Justia Government & Administrative Law Opinion Summaries

AICPA challenged the IRS's Annual Filing Season Program as violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). On remand, the district court granted the IRS's motion for judgment on the pleadings based on AICPA's lack of standing.The DC Circuit reversed and held that AICPA has constitutional and statutory standing to challenge the validity of the Program because its members employ unenrolled preparers. On the merits, the court held that the Program did not violate the APA in any of the ways AICPA alleged. In this case, 31 U.S.C. 330(a) authorizes the IRS to establish and operate the Program, and 26 U.S.C. 7803(a)(2)(A) authorizes the agency to publish the results of the Program; the IRS did not violate the APA by failing to follow notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures in promulgating it; and the Program was not arbitrary and capricious. View "American Institute of Certified Accountants v. IRS" on Justia Law

Hospitals challenged the methodology that the Department used to calculate the "outlier payment" component of their Medicare reimbursements for 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. At issue was whether the Department's decision to continue with its methodology after the 2007 fiscal year was arbitrary in light of accumulating data about the methodology's generally sub-par performance. The DC Circuit held in Banner Health v. Price, 867 F.3d 1323 (D.C. Cir. 2017) (per curiam), that the Department's decision to wait a bit longer before reevaluating its complex predictive model was reasonable, because the Department had, at best, only limited additional data for 2008 and 2009 and because the 2009 data suggested that hospitals were paid more than expected.In this appeal, the court held that Banner Health foreclosed the hospitals' challenges to the Department's failure to publish a proposed draft rule during the 2003 rulemaking process and the Department's failure to account for the possibility of reconciliation claw-backs in setting the 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 thresholds. Finally, the court held that, while the hospitals' frustration with the Department's frequently off-target calculations was understandable, the methodology had not sunk to the level of arbitrary or capricious agency action. View "Billings Clinic v. Azar" on Justia Law

Plaintiff filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with OPR and other agencies, seeking to learn the results of investigations into the prosecutor in plaintiff's case. OPR categorically refused to acknowledge the existence of, let alone disclose, any potentially relevant documents outside of plaintiff's individual case. With respect to the prosecutor's conduct in plaintiff's case, OPR held back substantial amounts of material, asserting a sweeping breadth for its claimed exemptions.The DC Circuit reversed the district court's judgment for OPR with respect to its invocations of Exemption 7(C) and the district court's decision to deny a fee waiver to plaintiff, holding that circuit precedent foreclosed OPR's approach and OPR failed to justify multiple withholdings. The court also remanded with instructions for the district court to reconsider its decision with respect to the FBI's withholding of records under Exemption 3 in light of recent circuit precedent. The court affirmed in all other matters. View "Bartko v. DOJ" on Justia Law

Petitioners challenged FERC's approval of an application from Algonquin to undertake an upgrade to its natural gas pipeline system. The DC Circuit dismissed the Delegation's petition for review for lack of jurisdiction because the Delegation failed to establish that it had standing to seek review of the Commission's decision where its individual members did not suffer an injury in fact from the pipeline project. The court held that the remaining petitioners adequately demonstrated standing and thus reached the merits of their petitions.On the merits, the court held that the Commission did not act arbitrarily and capriciously in declining to consider Algonquin's three projects in a single environmental impact statement. The court explained that, for purposes of the AIM Project, the Commission adequately considered the cumulative impacts of the other two projects based on the information then available to the agency. The court also held that the Commission gave adequate consideration to the cumulative environmental impacts of the three upgrade projects. View "City of Boston Delegation v. FERC" on Justia Law

Petitioners challenged FERC's failure to account for the effect on electricity prices of the permanent retirement of the Brayton Point Power Station, a coal-fired electric plant in Somerset, Massachusetts. Petitioners alleged that the closure was an attempt to manipulate the results of forward capacity auction (FCA 8). The DC Circuit held that it lacked jurisdiction to consider the petition in the absence of final agency action. In two later proceedings, petitioners asked FERC to correct for what they assert were effects of Brayton Point’s illegal closure on the next two annual forward capacity auctions (FCA 9 and FCA 10). FERC denied the petitions and approved FCA 9 and FCA 10 results.The court held that petitioners lacked standing to challenge FERC's acceptance of the FCA 9 and FCA 10 results because no record evidence established a causal link between the claimed manipulative closure of Brayton Point and the clearing prices of FCA 9 and FCA 10 that FERC approved. View "Utility Workers Union of America Local 464 v. FERC" on Justia Law

