CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL

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73 OCTOBER TERM, 2001
Syllabus
CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL
certiorari to the united states court of appeals for
the ninth circuit
No. 00–1406. Argued February 27, 2002—Decided June 10, 2002
Respondent Echazabal worked for independent contractors at one of peti-
tioner Chevron U. S. A. Inc.’s oil refineries until Chevron refused to
hire him because of a liver condition—which its doctors said would be
exacerbated by continued exposure to toxins at the refinery—and the
contractor employing him laid him off in response to Chevron’s request
that it reassign him to a job without exposure to toxins or remove him
from the refinery. Echazabal filed suit, claiming, among other things,
that Chevron’s actions violated the Americans with Disabilities Act of
1990 (ADA). Chevron defended under an Equal Employment Opportu-
nity Commission (EEOC) regulation permitting the defense that a
worker’s disability on the job would pose a direct threat to his health.
The District Court granted Chevron summary judgment, but the Ninth
Circuit reversed, finding that the regulation exceeded the scope of per-
missible rulemaking under the ADA.
Held: The ADA permits the EEOC’s regulation. Pp. 78–87.
(a) The ADA’s discrimination definition covers a number of things an
employer might do to block a disabled person from advancing in the
workplace, such as “using qualification standards . . . that screen out or
tend to screen out [such] an individual,” 42 U. S. C. § 12112(b)(6). And
along with § 12113(a), the definition creates an affirmative defense for
action under a qualification standard “shown to be job-related and con-
sistent with business necessity,” which “may include a requirement that
an individual shall not pose a direct threat to the health or safety of
other individuals in the workplace,” § 12113(b). The EEOC’s regulation
carries the defense one step further, allowing an employer to screen out
a potential worker with a disability for risks on the job to his own health
or safety. Pp. 78–79.
(b) Echazabal relies on the canon expressio unius exclusio alterius—
expressing one item of an associated group excludes another left unmen-
tioned—for his argument that the ADA, by recognizing only threats to
others, precludes the regulation as a matter of law. The first strike
against the expression-exclusion rule here is in the statute, which in-
cludes the threat-to-others provision as an example of legitimate quali-
fications that are “job-related and consistent with business necessity.”
These spacious defensive categories seem to give an agency a good deal

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74 CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL
Syllabus
of discretion in setting the limits of permissible qualification standards.
And the expansive “may include” phrase points directly away from the
sort of exclusive specifications that Echazabal claims. Strike two is the
failure to identify any series of terms or things that should be under-
stood to go hand in hand, which are abridged in circumstances support-
ing a sensible inference that the term left out must have been meant
to be excluded. Echazabal claims that Congress’s adoption only of the
threat-to-others exception in the ADA was a deliberate omission of the
threat-to-self exception included in the EEOC’s regulation implement-
ing the precursor Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which has language identi-
cal to that in the ADA. But this is not an unequivocal implication of
congressional intent. Because the EEOC was not the only agency in-
terpreting the Rehabilitation Act, its regulation did not establish a clear,
standard pairing of threats to self and others. And, it is likely that
Congress used such language in the ADA knowing what the EEOC had
made of that language under the earlier statute. The third strike is
simply that there is no apparent stopping point to the argument that,
by specifying a threat-to-others defense, Congress intended a negative
implication about those whose safety could be considered. For exam-
ple, Congress could not have meant that an employer could not defend
a refusal to hire when a worker’s disability would threaten others out-
side the workplace. Pp. 79–84.
(c) Since Congress has not spoken exhaustively on threats to a work-
er’s own health, the regulation can claim adherence under the rule in
Chevron U. S. A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467
U. S. 837, 843, so long as it makes sense of the statutory defense for
qualification standards that are “job-related and consistent with busi-
ness necessity.” Chevron’s reasons for claiming that the regulation is
reasonable include, inter alia, that it allows Chevron to avoid the risk
of violating the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA).
Whether an employer would be liable under OSHA for hiring an individ-
ual who consents to a job’s particular dangers is an open question, but
the employer would be courting trouble under OSHA. The EEOC’s
resolution exemplifies the substantive choices that agencies are ex-
pected to make when Congress leaves the intersection of competing
objectives both imprecisely marked and subject to administrative lee-
way. Nor can the EEOC’s resolution be called unreasonable as allow-
ing the kind of workplace paternalism the ADA was meant to outlaw.
The ADA was trying to get at refusals to give an even break to classes
of disabled people, while claiming to act for their own good in reliance
on untested and pretextual stereotypes. This sort of sham protection
is just what the regulation disallows, by demanding a particularized
enquiry into the harms an employee would probably face. Finally, that

