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Nature of Suit Code: 891
Nature of Suit: Agricultural Acts
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals

FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT

Argued May 6, 2005 Decided July 26, 2005

No. 04-5297

CARMINE FORNARO, JR., ET AL.,

APPELLANTS

v.

KAY COLES JAMES, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF PERSONNEL

MANAGEMENT,

APPELLEE

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the District of Columbia

(No. 01cv02542)

David U. Fierst argued the cause for appellants. With him

on the briefs were Glenn A. Mitchell and Gary S. Marx.

Lisa S. Goldfluss, Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued the cause

for appellee. With her on the brief were Kenneth L. Wainstein,

U.S. Attorney, and Michael J. Ryan, Assistant U.S. Attorney. R.

Craig Lawrence, Assistant U.S. Attorney, entered an

appearance.

Before:GINSBURG,Chief Judge, and ROGERS and ROBERTS,

Circuit Judges.

Opinion for the Court filed by Circuit Judge ROBERTS.

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ROBERTS,Circuit Judge: A group of eight plaintiffs seeking

to represent a class of retired, disabled federal law enforcement

officers and firefighters sued the Office of Personnel Management. They claimed that class members were entitled to higher

disability benefits, based on recent decisions from the Court of

Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and sought an order requiring

OPM to notify class members and pay them the higher benefits.

The plaintiffs looked to the Administrative Procedure Act for the

waiver of sovereign immunity that would allow their suit to

proceed in district court, but we hold that the APA’s waiver is

inapplicable because Congress has prescribed a route other than

suit under the APA for vindicating claims for civil service

benefits. We affirm the judgment dismissing the action for lack

of jurisdiction.

I.

The Civil Service Retirement Act, codified at 5 U.S.C.

§§ 8331 et seq., provides for payment of annuities to retired

federal employees and their surviving spouses. Congress has

entrusted the administration of this system to the Office of

Personnel Management. Id. § 8347(a). The CSRA provides that

OPM “shall adjudicate all claims” for retirement benefits,

id. § 8347(b), and sets forth a detailed regime for reviewing

those decisions. The CSRA first allows a claimant to appeal an

adverse OPM decision to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

Id. § 8347(d)(1). Claimants can then seek judicial review of

MSPB final orders and decisions, but — except for certain

discrimination claims — must do so before the Court of Appeals

for the Federal Circuit. Id. § 7703(b)(1).

Pursuant to the CSRA, federal law enforcement officers and

firefighters(LEO/FFs),and their surviving spouses, are generally

entitled to a more generous retirement annuity than that received

by other civil service employees. See id. §§ 8336(c), 8339(d).

Receiving the larger annuity, however, is contingent on working

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past age fifty and having more than twenty years of service, id.

§ 8336(c), and LEO/FFs who retire before either threshold are

entitled only to the standard civil service pension, see id.

§ 8339(g). The CSRA also provides annuities for employees

who become disabled or for the surviving spouses of employees

who die while still employed. See id. §§ 8337, 8341. The

difficult question of statutory interpretation at the root of the

present dispute is whether LEO/FFs who fail to meet the age

fifty or twenty years of service requirements because of death or

disability are nonetheless entitled to the larger annuity. See

generally Wassenaar v. OPM, 21 F.3d 1090, 1092–94 (Fed. Cir.

1994).

The dispute between OPM and LEO/FFs over how to

resolve this question has been going on for some time. Round

one concerned whether death before meeting the age and service

thresholds prevented LEO/FF survivors from receiving an

enhanced annuity. OPM initially took the position that it did. In

response, surviving spouses of LEO/FFs who died before

satisfying the requirements for the larger annuity challenged

OPM’s interpretation through the CSRA review process, taking

their case to the MSPB and the Federal Circuit. The Federal

Circuit held that neither death before age fifty, Wassenaar, 21

F.3d at 1097, nor death before twenty years of service, nor both,

Moore v. OPM, 113 F.3d 216, 218 (Fed. Cir. 1997), deprived

surviving spouses of the enhanced annuity. 

