WASHINGTON (NEWSnet/AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday upended a long-standing decision that made it easier for the federal government to regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections.

The court’s six conservative justices voted to overturn the 1984 decision colloquially known as Chevron, long a target of conservatives. The liberal justices were in dissent.

The Supreme Court  issued a flurry of opinions this week, including three today, but some of its most closely-watched cases this year remain on the docket. Opinions also are scheduled to be announced on Monday.

Billions of dollars are potentially at stake in challenges that could be spawned by the high court’s ruling in Chevron. The Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer had warned such a move would be an “unwarranted shock to the legal system.”

The heart of the Chevron decision says federal agencies should be allowed to fill in the details when laws aren’t crystal clear. Opponents of the decision argued that it gave power that should be wielded by judges to experts who work for the government.

“Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court.

Roberts wrote that the decision does not call into question prior cases that relied on the Chevron decision.

But in dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the assurance rings hollow. “The majority is sanguine; I am not so much,” she wrote.

The court ruled in cases brought by Atlantic herring fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island who challenged a fee requirement. Lower courts used the Chevron decision to uphold a 2020 National Marine Fisheries Service rule that herring fishermen pay for government-mandated observers who track their fish intake.

Conservative and business interests strongly backed the fishermen’s appeals, taking a chance that a court that leaned conservative after appointments during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency would have a different viewpoint.

The justices hadn’t invoked Chevron since 2016, but lower courts had continued to do so.

Forty years ago, the Supreme Court ruled 6-0, with three justices recused, that judges should play a limited, deferential role when evaluating the actions of agency experts in a case brought by environmental groups to challenge a Reagan administration effort to ease regulation of power plants and factories.

“Judges are not experts in the field, and are not part of either political branch of government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in 1984, explaining why they should play a limited role.

But the current high court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has been increasingly skeptical of the powers of federal agencies. Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas all had questioned the Chevron decision.

They were in Friday’s majority, along with Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor joined Kagan in dissent.

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