Opinion ID: 184778
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Consistency with Statute

Text: 9 The ATA's first claim is that the rule fails to comply with the statute, principally for want of what ATA regards as statutorily mandated specificity. When the present rule was issued, and when this action was brought, the relevant statutory provision was contained in 49 U.S.C. § 31144(a)(1), which instructed the Secretary to prescribe regulations establishing a procedure to decide on the safety fitness of carriers, including a means of deciding whether [carriers] meet the safety fitness requirements under clause (A), which in turn called for specific initial and continuing safety requirements. Id. Although none of the parties mentioned it in briefing or oral argument, 49 U.S.C. § 31144 was amended by the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (1998 Act), § 4009(a), Pub.L. No. 105-178, 112 Stat. 107, 405-07. The requirement at stake here is reformulated as § 31144(b) and now demands that the Secretary maintain by regulation a procedure for determining the safety fitness of carriers, which must include specific initial and continuing safety fitness requirements and a methodology the Secretary will use to determine whether carriers are fit. Id. As we develop below, the change has no effect on the outcome. 10 In its specificity claim, ATA points out that the SFRM decrees neither how many documents a Safety Investigator is to examine nor how the investigator is to select the documents he or she does review. ATA reads MST Express as saying that the statute requires that all procedures used in assessing safety fitness be completely contained in the regulations, so as to enable carriers to predict, ascertain in advance, or determine from looking at the current regulations, the safety ratings they will receive if inspected. 11 Whether the FHWA's regulations satisfy the statutory directive is a question of statutory interpretation, one the FHWA has answered by adopting the regulations in question. Under the familiar test of Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. NRDC, 467 U.S. 837, 104 S.Ct. 2778, 81 L.Ed.2d 694 (1984), assuming Congress has not directly spoken to the precise question at issue, id. at 842-43, 104 S.Ct. 2778, we defer to the agency's interpretation if it is based on a permissible construction of the statute, id. at 843, 104 S.Ct. 2778. The Chevron test applies to issues of how specifically an agency must frame its regulations. New Mexico v. EPA, 114 F.3d 290, 293 (D.C.Cir.1997). 12 Here neither the 1984 Act's term, means of deciding, nor that of the 1998 Act, methodology, could possibly be said to speak directly to the necessary degree of specificity (at least in any sense adequate to condemn the present regulations). Nor does the statutory mandate that requirements be specific illuminate the degree of specificity required. Thus, we turn to the question of whether it is reasonable to call the procedures a means of deciding whether carriers meet specific safety fitness requirements (1984 Act) or a methodology for determining the safety fitness of carriers (1998 Act), again with reference to specific requirements. In a series of cases we have explicitly accorded agencies very broad deference in selecting the level of generality at which they will articulate rules. See New Mexico v. EPA, 114 F.3d at 294; Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority Professional Fire Fighters Ass'n v. United States, 959 F.2d 297, 300 (D.C.Cir.1992); Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 907 F.2d 1146, 1165 n. 16 (D.C.Cir.1990). 13 In fact the SFRM is highly specific, as we noted in MST Express. There, contrasting it with the far more limited treatment of the method for assigning ratings in the Safety Fitness Procedures, we said that the SFRM provides FHWA inspectors with detailed guidelines for deriving a motor carrier's safety rating. 108 F.3d at 403. It enumerates the specific safety regulations that are considered in a compliance review, divides them into acute and critical categories, 1 notifies the carrier of the types of records that are reviewed for compliance, and explains exactly how detected violations of acute and critical regulations are combined into an overall safety rating. 14 Yet ATA is certainly correct in claiming that the SFRM fails to specify how many documents are examined for compliance or how the documents that are reviewed are selected. But that gap hardly compels a finding that it fails to meet the specificity requirement of the statute as construed in MST Express. Indeed, that case implied that the SFRM did satisfy the statutory mandate, observing that it is not apparent from the regulations--as opposed to the SFRM--under what circumstances a carrier should expect to receive a conditional or an unsatisfactory rating. 108 F.3d at 406. At the time of this accolade the SFRM did not contain the prescription of sampling procedures that ATA now claims is indispensable. In fact, the SFRM's specificity has not in any way been degraded since MST Express. 15 The ATA cites MST Express's statement that [a] motor carrier or operator looking at the current regulations cannot determine ... what safety fitness rating it will receive. Id. But the regulations condemned in MST Express gave no guidance at all as to when inspectors would give a poor safety rating, providing only that a satisfactory rating would be awarded if a carrier had adequate safety management controls. Id. at 403. Adequate was defined in turn as appropriate for the size and type of operation of the particular motor carrier. Id. Thus the case can hardly be read to support the ATA's theory that it required specificity to the point of laying out a totally deterministic process. A better reading is that it merely reflects a rule, suggested in New Mexico v. EPA, that when a regulation intended to apply a standard contribute[s] no extra specificity or clarity to the standard it implements, the agency has failed [to do] the intended job. 114 F.3d at 293. 16 As a practical matter, ATA points to no way in which the overall purpose of the Act--promoting motor carrier safety, subject of course to protecting carriers' rights--calls for a promulgation of every detail of the sampling process by regulation. It is easy to imagine an affirmative reason for the agency's decision not to subject the sampling procedure to notice and comment rulemaking--the desire to be able to vary these technical elements of the process without excessive delay as experience accrues. 17 Although the FHWA did not defend the decision not to incorporate sampling procedures into the regulations on those grounds in the rulemaking proceedings, neither the ATA nor TUFS argued that it must place the sampling procedures there. The ATA did urge FHWA to include random record sampling as a component of the final rule establishing a new safety rating methodology. But ATA was arguing that FHWA should use random sampling instead of the focused sampling technique the agency ultimately adopted, not that the statute required the selected technique to be described in a regulation rather than in the Field Operations Training Manual, where it in fact appeared. Since the petitioners did not say why the agency was required to put its sampling method into the regulation, we cannot fault the agency for failing to explain its decision. [A] zero argument deserves a zero response. ParkView Medical Assocs. v. Shalala, 158 F.3d 146, 149 (D.C.Cir.1998). 18 In New Mexico v. EPA, in rejecting a demand for greater detail, we said that [e]verything else being equal, the better a petitioner can demonstrate the feasibility of greater specificity the more convincing its attack on agency vagueness, and that where the agency itself has adopted highly specific internal guidelines governing the same subject, it cannot very plausibly deny feasibility. 114 F.3d at 294 (emphasis omitted). There we cited MST Express, where, of course, the detail in the SFRM showed that the agency could handily achieve far greater specificity than the Safety Fitness Procedures contained. Here, as the FHWA's manual does contain procedures almost as detailed as those the ATA would require, see Federal Highway Administration, Field Operations Training Manual, ch. 3 (1997), naturally the FHWA's exclusion of the sampling procedures from the notice-and-comment regulations cannot be grounded in infeasibility. But it need not be. The agency's broad discretion and the reasonableness of its choice are enough. 19