Subsequent to these decisions, OPM paid enhanced benefits

to the complaining parties in Wassenaar and Moore, and also

agreed to pay enhanced benefits to surviving spouses of any

future LEO/FFs who died before meeting either or both of the

minimum thresholds. With respect to similarly situated LEO/FF

survivors who were already receiving reduced benefits but had

not been parties to the litigation, however, OPM would only pay

an increased annuity to those who filed a claim for one after the

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decisions. A class of plaintiffs then sought to compel OPM to

notify current annuitants unaware of the new interpretation in

Wassenaar and Moore, filing suit in the District Court for the

District of Columbia. See Anselmo v. King, 902 F. Supp. 273

(D.D.C. 1995). After several years of inconclusive litigation

there, OPM agreed to seek out current annuitants and pay them

adjusted prospective and retroactive benefits in line with the

Wassenaar and Moore decisions.

 The present appeal concerns the impact of disability rather

than death on entitlement to an enhanced annuity. The Federal

Circuit recently ruled, in a case brought through the CSRA

review process, that LEO/FFs younger than fifty are entitled to

enhanced benefits if they retire early because of disability, but

did so without addressing whether the same held for those

retiring because of disability without twenty years of service.

See Pitsker v. OPM, 234 F.3d 1378, 1381–84 (Fed. Cir. 2000).

OPM paid enhanced benefits to the named parties in Pitsker but,

following the same course it had pursued in the survivor

litigation, would not do so for other similarly situated annuitants

unless they came forward and filed a claim. OPM also took the

position that retirees who did not have twenty years of service

were not covered by the Pitsker ruling and were still ineligible

for an enhanced annuity. A group of LEO/FFs who had retired

because of disability before age fifty and with less than twenty

years’ experience filed the present class action suit on December

10, 2001 in the District Court for the District of Columbia,

seeking mandamus and declaratory relief compelling OPM to

notify class members and grant them enhanced retirement

benefits.

OPM moved to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction and failure

to state a claim. On October 31, 2002, the parties stipulated that

OPM would notify and begin paying retroactive and prospective

enhanced benefits to LEO/FFs who retired on disability after

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serving twenty years, but before the age of fifty — the cohort to

which Pitsker directly applied. See Stipulation and Order, ¶ 2.

Then, on June 6, 2004, the district court granted OPM’s motion

to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction. The court held that the APA

did not waive sovereign immunity with respect to the action

because the relief the plaintiffs sought — notifying annuitants of

their rights or applying Pitsker to those without twenty years of

service — was within the discretion of the agency. Alternatively, the court held that the plaintiffs’ civil action was timebarred under 28 U.S.C. § 2401(a), because the harm triggering

the cause of action — the initial miscalculation of benefits —

occurred more than six years before filing the complaint. The

plaintiffs appeal.

II.

The United States, as sovereign, “is immune from suit save

as it consents to be sued, and the terms of consent to be sued in

any court define that court’s jurisdiction to entertain the suit.”

United States v. Sherwood, 312 U.S. 584, 586 (1941) (citations

omitted). Plaintiffs rely on the waiver of sovereign immunity in

the APA, which does indeed provide that “[a]n action in a court

of the United States seeking relief other than money damages

and stating a claim that an agency or an officer or employee

thereof acted or failed to act in an official capacity . . . shall not

be dismissed nor relief therein be denied on the ground that it is

against the United States.” 5 U.S.C. § 702. Section 702 goes

on, however, to specify that “[n]othing herein . . . confers

authority to grant relief if any other statute that grants consent to

suit expressly or impliedly forbids the relief which is sought.”

Id.

As we explained in Transohio Savings Bank v. OTS, 967

F.2d 598, 607 (D.C. Cir. 1993), “[t]he APA excludes from its

waiver of sovereign immunity . . . claims for which an adequate

remedy is available elsewhere, and . . . claims seeking relief

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expressly or impliedly forbidden by another statute.” See also

Sprecher v. Graber, 716 F.2d 968, 974 (2d Cir. 1983) (“The

legislation establishing the authority of [modern regulatory]

agencies usually defines the scope of judicial review over their

actions and sovereign immunity will generally continue to bar

other kinds of lawsuits against them as a consequence of the

proviso to Section 702.”).

