can’t cross, according to Choice Refrigerant’s petition. But the AIM Act “fails to clear even that low bar, giving an administrative agency exactly zero direction,” the petition states.

In August, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled against the company, finding that Congress “enacted a detailed program for capping and trading HFC allowances, in which the EPA has discretion to decide how to allocate the allowances,” according to Judge Florence Y. Pan’s majority opinion.

Choice Refrigerants’ position seems consistent with President Donald Trump’s approach to agencies. In February 2025, as part of his Department of Government Efficiency effort, Trump signed an executive order telling federal agencies to identify regulations based on “unlawful delegations of legislative power,” as well as any rules that “implicate matters of social, political, or economic significance that are not authorized by clear statutory authority.”

Those rules were ordered to be repealed in an April 2025 White House memo.

The case is RMS of Georgia v. EPA, U.S., No. 25-1079, 6/22/26.