The DC Circuit previously ruled that the Due Process Clause does not allow Amtrak to use an arbitration process to impose its preferred metrics and standards on its competitors, notwithstanding their opposition and that of the Federal Railroad Administration. In this case, the court held that severing the arbitration provision in Section 207(d) of the 2008 Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act was the proper remedy. The court reasoned that, without an arbitrator's stamp of approval, Amtrak could not unilaterally impose its metrics and standards on objecting freight railroads; no rule would go into effect without the approval and permission of a neutral federal agency; and that brought the process of formulating metrics and standards back into the constitutional fold. View "Association of American Railroads v. DOT" on Justia Law

This case involved the "340B Program," which allowed certain hospitals to purchase outpatient drugs from manufacturers at or below specified prices. Plaintiffs filed suit challenging a regulation that sets the Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) reimbursement drugs purchased through the 340B Progam for 2018. The district court held that plaintiffs failed to present claims for reimbursement to the Secretary, as required to obtain judicial review of claims under Medicare, and thus dismissed the complaint for lack of subject matter jurisdiction.The DC Circuit held that plaintiffs neither presented their claim nor obtained any administrative decision at all, much less the "final decision" required under 42 U.S.C. 405(g). In this case, when plaintiffs filed this action, neither the hospital plaintiffs, nor any members of the hospital-association plaintiffs, had challenged the new reimbursement regulation in the context of a specific administrative claim for payment. They could not have done so because the new regulation had not yet even become effective. Therefore, plaintiffs failed to satisfy the presentment requirement of section 405(g), and the district court properly dismissed this case for lack of subject matter jurisdiction. View "American Hospital Ass'n v. Azar" on Justia Law

The DC Circuit reversed the district court's judgment on the pleadings in an action brought by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), seeking records in response to nineteen travel-related FOIA requests submitted over a thirteen-month period. Judicial Watch alleged two counts: Count 1 alleged that the Secret Service violated FOIA by failing to conduct a search reasonably calculated to uncover all responsive records; and Count 2 alleged that the Secret Service has a policy and practice of violating FOIA's procedural requirements. Count 1 was dismissed as moot.The court held that in this circuit it is settled law that informal agency conduct resulting in long delays in making requested non-exempt records available may serve as the basis for a policy or practice claim. The court held that Judicial Watch alleged sufficient facts under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2) and Supreme Court precedent to draw the reasonable inference that the Secret Service has adopted a practice of delay, contrary to FOIA's two-part scheme, by repeatedly standing mute over a prolonged period of time and using Judicial Watch's filing of a lawsuit as an organizing tool for setting its response priorities. The court remanded as to Count 2 so that the Secret Service will have the opportunity to explain its delays and to confirm how it intended to conform to FOIA's mandate in the future. View "Judicial Watch, Inc. v. DHS" on Justia Law

The Federal Mine Safety and Health Administration cited the Consolidation Coal Company for excavating an excess amount of rock from a collapsed tunnel, in violation of what the company's roof plan allowed. The ALJ reduced the citation fine, concluding that Consolidation Coal's breach of its roof control plan, with the resulting roof collapse, was not a "significant and substantial" safety violation. The Federal Mine Safety and Health Review Commission deadlocked two-to-two on the issue, leaving the ALJ's decision as the final agency decision.The DC Circuit vacated and remanded, holding that the ALJ's decision relied critically on types of evidence long foreclosed by Commission precedent. In this case, the ALJ erroneously rooted her decision in the likelihood-of-injury prong, and impermissibly relied on redundant safety measures and miner precaution in concluding that the violation was not significant and substantial. View "Secretary of Labor v. Consolidation Coal Company" on Justia Law

This litigation over attorney's fees stemmed from a Freedom of Information Act case. At issue was whether plaintiff was entitled to attorney's fees under the Freedom of Information Act attorney's fee statute. Applying a deferential standard, the DC Circuit held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in its analysis of four factors: (i) the public benefit from the case; (ii) the commercial benefit to the plaintiff; (iii) the nature of the plaintiff's interest in the records; and (iv) the reasonableness of the agency's withholding of the requested documents. Furthermore, the district court acted within its discretion when it concluded that the fourth factor outweighed the other three. View "Morley v. CIA" on Justia Law