The CSRA specifies the benefits to which federal employees and their survivors are entitled, and provides a reticulated

remedial regime for beneficiaries to secure review — including

judicial review — of benefits determinations. That regime

provides for adjudication of all claims by OPM, 5 U.S.C.

§ 8347(b), appeal of adverse decisions by OPM to the MSPB, id.

§ 8347(d)(1), and subsequent review of MSPB decisions in the

Federal Circuit, id. § 7703(b)(1); 28 U.S.C. § 1295(a)(9). A

series of opinions from the Supreme Court and this court make

clear that these remedial provisions are exclusive, and may not

be supplemented by the recognition of additional rights to

judicial review having their sources outside the CSRA.

In Lindahl v. OPM, 470 U.S. 768 (1985), for example, the

Court confirmed that, under the CSRA, MSPB decisions

concerning retirement disability claims were reviewable in the

Federal Circuit, rejecting an effort to challenge an MSPB

decision through an action in the Claims Court. Id. at 798–99.

As the Supreme Court explained in United States v. Fausto, 484

U.S. 439 (1988), Congress sought in the CSRA “to replace the

haphazard arrangements for administrative and judicial review

of personnel action,” review that often involved appeal of

agency decisions “to the district courts through . . . various forms

of action . . ., including suits for mandamus, injunction, and

declaratory judgment.” Id. at 444 (citations omitted). To

remedy “the wide variations in the kinds of decisions . . . issued

on the same and similar matters which were the product of

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concurrent jurisdiction . . . of the district courts in all Circuits

and the Court of Claims,” id. at 445 (citation omitted), Congress

created in the CSRA a remedial structure that “avoids an

unnecessary layer of judicial review in lower federal courts, and

[e]ncourages more consistent judicial decisions . . . . ” Id. at 449

(citations omitted). These considerations helped lead the Court

in Fausto to hold that an employee could not sue in the Court of

Claims under the Back Pay Act to remedy an adverse personnel

action, when the CSRA regime did not provide administrative or

judicial review for the claim at issue. Id. at 455. See also Bush

v. Lucas, 462 U.S. 367, 388, 390 (1983) (noting “comprehensive

nature” of civil service remedies and the “elaborate remedial

system that has been constructed step by step, with careful

attention to conflicting policy considerations,” and declining to

“augment[]” system “by the creation of a new judicial remedy”).

Our cases have also recognized, in a variety of contexts, the

exclusivity of the remedial and review provisions of the CSRA.

We early on held that the CSRA review provisions could not be

supplemented by an implied private right of action, see Cutts v.

Fowler, 692 F.2d 138, 140–41 (D.C. Cir. 1982); Borrell v.

United States Int’l Communications Agency, 682 F.2d 981, 987

(D.C. Cir. 1982), and concluded in Carducci v. Regan, 714 F.2d

171, 174–75 (D.C. Cir. 1983), that no remedy was available

under the APA for an employment claim as to which the CSRA

provided no relief. As we explained, the “failure to include” any

relief “within the remedial scheme of so comprehensive a piece

of legislation reflects a congressional intent that no judicial relief

be available.” Id. at 174. 

In Spagnola v. Mathis, 859 F.2d 223 (D.C. Cir. 1988) (en

banc), we ruled that the CSRA precluded a Bivens remedy for

adverse personnel decisions, explaining that “it is the comprehensiveness of the statutory scheme involved, not the ‘adequacy’

of specific remedies thereunder, that counsels judicial abstenUSCA Case #04-5297 Document #908389 Filed: 07/26/2005 Page 7 of 12
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tion.” Id. at 227; see also Harrison v. Bowen, 815 F.2d 1505,