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Syllabus
the threat-to-self defense reasonably falls within the general “job re-
lated” and “business necessity” standard does not reduce the “direct
threat” language to surplusage. The provision made a conclusion clear
that might otherwise have been fought over in litigation or administra-
tive rulemaking. Pp. 84–87.
226 F. 3d 1063, reversed and remanded.
Souter, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
Stephen M. Shapiro argued the cause for petitioner. With
him on the briefs were James D. Holzhauer, Robert P. Davis,
and Evan M. Tager.
Lisa Schiavo Blatt argued the cause for the United States
et al. as amici curiae urging reversal. With her on the brief
were Solicitor General Olson, Deputy Solicitor General
Clement, Assistant Attorney General McCallum, Marleigh
D. Dover, Matthew Collette, Phillip B. Sklover, Carolyn L.
Wheeler, and Robert J. Gregory.
Samuel R. Bagenstos argued the cause for respondent.
With him on the brief were Larry Minsky and Chai R.
Feldblum.*
*Briefs of amici curiae urging reversal were filed for the American
College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine et al. by Craig E.
Stewart; for the Chamber of Commerce of the United States et al. by Roy
T. Englert, Jr., Kathryn S. Zecca, Stephen A. Bokat, and Robin S. Conrad;
for the Employers Group by Fred W. Alvarez and Christine A. Kendrick;
for the Equal Employment Advisory Council et al. by Ann Elizabeth Rees-
man, Jan S. Amundson, and Quentin Riegel; for the Pacific Legal Foun-
dation et al. by Anne M. Hayes and M. Reed Hopper; and for the Society
for Human Resource Management by Peter J. Petesch and John E. Duvall.
Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the American
Association of People with Disabilities et al. by John Townsend Rich, Ar-
lene Mayerson, Daniel B. Kohrman, Ira A. Burnim, and Jennifer Mathis;
for the American Civil Liberties Union et al. by Matthew A. Coles, James
D. Esseks, Steven R. Shapiro, and Lenora M. Lapidus; for the American
Public Health Association et al. by Catherine A. Hanssens and Jon W.
Davidson; for the National Council on Disability by Peter Blanck, Diane
Kutzko, Mark L. Zaiger, Douglas R. Oelschlaeger, and Sarah J. Gayer;
and for the National Employment Lawyers Association by Gary Phelan.

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76 CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL
Opinion of the Court
Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court.
A regulation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-
mission authorizes refusal to hire an individual because his
performance on the job would endanger his own health,
owing to a disability. The question in this case is whether
the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, 104 Stat. 328,
42 U. S. C. § 12101 et seq. (1994 ed. and Supp. V), permits the
regulation.1 We hold that it does.
I
Beginning in 1972, respondent Mario Echazabal worked
for independent contractors at an oil refinery owned by peti-
tioner Chevron U. S. A. Inc. Twice he applied for a job di-
rectly with Chevron, which offered to hire him if he could
pass the company’s physical examination. See 42 U. S. C.
§ 12112(d)(3) (1994 ed.). Each time, the exam showed liver
abnormality or damage, the cause eventually being identified
as Hepatitis C, which Chevron’s doctors said would be aggra-
vated by continued exposure to toxins at Chevron’s refinery.
In each instance, the company withdrew the offer, and the
second time it asked the contractor employing Echazabal
either to reassign him to a job without exposure to harmful
chemicals or to remove him from the refinery altogether.
The contractor laid him off in early 1996.
Echazabal filed suit, ultimately removed to federal court,
claiming, among other things, that Chevron violated the
Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA or Act) in refusing to
1 We do not consider the further issue passed upon by the Ninth Circuit,
which held that the respondent is a “ ‘qualified individual’ ” who “can per-
form the essential functions of the employment position,” 42 U. S. C.
§ 12111(8) (1994 ed.). 226 F. 3d 1063, 1072 (2000). That issue will only
resurface if the Circuit concludes that the decision of respondent’s em-
ployer to exclude him was not based on the sort of individualized medical
enquiry required by the regulation, an issue on which the District Court
granted summary judgment for petitioner and which we leave to the Ninth
Circuit for initial appellate consideration if warranted.

