Source: http://foiaproject.org/case_detail/?title=on&style=foia&case_id=30637
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 12:02:54+00:00

Document:
Case Description The Animal Legal Defense Fund and several other animal rights groups filed suit against the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service for its removal of information about Animal Welfare Act implementation and enforcement from the agency's website, claiming the removal violated the affirmative disclosure provisions in Section (a)(2) of FOIA.
FOIA Project Annotation: In the first ruling in a series of suits filed by animal rights and environmental groups challenging the decision of the Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to take down and reassess records from its website containing personally identifying information the agency believed might be subject to privacy concerns, Judge William Orrick of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has found that the Animal Legal Defense Fund has not shown that it is entitled to an injunction requiring the APHIS to repost the information it took down. At the heart of ALDF's claim was that the APHIS records fell under the requirement in 5 U.S.C. §552(a)(2) that agencies make public final opinions and frequently requested documents through a reading room. ALDF argued that APHIS had violated that provision by taking down the posted records and asked Orrick to order the agency to repost them. Instead, Orrick found ALDF had not demonstrated that it was entitled to such relief. He noted that "they are not likely to succeed on their FOIA claim because there is no public remedy for violations of the reading room provision �" courts may order production of documents to specific plaintiffs but cannot mandate publication to the public as a whole. They have not exhausted administrative remedies on their reading room claims either. They also are not likely to succeed on their claim under the [Administrative Procedure Act] because FOIA provides plaintiffs an adequate alternative remedy." APHIS's decision to take down the inspection records was seen initially as a first salvo in an anticipated policy shift by the Trump administration to make less information publicly available. But the decision to take down the APHIS records actually had its roots in an earlier contentious dispute pitting agricultural businesses against advocacy groups and other entities that use data about government financial support to agricultural operations over the level of privacy for such businesses whose corporate identities overlap with publicly available personally identifying information. The leading case in the D.C. Circuit, Mult Ag Media v. Dept of Agriculture, 515 F.3d 1224 (D.C. Cir. 2008), leans slightly in favor of disclosing personally identifying information when it is in a business context, but Congress has taken measures since that decision to shrink the universe of personally-identifying business information. Orrick cited American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, 836 F.3d 963 (8th Cir. 2016), a recently decided reverse-FOIA case in which the Eighth Circuit agreed that members of the American Farm Bureau Federation had standing to sue on behalf of their members over whether the EPA could disclose personally-identifying information in response to FOIA requests from environmental groups. Even though the Department of Agriculture had agreed in 2009 as part of a four-year suit brought against it by the Humane Society to post reports required under the Animal Welfare Act, APHIS became concerned that posting some of the personally-identifying information might open it up for liability under the Privacy Act. As a result, it took down many of the inspection records to assess whether or not personally-identifying information needed to be redacted. These actions led to lawsuits being filed in D.C. as well as other districts challenging APHIS's actions as violating its FOIA obligation to post final opinions and frequently requested records. In what may well be a preview of how these cases will be decided at the district court level, Orrick found that the recent D.C. Circuit ruling in CREW v. Dept of Justice, 846 F.3d 1235 (D.C. Cir. 2017), not only severely limited ALDF's remedies, but also made clear that ALDF did not even have standing to bring its challenge because it had not made a FOIA request and exhausted administrative remedies. There is a significant back story to the CREW case as well which does not bode well for ALDF and its fellow plaintiffs going forward. Even though Payne Enterprises v. USA, 837 F.2d 486 (D.C. Cir. 1988), which held that FOIA allowed courts to provide equitable remedies to rectify agency policies that effectively denied access to information short of denials, has recently been reaffirmed by a number of district court judges in D.C., courts have been extremely reluctant to recognize rights to enforce the affirmative disclosure provisions of Section (a)(2). Viewed in historical context, a primary driver of such limited judicial remedies stems from the Supreme Court's 1980 companion decisions in Kissinger and Forsham, in which the Court announced that agencies only violated FOIA when they improperly withheld agency records in response to a FOIA request. Although this describes the normal course of FOIA litigation, it does not take into account a variety of other agency obligations under FOIA. Nevertheless, government attorneys frequently claim in court that the court does not have jurisdiction because the agency has not actually withheld any records, even though it has failed to respond within the statutory time limit, or denied a fee or fee category request. That argument usually isn't persuasive, but the fact that government attorneys continue to argue it suggests that they remain hopeful that a court will agree. Until the CREW case was decided recently by Judge Amit Mehta, both plaintiffs and the government believed that FOIA did not provide a remedy for failure to abide by Section (a)(2) and that if a remedy existed it was under the Administrative Procedure Act. Indeed, CREW's original suit to force the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel to post its opinions on line was brought under the APA. But after examining the text of FOIA, Mehta concluded that FOIA did give courts the ability to remedy such violations. The case went to the D.C. Circuit where the appeals court agreed with Mehta but found a remedy that was so circumscribed that it was virtually useless. Based on Kennecott Utah Copper Corp. v. Dept of Interior, 88 F.3d 1191 (D.C. Cir. 1996), the D.C. Circuit concluded that any relief available for a violation of the affirmative disclosure provisions in Section (a)(2) was limited to FOIA requesters. Although the circumstances giving rise to the Kennecott Utah case were peculiarly unsuited for making pronouncements about information disclosure policy �" the case essentially tried to force the Interior Department to publish a rule in the Federal Register that it had withdrawn �" the D.C. Circuit noted that FOIA's judicial review right "allows district courts to order 'the production of any agency records improperly withheld from the complainant,' not agency records withheld from the public." Orrick found the CREW decision was directly on point. He noted that "federal courts do not have the power to order agencies to make documents available for public inspection under section 552(a)(4)(B) of FOIA. While plaintiffs may bring suit to enforce section 552(a)(2) and may seek injunctive relief and production of documents to them personally, they cannot compel an agency to make documents available to the general public." He rejected ALDF's claim that it would suffer irreparable harm if APHIS did not repost the records immediately. Instead, he concluded that "the public's interest in immediately accessing all AWA enforcement and compliance records is outweighed by the USDA's interest in ensuring that these records do not improperly disclose private information."
FOIA Project Annotation: After refusing to grant the Animal Legal Defense Fund a preliminary injunction to force the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service to repost information it had taken down from its website, Judge William Orrick has dismissed the case after finding the ALDF's contention that it had a separate APA claim that Orrick did not address was not convincing. ALDF argued that it had a separate APA claim to challenge whether the agency's decision to take down the information in the first place was arbitrary and capricious. But Orrick pointed out that "plaintiffs' injury is an informational injury based on a lack of access to documents that they assert they are entitled to under FOIA. Plaintiffs' argument that this claim is 'independent' from FOIA because it is based on the USDA's obligations under the APA, rather than FOIA, misses the point. While the USDA may have obligations under both FOIA and the APA, the plaintiffs have only one injury �" an informational injury that depends on statutory rights conferred by FOIA. In the context of assessing whether there is an adequate remedy to plaintiffs' claims, the focus is on plaintiffs' injury and the possible means of redressing it. It is irrelevant that FOIA does not provide a specific means of challenging an agency's arbitrary decision to remove databases because plaintiffs do not have independent standing to challenge that action beyond its impact on plaintiffs' ability to access information to which they have a statutory right. What FOIA does provide is a means of redressing the only injury plaintiffs have identified by providing a means through which plaintiffs can obtain the information and documents that were once available on the USDA databases. . . [W]hile this remedy may not be identical to the relief available under the APA, it is nevertheless adequate to redress the informational injury plaintiffs have identified and thus to bar separate review under the APA."

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