Opinion ID: 525548
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Skinner and Von Raab

Text: 13 Our analysis centers on the two decisions recently issued by the Supreme Court. Of the two, Von Raab is more closely on point. In Skinner, the Court upheld regulations under which drug testing would be contingent on an event--such as a train accident or a rule violation by a particular employee--which furnished an indication that some dereliction of duty had occurred. Although post-accident testing requires no individualized suspicion of any particular employee, it at least requires concrete evidence that events have not gone as planned. The testing program upheld in Von Raab, by contrast--like the program at issue here--included no such requirement. Moreover, Skinner relied entirely on a single governmental interest: the protection of the public from immediate threats to physical safety. Portions of Von Raab relied on that interest, but the Court also discussed the circumstances under which the state's need to ensure the integrity of its workforce, or the necessity of preventing the disclosure of confidential information, might justify the testing of public employees. 14 Application of Von Raab to the facts of the present case presents a delicate task. The Von Raab majority made no effort to articulate an analytical rule by which legitimate drug-testing programs could be distinguished from illegitimate ones. It simply weighed individual privacy interests against the government's policy objectives, enumerating several factors that it deemed relevant in performing this balancing process. The Court did not, however, indicate whether it deemed the case a close one, in the sense that minor variations in the facts would have tipped the balance in the other direction. 5 Nor did it indicate which (if any) of the relevant factors would be essential to a constitutional testing plan. 15 In their supplemental brief, appellees draw our attention to two basic distinctions between the plan at issue here and the testing program upheld in Von Raab. One distinction involves the differing working environments of DOJ and Customs Service employees. The Court in Von Raab noted that [d]etecting drug impairment on the part of employees can be a difficult task, especially where, as here, it is not feasible to subject employees and their work-product to the kind of day-to-day scrutiny that is the norm in more traditional office environments. 109 S.Ct. at 1395. DOJ employees, by contrast, work in traditional office environments, in which drug use is, presumably, more easily detected by means other than urine testing. Though this is surely one element to be weighed in the balance, the Von Raab Court gave no indication that it deemed this factor to be one of overriding significance. 16 Appellees also point out that the OBD Plan challenged here involves random testing; the Customs Service required testing only for employees seeking transfer or promotion to a covered position. While the Customs plan mandated testing on a single occasion, a DOJ employee could, at least in theory, be subjected to repeated testing over the course of his career. More importantly, under the Customs program an individual's obligation to undergo testing can be triggered only by her own decision to alter her status within the Service. A DOJ worker in a sensitive position, by contrast, may decline to be tested only if she is willing to relinquish a job she already holds. 6 17 The invasion of privacy occasioned by the OBD Plan might therefore be regarded as different in kind from the intrusion at issue in Von Raab. And a coherent theory might be constructed which would make this a fundamental distinction. In our view, however, the Supreme Court has not encouraged the construction of such a theory. The Court in Von Raab did point out that [o]nly employees who have been tentatively accepted for promotion or transfer to one of the three categories of covered positions are tested, and applicants know at the outset that a drug test is a requirement of those positions. 109 S.Ct. at 1394 n. 2. The Court's discussion of this point, however, was confined to a footnote; even within this footnote, moreover, it was identified only as one of several factors which, taken together, would significantly minimize the intrusiveness of the Service's drug screening program. Id. Certainly the random nature of the OBD testing plan is a relevant consideration; and, in a particularly close case, it is possible that this factor would tip the scales. We do not believe, however, that this aspect of the program requires us to undertake a fundamentally different analysis from that pursued by the Supreme Court in Von Raab.