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hire him, or even to let him continue working in the plant,
because of a disability, his liver condition.2 Chevron de-
fended under a regulation of the Equal Employment Oppor-
tunity Commission (EEOC) permitting the defense that a
worker’s disability on the job would pose a “direct threat” to
his health, see 29 CFR § 1630.15(b)(2) (2001). Although two
medical witnesses disputed Chevron’s judgment that Echaza-
bal’s liver function was impaired and subject to further dam-
age under the job conditions in the refinery, the District
Court granted summary judgment for Chevron. It held
that Echazabal raised no genuine issue of material fact as to
whether the company acted reasonably in relying on its own
doctors’ medical advice, regardless of its accuracy.
On appeal, the Ninth Circuit asked for briefs on a thresh-
old question not raised before, whether the EEOC’s regula-
tion recognizing a threat-to-self defense, ibid., exceeded the
scope of permissible rulemaking under the ADA. 226 F. 3d
1063, 1066, n. 3 (2000). The Circuit held that it did and re-
versed the summary judgment. The court rested its posi-
tion on the text of the ADA itself in explicitly recognizing
an employer’s right to adopt an employment qualification
barring anyone whose disability would place others in the
workplace at risk, while saying nothing about threats to the
disabled employee himself. The majority opinion reasoned
that “by specifying only threats to ‘other individuals in the
workplace,’ the statute makes it clear that threats to other
persons—including the disabled individual himself—are not
included within the scope of the [direct threat] defense,” id.,
at 1066–1067, and it indicated that any such regulation would
unreasonably conflict with congressional policy against pa-
ternalism in the workplace, id., at 1067–1070. The court
went on to reject Chevron’s further argument that Echaza-
2 Chevron did not dispute for purposes of its summary-judgment motion
that Echazabal is “disabled” under the ADA, and Echazabal did not argue
that Chevron could have made a “ ‘reasonable accommodation.’ ” App.
184, n. 6.

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78 CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL
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bal was not “ ‘otherwise qualified’ ” to perform the job, hold-
ing that the ability to perform a job without risk to one’s
health or safety is not an “ ‘essential function’ ” of the job.
Id., at 1070.
The decision conflicted with one from the Eleventh Circuit,
Moses v. American Nonwovens, Inc., 97 F. 3d 446, 447 (1996),
and raised tension with the Seventh Circuit case of Koshin-
ski v. Decatur Foundry, Inc., 177 F. 3d 599, 603 (1999). We
granted certiorari, 534 U. S. 991 (2001), and now reverse.
II
Section 102 of the ADA, 104 Stat. 328, 42 U. S. C. § 12101
et seq., prohibits “discriminat[ion] against a qualified individ-
ual with a disability because of the disability . . . in regard
to” a number of actions by an employer, including “hiring.”
42 U. S. C. § 12112(a). The statutory definition of “discrimi-
nat[ion]” covers a number of things an employer might do to
block a disabled person from advancing in the workplace,
such as “using qualification standards . . . that screen out
or tend to screen out an individual with a disability.”
§ 12112(b)(6). By that same definition, ibid., as well as by
separate provision, § 12113(a), the Act creates an affirmative
defense for action under a qualification standard “shown to
be job-related for the position in question and . . . consistent
with business necessity.” Such a standard may include
“a requirement that an individual shall not pose a direct
threat to the health or safety of other individuals in the
workplace,” § 12113(b), if the individual cannot perform the
job safely with reasonable accommodation, § 12113(a). By
regulation, the EEOC carries the defense one step further,
in allowing an employer to screen out a potential worker
with a disability not only for risks that he would pose to
others in the workplace but for risks on the job to his own
health or safety as well: “The term ‘qualification standard’
may include a requirement that an individual shall not pose

