Opinion ID: 187173
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The FACA

Text: The Congress enacted the FACA in order to control the establishment of advisory committees to the federal government and to allow the public to monitor their existence, activities, and cost. Animal Legal Defense Fund v. Shalala, 104 F.3d 424, 426 (1997); see FACA § 2. To those ends, the FACA requires the President, the relevant standing committees of the Congress, the relevant agency heads, and the Administrator of General Services to review the activities and finances of each advisory committee, and requires that the membership of each advisory committee be fairly balanced in terms of point of view represented. FACA §§ 5-8; see In re Cheney, 406 F.3d 723, 727 (D.C.Cir. 2005) (en banc); Nat'l Anti-Hunger Coal. v. Exec. Comm. of the President's Private Sector Survey of Cost Control, 711 F.2d 1071, 1073 & n. 1 (D.C.Cir.1983) (reject[ing] the ... contention that the `fairly balanced' requirement ... is not binding on the President). The FACA also imposes upon advisory committees a number of disclosure obligations, three of which the Center claims the Commission violated. Every advisory committee is required, under § 10(c) of the Act, to keep [d]etailed minutes of each meeting, and, under § 11(a), to make available to any person ... copies of transcripts of [its] meetings. In addition, § 10(b) provides the records, reports, transcripts, minutes, appendixes, working papers, drafts, studies, agenda, or other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by each advisory committee shall be available for public inspection. Pursuant to § 3(2) of the FACA, any committee, board, commission, etc., qualifies as an advisory committee if it was (A) established by statute ..., (B) established or utilized by the President, or (C) established or utilized by one or more agencies, in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government. We have on several occasions addressed the meaning of the term utilized in § 3(2) to determine whether a committee was subject to the requirements of the FACA. Although this case concerns the meaning of utilized in the provision of § 4 exempting from the FACA advisory committees utilized by the CIA, prior judicial interpretations of that term as used in § 3 bear upon our analysis of the exemption in § 4.