Opinion ID: 110130
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: the commissioner's appeal

Text: Where a statute is defective because of underinclusion, Mr. Justice Harlan noted, there exist two remedial alternatives: a court may either declare [the statute] a nullity and order that its benefits not extend to the class that the legislature intended to benefit, or it may extend the coverage of the statute to include those who are aggrieved by the exclusion. Welsh v. United States, 398 U. S. 333, 361 (1970) (concurring in result). In previous cases involving equal protection challenges to underinclusive federal benefits statutes, this Court has suggested that extension, rather than nullification, is the proper course. See, e.g., Jimenez v. Weinberger, 417 U. S. 628, 637-638 (1974); Frontiero v. Richardson, 411 U. S., at 691 and n. 25 (plurality opinion). Indeed, this Court regularly has affirmed District Court judgments ordering that welfare benefits be paid to members of an unconstitutionally excluded class. E. g., Califano v. Goldfarb, 430 U. S. 199 (1977), aff'g 396 F. Supp. 308, 309 (EDNY 1975); Califano v. Silbowitz, 430 U. S. 924 (1977), summarily aff'g 397 F. Supp. 862, 871 (SD Fla. 1975); Jablon v. Califano, 430 U. S. 924 (1977), summarily aff'g 399 F. Supp. 118, 132-133 (Md. 1975); Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld, 420 U. S. 636 (1975), aff'g 367 F. Supp. 981, 991 (NJ 1973); United States Dept. of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U. S. 528 (1973), aff'g 345 F. Supp. 310, 315-316 (DC 1972); Richardson v. Griffin, 409 U. S. 1069 (1972), summarily aff'g 346 F. Supp. 1226, 1237 (Md.). The District Court ordered extension rather than invalidation by way of remedy here, and equitable considerations surely support its choice. Approximately 300,000 needy children currently receive AFDC-UF benefits, see 42 Soc. Sec. Bull. 78 (Jan. 1979), and an injunction suspending the program's operation would impose hardship on beneficiaries whom Congress plainly meant to protect. The presence in the Social Security Act of a strong severability clause, 42 U. S. C. § 1303, [8] likewise counsels against nullification, for it evidences a congressional intent to minimize the burdens imposed by a declaration of unconstitutionality upon innocent recipients of government largesse. There is no need, however, to elaborate here the conditions under which invalidation rather than extension of an under-inclusive federal benefits statute should be ordered, for no party has presented that issue for review. All parties before the District Court agreed that extension was the appropriate remedy. Juris. Statement in No. 78-689, p. 6; Motion to Affirm 5; Juris. Statement in No. 78-437, p. 6 n. 5. Appellees support that remedy here, and the Secretary, while arguing in favor of § 407's constitutionality, urges that, if the statute is invalidated, the District Court's remedy should be affirmed. Brief for Federal Appellee in No. 78-689, pp. 5-10. The Commissioner likewise argues that extension, rather than nullification, is proper, Tr. of Oral Arg. 18; indeed, the Commissioner did not appeal from the District Court's April 20 extension order, but only from its August 9 refusal to limit extension along principal wage-earner lines. App. to Juris. Statement in No. 78-689, p. 15a. Since no party has presented the issue of extension versus nullification for review, we would be inclined to consider it only if the power to order extension were clearly beyond the constitutional competence of a federal district court. This Court's previous decisions, however, which routinely have affirmed District Court judgments ordering extension of federal welfare programs, suggest strongly that no such remedial incapacity exists.
The narrower question presented by the Commissioner's appeal concerns not the merits of extension versus nullification, but rather the form that extension should take. The District Court ordered that benefits be paid to families in which either the mother or the father is unemployed within the meaning of the Act. The Commissioner agrees that either the mother's or the father's unemployment should be able to qualify a needy family for benefits, but proposes to award them only if the parent in question can show that he or she is both unemployed and the family's principal wage-earner. Citing the legislative history of the AFDC-UF program, the Commissioner argues that his proposed remedy comports with Congress' intent to aid families made needy by their breadwinner's unemployment. This argument, as the preceding portions of this opinion show, is not without force. We may assume arguendo that, if Congress knew in 1968 what it knows now, it might well have adopted the principal wage-earner model suggested by the Commissioner. But this does not mean that the AFDC-UF program should be restructured along these lines by a federal court. First, the Commissioner's proposed remedy would have the effect of terminating benefits to many families currently receiving them. Under the Act and implementing regulations, benefits are paid to needy families of all unemployed fathers, whether or not the father is actually the principal wage-earner. See 42 U. S. C. § 607 (a); 45 CFR § 233.100 (a) (1) (1978). No one contends that the Act and regulations, insofar as they provide benefits to families of all unemployed fathers, are invalid. Absent some such showing of invalidity, we would hesitate to terminate needy families' entitlement to statutory benefits merely because the unemployed father cannot prove breadwinner status. Second, the Commissioner's proposed remedy would involve a restructuring of the Act that a court should not undertake lightly. Whenever a court extends a benefits program to redress unconstitutional underinclusiveness, it risks infringing legislative prerogatives. The extension ordered by the District Court possesses at least the virtue of simplicity: by ordering that father be replaced by its gender-neutral equivalent, the court avoided disruption of the AFDC-UF program, for benefits simply will be paid to families with an unemployed parent on the same terms that benefits have long been paid to families with an unemployed father. The principal wage-earner solution, by contrast, would introduce a term novel in the AFDC scheme, [9] and would pose definitional and policy questions best suited to legislative or administrative elaboration. The Commissioner, with his principal wage-earner gloss on parental unemployment, in essence asks this Court to redefine unemployment within the meaning of the Act. Yet Congress in § 407 (a) expressly delegated to the Secretary the power to prescribe standards for determining what constitutes `unemployment' for purposes of AFDC-UF eligibility. In a situation of this kind, Congress entrusts to the Secretary, rather than to the courts, the primary responsibility for interpreting the statutory term. Batterton v. Francis, 432 U. S., at 425 (emphasis in original). The remedy the Commissioner proposes, of course, undeniably would be cheaper than the remedy the District Court decreed, in part because it would terminate some current recipients' eligibility. Although cost may prove a dispositive factor in other contexts, we do not regard it as controlling here. The United States, which will bear the main burden of added coverage through federal matching grants, urges that the District Court's remedy be affirmed. The AFDC-UF program, furthermore, is optional with the States, id., at 431, and any State is free to drop out of it if dissatisfied with the added expense. This Court, in any event, is ill-equipped both to estimate the relative costs of various types of coverage, and to gauge the effect that different levels of expenditures would have upon the alleviation of human suffering. Under these circumstances, any fine-tuning of AFDC coverage along principal wage-earner lines is properly left to the democratic branches of the Government. In sum, we believe the District Court, in an effort to render the AFDC-UF program gender neutral, adopted the simplest and most equitable extension possible. The judgment of the District Court accordingly is affirmed. It is so ordered.