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a direct threat to the health or safety of the individual or
others in the workplace.” 29 CFR § 1630.15(b)(2) (2001).
Chevron relies on the regulation here, since it says a job
in the refinery would pose a “direct threat” to Echazabal’s
health. In seeking deference to the agency, it argues that
nothing in the statute unambiguously precludes such a de-
fense, while the regulation was adopted under authority
explicitly delegated by Congress, 42 U. S. C. § 12116, and
after notice-and-comment rulemaking. See United States v.
Mead Corp., 533 U. S. 218, 227 (2001); Chevron U. S. A. Inc.
v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 467 U. S. 837,
842–844 (1984). Echazabal, on the contrary, argues that as
a matter of law the statute precludes the regulation, which
he claims would be an unreasonable interpretation even if
the agency had leeway to go beyond the literal text.
A
As for the textual bar to any agency action as a matter
of law, Echazabal says that Chevron loses on the threshold
question whether the statute leaves a gap for the EEOC to
fill. See id., at 843–844. Echazabal recognizes the general-
ity of the language providing for a defense when a plaintiff
is screened out by “qualification standards” that are “job-
related and consistent with business necessity” (and reason-
able accommodation would not cure the difficulty posed by
employment). 42 U. S. C. § 12113(a). Without more, those
provisions would allow an employer to turn away someone
whose work would pose a serious risk to himself. That pos-
sibility is said to be eliminated, however, by the further spec-
ification that “ ‘qualification standards’ may include a re-
quirement that an individual shall not pose a direct threat to
the health or safety of other individuals in the workplace.”
§ 12113(b); see also § 12111(3) (defining “direct threat” in
terms of risk to others). Echazabal contrasts this provision
with an EEOC regulation under the Rehabilitation Act of
1973, 87 Stat. 357, as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 701 et seq., ante-

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80 CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL
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dating the ADA, which recognized an employer’s right to
consider threats both to other workers and to the threaten-
ing employee himself. Because the ADA defense provision
recognizes threats only if they extend to another, Echazabal
reads the statute to imply as a matter of law that threats to
the worker himself cannot count.
The argument follows the reliance of the Ninth Circuit ma-
jority on the interpretive canon, expressio unius est exclusio
alterius, “expressing one item of [an] associated group or
series excludes another left unmentioned.” United States
v. Vonn, 535 U. S. 55, 65 (2002). The rule is fine when it
applies, but this case joins some others in showing when
it does not. See, e. g., ibid.; United Dominion Industries,
Inc. v. United States, 532 U. S. 822, 836 (2001); Pauley v.
BethEnergy Mines, Inc., 501 U. S. 680, 703 (1991).
The first strike against the expression-exclusion rule here
is right in the text that Echazabal quotes. Congress in-
cluded the harm-to-others provision as an example of legit-
imate qualifications that are “job-related and consistent with
business necessity.” These are spacious defensive catego-
ries, which seem to give an agency (or in the absence of
agency action, a court) a good deal of discretion in setting
the limits of permissible qualification standards. That dis-
cretion is confirmed, if not magnified, by the provision that
“qualification standards” falling within the limits of job rela-
tion and business necessity “may include” a veto on those
who would directly threaten others in the workplace. Far
from supporting Echazabal’s position, the expansive phrasing
of “may include” points directly away from the sort of exclu-
sive specification he claims. United States v. New York
Telephone Co., 434 U. S. 159, 169 (1977); Federal Land Bank
of St. Paul v. Bismarck Lumber Co., 314 U. S. 95, 100 (1941).3
3 In saying that the expansive textual phrases point in the direction of
agency leeway we do not mean that the defense provisions place no limit
on agency rulemaking. Without deciding whether all safety-related quali-
fication standards must satisfy the ADA’s direct-threat standard, see Al-

