What follows is an opinion from a United States Court of Appeals.
Intervenors who participated as parties at the courts of appeals should be counted as either appellants or respondents when it can be determined whose position they supported. For example, if there were two plaintiffs who lost in district court, appealed, and were joined by four intervenors who also asked the court of appeals to reverse the district court, the number of appellants should be coded as six.
In some cases there is some confusion over who should be listed as the appellant and who as the respondent. This confusion is primarily the result of the presence of multiple docket numbers consolidated into a single appeal that is disposed of by a single opinion. Most frequently, this occurs when there are cross appeals and/or when one litigant sued (or was sued by) multiple litigants that were originally filed in district court as separate actions. The coding rule followed in such cases should be to go strictly by the designation provided in the title of the case. The first person listed in the title as the appellant should be coded as the appellant even if they subsequently appeared in a second docket number as the respondent and regardless of who was characterized as the appellant in the opinion.
To clarify the coding conventions, consider the following hypothetical case in which the US Justice Department sues a labor union to strike down a racially discriminatory seniority system and the corporation (siding with the position of its union) simultaneously sues the government to get an injunction to block enforcement of the relevant civil rights law. From a district court decision that consolidated the two suits and declared the seniority system illegal but refused to impose financial penalties on the union, the corporation appeals and the government and union file cross appeals from the decision in the suit brought by the government. Assume the case was listed in the Federal Reporter as follows:
United States of America,
Plaintiff, Appellant
v
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendant, Appellee.
International Brotherhood of Widget Workers,AFL-CIO
Defendants, Cross-appellants
v
United States of America.
Widgets, Inc. & Susan Kuersten Sheehan, President & Chairman
of the Board
Plaintiff, Appellants,
v
United States of America,
Defendant, Appellee.
This case should be coded as follows:Appellant = United States, Respondents = International Brotherhood of Widget Workers Widgets, Inc., Total number of appellants = 1, Number of appellants that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials" = 1, Total number of respondents = 3, Number of respondents that fall into the category "private business and its executives" = 2, Number of respondents that fall into the category "groups and associations" = 1.
Note that if an individual is listed by name, but their appearance in the case is as a government official, then they should be counted as a government rather than as a private person. For example, in the case "Billy Jones & Alfredo Ruiz v Joe Smith" where Smith is a state prisoner who brought a civil rights suit against two of the wardens in the prison (Jones & Ruiz), the following values should be coded: number of appellants that fall into the category "natural persons" =0 and number that fall into the category "state governments, their agencies, and officials" =2. A similar logic should be applied to businesses and associations. Officers of a company or association whose role in the case is as a representative of their company or association should be coded as being a business or association rather than as a natural person. However, employees of a business or a government who are suing their employer should be coded as natural persons. Likewise, employees who are charged with criminal conduct for action that was contrary to the company policies should be considered natural persons.
If the title of a case listed a corporation by name and then listed the names of two individuals that the opinion indicated were top officers of the same corporation as the appellants, then the number of appellants should be coded as three and all three were coded as a business (with the identical detailed code). Similar logic should be applied when government officials or officers of an association were listed by name.
Your specific task is to determine the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officials". If the total number cannot be determined (e.g., if the appellant is listed as "Smith, et. al." and the opinion does not specify who is included in the "et.al."), then answer 99.

Opinion:
Joseph TRICHILO, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. SECRETARY OF HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, Defendant-Appellant.
No. 1129, Docket 87-6023.
United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.
Argued July 16, 1987.
Decided Nov. 4, 1987.
James M. Baker, Baker, Clark & Satter, Syracuse, N.Y., for plaintiff-appellee.
William Kanter, Jay S. Bybee, U.S. Dept, of Justice, Appellate Staff, Civ. Div., Washington, D.C., for defendant-appellant.
Before VAN GRAAFEILAND, PRATT, and ALTIMARI, Circuit Judges.
PER CURIAM:
Presently before the court is Trichilo’s motion for $10,037.96 in attorney’s fees and litigation expenses incurred on the government’s appeal of the district court’s award of attorney’s fees for counsel’s district court work. On that appeal, we ruled in favor of plaintiff in all respects. Trichilo v. Secretary of Health & Human Services, 823 F.2d 702 (2d Cir.1987). We now reaffirm the holding and rationale of our earlier opinion, and, in addition, grant Trichilo’s motion for attorney’s fees on the appeal.
We assume familiarity with our earlier opinion in which we held, in part, that a litigant is entitled to attorney’s fees under the Equal Access to Justice Act not only for the successful prosecution of a suit under the act, but also for the time spent preparing and litigating the fee issue itself. Id. at 707. As we noted:
Since the purpose of the EAJA is to remove counsel fees as an impediment to challenging unreasonable and unjustified governmental actions, where a governmental action has been shown to have been unjustified, there should be as little disincentive for plaintiffs to obtain attorney’s fees as there is for them to challenge the action itself
Id. (emphasis added). This reasoning applies equally to the time and effort expended by counsel on appeal. Indeed, this case provides a prime example of the reason why fees such as Trichilo’s must be recoverable. He incurred fees of over $10,000 on appeal, when the amount in controversy on the original appeal was under $1,000. Were there no possibility of recovering the fees on appeal, counsel might well simply forgo the relatively small amount at issue arid not contest the government’s position on issues such as those raised by the ap-p6al in this case, which, we note, the government lost.
The government contends that it is unfair to subject the government to attorney's fee liability when, as here, the position it advocated on appeal-as distinguished from the original, "substantially unjustified" position it adopted toward Tn-chilo that triggered this litigation-was reasonable, although not ultimately persuasive. However, as we noted in our original opinion, congress has made clear that it is inappropriate to examine separate parts of the litigation to determine whether the government's position in each phase was justified. Instead, as long as the government's underlying substantive position was not "substantially justified", the plaintiff is entitled to recover all reasonable attorney's fees incurred. Trichilo, 823 F.2d at 707-08. If the government wishes to avoid such liability, it need only refrain from taking positions that are not "substantially justified". Plaintiffs such as Triehilo, on the other hand, are unable to avoid these fees, which are forced upon them by the government's unreasonable positions.
We reject the government's position that the reasonability of its position on appeal amounts to a "special circumstance" that would "make an award unjust". 28 U.S.C. § 2412(d)(1)(A). Reading the "special circumstances" exception so broadly would, in effect, swallow the very rule we announced in our earlier opinion. This we decline to do.
We therefore reaffirm our earlier holding in this case, and extend it to include the reasonable attorney's fees incurred by plaintiff on the appeal. In case the law of this circuit is not now clear to the government, we hold that where the government's underlying position is not substantially justified, plaintiff is entitled under the EAJA to recover all attorney's fees and expenses reasonably incurred in connection with the vindication of his rights, including those related to any litigation over fees, and any appeal. Since the government challenges none of the particular amounts of fees and expenses claimed by plaintiff, there is no need to remand for an evidentiary hearing in the district court, and plaintiff's motion is granted in its entirety.

Question: What is the total number of appellants in the case that fall into the category "the federal government, its agencies, and officialss"? Answer with a number.

Choices:

Answer: 1