Opinion ID: 483803
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The Grievance Board Decisions Provision

Text: 26 Thus, Daniels' arguments must overcome the fact that the grievance provisions themselves do not expressly contemplate career appointments as part of the grievance board's remedial power. Section 4137(d), pursuant to which the grievance board recommended tenure for Daniels, permits the board to make an appropriate recommendation to the Secretary that remedial action should be taken that relates ... to other remedial action not otherwise provided for in this section. 27 Daniels is correct in arguing that this provision is open-ended, and does not exclude tenure recommendations. 7 Additionally, Daniels maintains that in certain unusual circumstances, such as hers, only a recommendation of tenure by the grievance board will make the grievant's injury whole. Accordingly, even an extended appointment, which was the Acting Director's method for making Daniels whole, might not remove the lingering taint on Daniels' record. Despite the expungement of the negative OER, a future tenure board reviewing her case might be adversely influenced, perhaps even subconsciously, by the fact that she has come up for review well after the others in her entering class and after an extra tour of duty. 28 Our response is informed by Sec. 4137(d)'s provision that the Secretary may reject the recommendation of the grievance board if it would be contrary to law; hence, we come full circle to the first question of whether a tenure recommendation by the grievance board is actually contrary to law. Indeed, the Acting Director relied on this contrary to law provision in rejecting the Daniels' grievance board tenure recommendation, opining that Sec. 3946 provided the sole basis for career appointments. 8 The reconciliation of Secs. 3946 and 4137(d) is thus aided by Sec. 4137(d)'s reminder that the Secretary may decline to follow the grievance board's recommended remedy, if the power to implement the remedy is delegated exclusively to another decisionmaker. That leads us back inevitably to the dispositive issue of whether Sec. 3946 constitutes an exclusive delegation of the power to grant tenure to a tenure board. 29 4. The Career Appointments Provision Revisited: Why a Tenure Board is Required for a Tenure Award 30 We find in the end that Sec. 3946 is the exclusive route to a tenure appointment, even in unusual cases such as Daniels' where a grievance board recommendation of tenure might seem the best method of making the grievant whole. First, the carefully detailed procedures of Sec. 3946--limited appointment, recommendation by tenure board, decision by Secretary--militate against an inference that Congress intended, without explicitly saying so, for these procedures to be bypassed by the grievance board, even in the exercise of its broad remedial powers. 31 Second, the tenure boards that recommend career candidates to the Secretary are constituted entirely or primarily of career members of the Service, while the grievance board is composed of people who are not employees of the Department or members of the Service. The difference in board composition says much: Congress meant to ensure that tenured appointment to the select cadre of career foreign service officers would be made only by other career professionals who had the knowledge and experience themselves to recognize which candidates should survive and which should be eliminated. 9 On the other hand, because individual grievances so often involve personality conflicts between officers or candidates and their superiors, Congress thought it wise to provide impartial, non-foreign service arbiters for such disputes. 32 It is true that the Act authorizes selection boards that include members of the public to make promotion decisions. See Secs. 4001-4003. Since foreign service officers must be either promoted within a specified period of time or retired (see note 10, infra ), one could maintain that promotion decisions are just as critical to a foreign service career as tenure decisions. If, under the Act, promotion decisions involve nonprofessionals, one could continue, why should we assume Congress did not similarly intend nonprofessionals to be involved in occasional tenure decisions? 33 There are two basic differences between tenure and promotion decisions under the Act. First, promotion, unlike tenure, does not mark the official entry into the foreign service career corps, but instead only differentiates between the ranks in that corps. Even though a failure to promote may effectively mean separation in some cases, see note 10, infra, such exit decisions are normally based upon a longer record of service in the corps itself and have less of a predictive quality about them than entry decisions. Second, and dispositively, the statute explicitly provides for members of the public to be involved in promotion decisions, see Secs. 4001-4003; there is no parallel explication of the grievance board's role in the tenuring process. 34 In light of these circumstances, we think that Daniels' make whole argument must also fail. Ultimately, the contention that only a grievance board tenure award would remedy a grievant's injury in some cases must be judged in light of congressional intention. The Act clearly provides at various points for the involvement of one or another type of procedure for a particular personnel action: We have already looked at Sec. 3946's carefully laid out tenure procedure and Secs. 4001-4003's explicit inclusion of public members in the promotion process; footnote 13, infra, describes Sec. 4010's express mandate that judgments of separation be grievable. The Act does not, though, even hint at grievance board power to grant tenure. A Congress that was so clear at so many other points is not likely to have intended the extraordinary remedy of a grant of tenure to be implied through broad, unspecific language.