1516 n.25 (D.C. Cir. 1987) (CSRA “creates an extensive scheme

regulating civil service personnel decisions” and courts should

not “allow an employee to circumvent this detailed scheme

governing federal employer-employee relations by suing under

the more general APA.”) (quoting Broadway v. Block, 694 F.2d

979, 986 (5th Cir. 1982)). Most recently, in Graham v. Ashcroft,

358 F.3d 931 (D.C. Cir. 2004), we held that the remedies under

the CSRA could not be supplemented by so-called “Vitarelli

actions” in district court — suits claiming that, in taking adverse

personnel action, an agency had violated its own regulations. Id.

at 933–36. See Vitarelli v. Seaton, 359 U.S. 535, 539–40 (1959).

In sum, so far as review of determinations under the CSRA is

concerned, what you get under the CSRA is what you get.

The plaintiffs do not dispute this point. Instead, they argue

that the CSRA regime’s exclusivity for individual benefits

determinations does not preclude what they contend is a collateral, systemwide challenge to OPM policy. The plaintiffs rely

heavily on Bowen v. City of New York, 476 U.S. 467 (1986),

which held that a district court could hear a challenge to a Social

Security Administration policy effectively denying claimants’

benefits despite the fact that some claimants in the class had not

exhausted the administrative remedies prescribed by the review

statute. The plaintiffs here contend that they too are challenging

the legality of a “systemwide . . . policy” in a manner “entirely

collateral to a substantive claim to entitlement,” Bowen, 476

U.S. at 485, 483, and therefore need not be relegated to the

remedies set forth in the CSRA for individual claims. 

Bowen, of course, did not address the CSRA and its

exclusive remedial scheme. In Bowen, moreover, there was no

dispute that the district court had jurisdiction to review properly

exhausted SSA claims. That a court can “waive” application of

the “intensely practical” doctrine of administrative exhaustion in

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the context of systemwide challenges, id. at 484, is beside the

point when, as here, the court would not have been able to take

jurisdiction over the claims in any event. Unlike those in

Bowen, the benefits claims at issue here were not eventually

headed to the district court at some point anyway, but could only

be brought before OPM, with review before the MSPB and the

Federal Circuit. Allowing an alternative route to relief in the

district court because plaintiffs frame their suit as a systemwide

challenge to OPM policy would substitute an entirely different

remedial regime for the one Congress intended to be exclusive,

rather than, as in Bowen, simply alter the timing of the congressionally mandated judicial review.

The plaintiffs also rely on McNary v. Haitian Refugee Ctr.,

Inc., 498 U.S. 479 (1991), which allowed a district court suit

challenging agency practices and policies in processing certain

applications, even though review of denial of the applications

was not available in district court. In McNary, however, the

Court emphasized that a victory for the plaintiffs in their district

court action would not “have the practical effect of also deciding

their claims for benefits on the merits.” Id. at 495. Instead, if

those plaintiffs prevailed, they “would only be entitled to have

their case files reopened and their applications reconsidered in

light” of the new requirements. Id. (distinguishing Heckler v.

Ringer, 466 U.S. 602 (1984)). In short, the statutorily mandated

administrative process did not address the sort of procedural and

constitutional claims the McNary plaintiffs sought to bring in

district court, and so did not preclude them. Id. at 493. Here

there is a far closer connection between the relief sought in the

judicial action and that available in the administrative process.

The district court action seeks benefits according to a particular

understanding of the reach of the Pitsker decision; that same

claim can be pressed in an individual benefits claim before

OPM, the MSPB, and — if necessary — the Federal Circuit. It

is hard to see how a district court’s decision to apply Pitsker as

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interpreted by the plaintiffs and ordering OPM to pay benefits

accordingly would do anything besides decide the merits of the

plaintiffs’ claims for benefits.

