The Supreme Court Injects Partisan Politics Into Independent Agencies

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/22/ [login to see] /the-supreme-court-injects-partisan-politics-into-independent-agencies
If you think that government experts should be free from political influence, then think again.

Twice this June, the Supreme Court ruled that the president could exert more control over regulatory agencies, the government institutions that are as important as they sound boring.

While Congress may write laws, agencies are needed to interpret them, apply them and fill in their gaps. Take the government's efforts to address lead poisoning. Congress passed a statute in 1971, and since then, a suite of agencies has issued regulations that keep up with the latest science on the problem. Such updating is especially needed in an era of political gridlock. Most climate policy, for example, builds on a 1963 statute that hasn't been amended in nearly 30 years.

Congress initially designed many of these agencies — including a patent board and a housing agency that were at issue this term — to stand above the whims of politics. But the court may be on the verge of undoing almost a century's worth of precedent and legal understandings protecting that independence.