Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, is talking with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Chief Counsel Mary-Thomas Hart about the new Trump administration and what has changed.
“There have been some pretty significant changes, especially coming down from the Supreme Court in the last four years,” Hart pointed out. “These are changes that the Trump administration is going to have to make some effort to conform to, and really a new structure that they are operating within.”
Hart was primarily referring to the Supreme Court Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision from 2024 which overturned the Chevron deference holding that courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority.
“There are layers to this Chevron question because only a couple of months after the Supreme Court dropped the Chevron decision, they dropped the decision in U.S. V. Trump – his criminal case – and endorsed the concept of the unitary executive theory which, in short, means that if the president does something, it is legal and constitutional because they are the president. It is going to be really interesting to see how these two decisions play out in court because we have gotten a ton of executive orders just in the first couple of weeks of this term, and a lot of them are the subjects of litigation,” Hart detailed. “I think it is going to be really interesting to see how this really newly established Supreme Court precedent is implemented by lower courts across the country.”
Hart expects to see the outcome of the Loper Bright decision versus the Trump decision in district courts across the country.
Regarding the DOGE cleanout process, Hart believes that the executive branch will be fundamentally altered, and she believes that was always the goal. “I think the people who came into the new White House, this new administration, and see the real inefficiencies of our current Federal Government as it is structured right now, the inability of the federal government to manage its own personnel, and the money that gets spent and maybe is or isn’t accounted for. Every federal employee got an email basically offering them an early buyout.”
According to Hart, employees were also given the option to take paid leave through September 2025, and the resulting effect has been a renewed motivation within the federal government’s career staff to show up and do things well.
She said, “Even if the Trump administration didn’t get its Plan A solution, which is a lot of people leaving, I think they are going to get a lot of people being more efficient and productive in their day-to-day jobs because they see that this is not a White House that is going to accept anything less than that.”
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