Allowing district court actions challenging how OPM

calculates civil service benefits for particular classes of beneficiaries would plainly undermine the whole point of channeling

review of benefits determinations to the MSPB and from there

to the Federal Circuit. Such an approach would reintroduce “the

haphazard arrangements for administrative and judicial review

of personnel action,” involving resort “to the district courts . . .

through various forms of action . . ., including suits for mandamus, injunction, and declaratory judgment,” that Congress

sought to replace in the CSRA. Fausto, 484 U.S. at 444

(citations omitted). It would erode “the primacy of the MSPB

for administrative resolution of disputes . . . and the primacy of

the Federal Circuit for judicial review.” Id. at 449. Allowing

the present action to proceed would also impermissibly create a

right of “access to the courts more immediate and direct than the

[CSRA] provides,” Carducci, 714 F.2d at 174, thus fracturing

“the unifying authority . . . of the MSPB,” and “undermining the

consistency of interpretation by the Federal Circuit envisioned”

by the Act, Fausto, 484 U.S. at 451. Nothing about the fact that

plaintiffs’ action is a systemic challenge to OPM policy mitigates this impact.

III.

It remains to consider whether the district court could have

exercised mandamus jurisdiction. No separate waiver of

sovereign immunity is required to seek a writ of mandamus to

compel an official to perform a duty required in his official

capacity. Wash. Legal Found. v. U.S. Sentencing Comm’n, 89

F.3d 897, 901 (D.C. Cir. 1996) (citing Dugan v. Rank, 372 U.S.

609, 621–22 (1963); Larson v. Domestic & Foreign Commerce

Corp., 337 U.S. 682, 689 (1949)).

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Mandamus is a “drastic” remedy, “to be invoked only in

extraordinary circumstances.” Allied Chem. Corp. v. Daiflon,

Inc., 449 U.S. 33, 34 (1980). “Mandamus is available only if:

(1) the plaintiff has a clear right to relief; (2) the defendant has

a clear duty to act; and (3) there is no other adequate remedy

available to plaintiff.” Power v. Barnhart, 292 F.3d 781, 784

(D.C. Cir. 2002) (internal quotation marks omitted). Because

the plaintiffs do not now contend that OPM has a duty to notify

annuitants about any enhanced benefits that may be enforced

through mandamus, see Recording of Oral Arg. at 11:55–12:10;

13:00–13:05, the sole issue here is whether mandamus is

available to compel OPM to pay all annuitants enhanced benefits

owed under Pitsker. There is no dispute that each of the

plaintiffs and members of the putative class could file a claim for

increased benefits with OPM, appeal any adverse decision to the

MSPB, and seek further review before the Federal Circuit. This

is true regardless of whether a claim would be time-barred in a

civil action, for any such bar under 28 U.S.C. § 2401(a) would

not apply to claims pursued administratively. See Oppenheim v.

Campbell, 571 F.2d 660, 663 (D.C. Cir. 1978) (28 U.S.C.

§ 2401(a) does not apply to civil service retirement claims

brought, prior to the enactment of the CSRA, pursuant to the

APA).

The plaintiffs contend that the CSRA as administered only

allows class certification of MSPB appeals — as opposed to

OPM claims — and that many potential claimants may not know

of the rights asserted under Pitsker. Yet however unsatisfactory

the CSRA’s approach may appear to the plaintiffs, the fact that

a remedial scheme chosen by Congress vindicates rights less

efficiently than a collective action does not render the CSRA

remedies inadequate for purposes of mandamus. See Council of

& for the Blind of Delaware County Valley, Inc. v. Regan, 709

F.2d 1521, 1532 (D.C. Cir. 1983) (en banc) (“Even if we agreed

that one nationwide suit would be more effective than several . . .

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suits, that does not mean that the remedy provided by Congress

isinadequate”). Becausethe CSRA regime affords beneficiaries

an adequate remedy with respect to claims for an enhanced

annuity, there is no jurisdiction to issue the writ. See Barnhart

v. Devine, 771 F.2d 1515, 1524, 1527 (D.C. Cir. 1985) (“It is, of

course, elementary that mandamus is an extraordinary form of

relief which lies only when no adequate alternative remedy

exists;” finding mandamus precluded by adequate remedy under

the CSRA).

The judgment of the district court is

Affirmed.

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