This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, June 24, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

Into it, the maker of Turbo Tax wants to go to court against the Federal Trade Commission

over the agency's claims about the company's practices.

The Federal Trade Commission wants the software maker to go through the agency's

in-house courts first.

This raises a few questions about basic constitutional issues,

like separation of powers and access to courts

to seek relief. Cato's Brent Scorrup talks about the case.

Maybe you can help me understand this trend, but for a very long time Congress wrote laws that delegated lots of authority to the

executive branch. The executive branch with its various agencies would assume that authority and make determinations

about what that authority meant and right regulations based on depending on how broadly

they viewed their authority to act without any additional input from Congress and in some cases the President.

Is that coming to an end?

I hope so.

Certainly not imminently, but there are some promising signs the Supreme Court in in the past 10 years or so has been bringing a lot more scrutiny on agencies and on statutory grants of authority.

Whereas for decades, if a statute was vague and broad and gave an agency a lot of power,

that courts have generally been deferential to Congress and to the agencies.

The Supreme Court and lower courts seem to be rolling some of that back and bringing a lot more

scrutiny to these statutes and to these claims by agencies to have

broad power.

The Cato Institute, our now former colleague Anastasia Bowden, and you wrote a brief in Intuit, Inc. the Federal Trade Commission.

Intuit of course is the software producer that makes TurboTax and the Federal Trade Commission using its, as it sees it, statutory

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