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Just as statutory language suggesting exclusiveness is
missing, so is that essential extrastatutory ingredient of an
expression-exclusion demonstration, the series of terms from
which an omission bespeaks a negative implication. The
canon depends on identifying a series of two or more terms
or things that should be understood to go hand in hand,
which is abridged in circumstances supporting a sensible
inference that the term left out must have been meant to be
excluded. E. Crawford, Construction of Statutes 337 (1940)
(expressio unius “ ‘properly applies only when in the natural
association of ideas in the mind of the reader that which is
expressed is so set over by way of strong contrast to that
which is omitted that the contrast enforces the affirmative
inference’ ” (quoting State ex rel. Curtis v. De Corps, 134
Ohio St. 295, 299, 16 N. E. 2d 459, 462 (1938))); United States
v. Vonn, supra.
Strike two in this case is the failure to identify any such
established series, including both threats to others and
threats to self, from which Congress appears to have made
a deliberate choice to omit the latter item as a signal of the
affirmative defense’s scope. The closest Echazabal comes is
the EEOC’s rule interpreting the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,
87 Stat. 357, as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 701 et seq., a precursor
of the ADA. That statute excepts from the definition of a
protected “qualified individual with a handicap” anyone who
would pose a “direct threat to the health or safety of other
individuals,” but, like the later ADA, the Rehabilitation
bertson’s, Inc. v. Kirkingburg, 527 U. S. 555, 569–570, n. 15 (1999), we as-
sume that some such regulations are implicitly precluded by the Act’s
specification of a direct-threat defense, such as those allowing “indirect”
threats of “insignificant” harm. This is so because the definitional and
defense provisions describing the defense in terms of “direct” threats of
“significant” harm, 42 U. S. C. §§ 12113(b), 12111(3), are obviously intended
to forbid qualifications that screen out by reference to general categories
pretextually applied. See infra, at 85–86, and n. 5. Recognizing the “in-
direct” and “insignificant” would simply reopen the door to pretext by
way of defense.

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Act says nothing about threats to self that particular em-
ployment might pose. 42 U. S. C. § 12113(b). The EEOC
nonetheless extended the exception to cover threat-to-self
employment, 29 CFR § 1613.702(f) (1990), and Echazabal ar-
gues that Congress’s adoption only of the threat-to-others
exception in the ADA must have been a deliberate omis-
sion of the Rehabilitation Act regulation’s tandem term of
threat-to-self, with intent to exclude it.
But two reasons stand in the way of treating the omission
as an unequivocal implication of congressional intent. The
first is that the EEOC was not the only agency interpreting
the Rehabilitation Act, with the consequence that its regula-
tion did not establish a clear, standard pairing of threats to
self and others. While the EEOC did amplify upon the text
of the Rehabilitation Act exclusion by recognizing threats to
self along with threats to others, three other agencies adopt-
ing regulations under the Rehabilitation Act did not. See
28 CFR § 42.540(l)(1) (1990) (Department of Justice), 29 CFR
§ 32.3 (1990) (Department of Labor), and 45 CFR § 84.3(k)(1)
(1990) (Department of Health and Human Services).4 It
would be a stretch, then, to say that there was a standard
usage, with its source in agency practice or elsewhere, that
connected threats to others so closely to threats to self that
leaving out one was like ignoring a twin.
Even if we put aside this variety of administrative experi-
ence, however, and look no further than the EEOC’s Rehabil-
4 In fact, we have said that the regulations issued by the Department of
Health and Human Services, which had previously been the regulations
of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, are of “particular
significance” in interpreting the Rehabilitation Act because “HEW was
the agency responsible for coordinating the implementation and enforce-
ment of § 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, 29 U. S. C. § 794,” prohibiting dis-
crimination against individuals with disabilities by recipients of federal
funds. Toyota Motor Mfg., Ky., Inc. v. Williams, 534 U. S. 184, 195 (2002).
Unfortunately for Echazabal’s argument, the congruence of the ADA with
the HEW regulations does not produce an unequivocal statement of con-
gressional intent.

