A former appellate judge warned of the dangers of the expected demise of the decades-old precedent of courts deferring to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes, as well as the current U.S. Supreme Court’s embrace of legal doctrines that would chip away at the power of the administrative state.

“We need expert agencies more than ever,” former Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said last week at an American Academy in Berlin event.