The Jurisdictional Tug of War

Congress has a habit of handing the exact same patch of regulatory dirt to more than one agency at once. Sometimes this concurrent authority is intentional, a deliberate legislative choice to pit regulators against each other or pursue complementary goals. Other times, it is simply an accident of drafting, an implicit overlap left behind when lawmakers fail to consider how administrative machinery might collide.

Either way, the result is a jurisdictional tug-of-war. Agencies trying to assert new or ambiguous statutory mandates suddenly find themselves blocked if a rival agency has already staked a claim in that same regulatory space. Coordination problems multiply, and overall regulatory efficiency tends to crater.

The friction extends straight into the courtroom. For years, courts operated under the assumption that law-interpreting authority must belong to just a single agency, making concurrent authority a persistent headache for judicial deference doctrines. With the end of Chevron deference, that landscape is shifting again, priming the system for an increase in forum-shopping as plaintiffs hunt for courts sympathetic to their preferred agency's reading of the law.

Whether this fragmentation is a clever way to discipline heavy-handed bureaucracies or merely an administrative disaster depends entirely on who you ask. But as long as overlapping mandates remain the law of the land, the turf wars will continue.