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itation Act regulation pairing self and others, the congres-
sional choice to speak only of threats to others would still be
equivocal. Consider what the ADA reference to threats to
others might have meant on somewhat different facts. If
the Rehabilitation Act had spoken only of “threats to health”
and the EEOC regulation had read that to mean threats to
self or others, a congressional choice to be more specific in
the ADA by listing threats to others but not threats to self
would have carried a message. The most probable reading
would have been that Congress understood what a failure
to specify could lead to and had made a choice to limit the
possibilities. The statutory basis for any agency rule-
making under the ADA would have been different from its
basis under the Rehabilitation Act and would have indicated
a difference in the agency’s rulemaking discretion. But
these are not the circumstances here. Instead of making
the ADA different from the Rehabilitation Act on the point
at issue, Congress used identical language, knowing full well
what the EEOC had made of that language under the earlier
statute. Did Congress mean to imply that the agency had
been wrong in reading the earlier language to allow it to
recognize threats to self, or did Congress just assume
that the agency was free to do under the ADA what it had
already done under the earlier Act’s identical language?
There is no way to tell. Omitting the EEOC’s reference to
self-harm while using the very language that the EEOC
had read as consistent with recognizing self-harm is equivo-
cal at best. No negative inference is possible.
There is even a third strike against applying the
expression-exclusion rule here. It is simply that there is no
apparent stopping point to the argument that by specifying
a threat-to-others defense Congress intended a negative
implication about those whose safety could be considered.
When Congress specified threats to others in the workplace,
for example, could it possibly have meant that an employer
could not defend a refusal to hire when a worker’s disability

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would threaten others outside the workplace? If Typhoid
Mary had come under the ADA, would a meat packer have
been defenseless if Mary had sued after being turned away?
See 42 U. S. C. § 12113(d). Expressio unius just fails to
work here.
B
Since Congress has not spoken exhaustively on threats to
a worker’s own health, the agency regulation can claim ad-
herence under the rule in Chevron, 467 U. S., at 843, so long
as it makes sense of the statutory defense for qualification
standards that are “job-related and consistent with business
necessity.” 42 U. S. C. § 12113(a). Chevron’s reasons for
calling the regulation reasonable are unsurprising: moral
concerns aside, it wishes to avoid time lost to sickness, exces-
sive turnover from medical retirement or death, litigation
under state tort law, and the risk of violating the national
Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970, 84 Stat. 1590,
as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 651 et seq. Although Echazabal
claims that none of these reasons is legitimate, focusing on
the concern with OSHA will be enough to show that the
regulation is entitled to survive.
Echazabal points out that there is no known instance of
OSHA enforcement, or even threatened enforcement, against
an employer who relied on the ADA to hire a worker willing
to accept a risk to himself from his disability on the job. In
Echazabal’s mind, this shows that invoking OSHA policy and
possible OSHA liability is just a red herring to excuse covert
discrimination. But there is another side to this. The text
of OSHA itself says its point is “to assure so far as possible
every working man and woman in the Nation safe and
healthful working conditions,” § 651(b), and Congress spe-
cifically obligated an employer to “furnish to each of his em-
ployees employment and a place of employment which are
free from recognized hazards that are causing or are likely
to cause death or serious physical harm to his employ-
ees,” § 654(a)(1). Although there may be an open question

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whether an employer would actually be liable under OSHA
for hiring an individual who knowingly consented to the par-
ticular dangers the job would pose to him, see Brief for
United States et al. as Amici Curiae 19, n. 7, there is no
denying that the employer would be asking for trouble: his
decision to hire would put Congress’s policy in the ADA, a
disabled individual’s right to operate on equal terms within
the workplace, at loggerheads with the competing policy of
OSHA, to ensure the safety of “each” and “every” worker.
Courts would, of course, resolve the tension if there were
no agency action, but the EEOC’s resolution exemplifies the
substantive choices that agencies are expected to make when
Congress leaves the intersection of competing objectives
both imprecisely marked but subject to the administrative
leeway found in 42 U. S. C. § 12113(a).
Nor can the EEOC’s resolution be fairly called unreason-
able as allowing the kind of workplace paternalism the ADA
was meant to outlaw. It is true that Congress had paternal-
ism in its sights when it passed the ADA, see § 12101(a)(5)
(recognizing “overprotective rules and policies” as a form of
discrimination). But the EEOC has taken this to mean that
Congress was not aiming at an employer’s refusal to place
disabled workers at a specifically demonstrated risk, but was
trying to get at refusals to give an even break to classes of
disabled people, while claiming to act for their own good in
reliance on untested and pretextual stereotypes.5 Its regu-
5 Echazabal’s contention that the Act’s legislative history is to the con-
trary is unpersuasive. Although some of the comments within the legisla-
tive history decry paternalism in general terms, see, e. g., H. R. Rep.
No. 101–485, pt. 2, p. 72 (1990) (“It is critical that paternalistic concerns
for the disabled person’s own safety not be used to disqualify an otherwise
qualified applicant”); ADA Conf. Rep., 136 Cong. Rec. 17377 (1990) (state-
ment of Sen. Kennedy) (“[A]n employer could not use as an excuse for not
hiring a person with HIV disease the claim that the employer was simply
‘protecting the individual’ from opportunistic diseases to which the indi-
vidual might be exposed”), those comments that elaborate actually express
the more pointed concern that such justifications are usually pretextual,

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86 CHEVRON U. S. A. INC. v. ECHAZABAL
Opinion of the Court
lation disallows just this sort of sham protection, through
demands for a particularized enquiry into the harms the em-
ployee would probably face. The direct threat defense must
be “based on a reasonable medical judgment that relies on
the most current medical knowledge and/or the best avail-
able objective evidence,” and upon an expressly “individual-
ized assessment of the individual’s present ability to safely
perform the essential functions of the job,” reached after
considering, among other things, the imminence of the risk
and the severity of the harm portended. 29 CFR § 1630.2(r)
(2001). The EEOC was certainly acting within the reason-
able zone when it saw a difference between rejecting work-
place paternalism and ignoring specific and documented risks
to the employee himself, even if the employee would take his
chances for the sake of getting a job.6
rooted in generalities and misperceptions about disabilities. See, e. g.,
H. R. Rep. No. 101–485, at 74 (“Generalized fear about risks from the
employment environment, such as exacerbation of the disability caused by
stress, cannot be used by an employer to disqualify a person with a disabil-
ity”); S. Rep. No. 101–116, p. 28 (1989) (“It would also be a violation to
deny employment to an applicant based on generalized fears about the
safety of the applicant . . . . By definition, such fears are based on aver-
ages and group-based predictions. This legislation requires individual-
ized assessments”).
Similarly, Echazabal points to several of our decisions expressing con-
cern under Title VII, which like the ADA allows employers to defend
otherwise discriminatory practices that are “consistent with business ne-
cessity,” 42 U. S. C. § 2000e–2(k), with employers adopting rules that ex-
clude women from jobs that are seen as too risky. See, e. g., Dothard
v. Rawlinson, 433 U. S. 321, 335 (1977); Automobile Workers v. Johnson
Controls, Inc., 499 U. S. 187, 202 (1991). Those cases, however, are beside
the point, as they, like Title VII generally, were concerned with paternalis-
tic judgments based on the broad category of gender, while the EEOC has
required that judgments based on the direct threat provision be made on
the basis of individualized risk assessments.
6 Respect for this distinction does not entail the requirement, as Echaza-
bal claims, that qualification standards be “neutral,” stating what the job
requires, as distinct from a worker’s disqualifying characteristics. Brief
for Respondent 26. It is just as much business necessity for skyscraper

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87 Cite as: 536 U. S. 73 (2002)
Opinion of the Court
Finally, our conclusions that some regulation is permissi-
ble and this one is reasonable are not open to Echazabal’s
objection that they reduce the direct threat provision to
“surplusage,” see Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter, Commu-
nities for Great Ore., 515 U. S. 687, 698 (1995). The mere
fact that a threat-to-self defense reasonably falls within the
general “job related” and “business necessity” standard does
not mean that Congress accomplished nothing with its ex-
plicit provision for a defense based on threats to others.
The provision made a conclusion clear that might otherwise
have been fought over in litigation or administrative rule-
making. It did not lack a job to do merely because the
EEOC might have adopted the same rule later in applying
the general defense provisions, nor was its job any less re-
sponsible simply because the agency was left with the option
to go a step further. A provision can be useful even without
congressional attention being indispensable.
Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the Court of
Appeals and remand the case for proceedings consistent
with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
contractors to have steelworkers without vertigo as to have well-balanced
ones. See 226 F. 3d, at 1074 (Trott, J., dissenting). Reasonableness does
not turn on formalism. We have no occasion, however, to try to describe
how acutely an employee must exhibit a disqualifying condition before an
employer may exclude him from the class of the generally qualified. See
Brief for Respondent 31. This is a job for the trial courts in the first
instance.