Opinion ID: 483803
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Tenure and Grievance Provisions in the Act

Text: 18 The central question is whether the Act unequivocally requires that all tenure recommendations be made by a tenure board, or whether in certain circumstances the grievance board may recommend the award of tenure as a necessary remedy to make whole a nontenured employee who has been critically impaired by a superior during her apprenticeship period. Section 3946, entitled [c]areer appointments, requires a tenure candidate first to serve a limited appointment. After this trial period, the Secretary shall decide whether a candidate should receive a career appointment. 5 Such decisions by the Secretary shall be based upon the recommendation of tenure boards, which are composed entirely or primarily of career members of the service. 19 Defendant USIA's main argument is that Sec. 3946 plainly requires all career appointments to be made upon the recommendation of professionally-composed tenure boards, and that the grievance board, made up of non-service individuals, has no implicit power to recommend tenure for whatever reason. A first reading of Sec. 3946 reveals this argument to be a powerful one. Section 3946 contains three commands: An individual must serve a limited appointment before receiving a career appointment; the Secretary must decide whether or not to offer a career appointment himself or recommend that the President offer one; and such decisions must be based upon the recommendation of a board composed of career service members. The second command is of central importance here; the USIA maintains that by requiring the Secretary to decide whether a candidate should receive a career appointment, Sec. 3946 specifically delegates decisionmaking power regarding career appointments to the Secretary (after recommendation from a tenure board) and to no one else. 20 Daniels' response is grounded in other sections of the Act that grant the grievance board ample authority to remedy foreign service officers' injuries at the hands of their superiors. But in order to gain any mileage from those other provisions, Daniels must first explain why Sec. 3946 is not in itself dispositive. She argues that because Sec. 3946 does not explicitly say that only the Secretary can decide whether or not to offer or recommend a career appointment, it leaves open the possibility that another decisionmaker pursuant to powers granted elsewhere in the statute is authorized under certain circumstances to make the tenure decision. In short, Daniels maintains that the absence of a specific bar to another decisionmaker making career appointments is evidence of congressional intent to open an alternative avenue for gaining tenure, so long as that power can reasonably be inferred from a more general grant of authority to a different decisionmaker. 21
22 In support of her argument that a tenure board is not the exclusive route to a career appointment, Daniels points to the discussions of Sec. 3946 contained in the relevant House Reports. The House Committee on Foreign Affairs concluded its analysis of Sec. 3946 by stating that [t]ogether with the safeguards of the grievance procedures established in chapter 11, this procedure [of tenure board recommendation to the Secretary] helps to insure that individuals will not be tenured or fired on the whim of a single individual. H.R.Rep. No. 992, Part 1, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. 32 (1980). Similarly, the House Committee on Post Office and Civil Service wound up its exegesis of Sec. 3946 by commenting that [t]ogether with the safeguards of the grievance procedures established in Chapter 11, this procedure helps to ensure that appointment decisions will not be arbitrary. H.R.Rep. No. 992, Part 2, 96th Cong., 2d Sess. 53 (1980). 23 Daniels argues that the language in these Reports indicates a congressional intention that tenure decisions be made either by the Secretary upon recommendation of a tenure board or by the grievance board. The seminal sentence upon which Daniels relies from the Foreign Affairs Committee Report occurs at the end of a paragraph extolling peer review of career candidates. That sentence seems to us to focus on the value of having a group of people, rather than a single person, make key personnel decisions. That is, the sentence emphasizes that the tenure board process ensures that someone will not be tenured on the whim of a single individual, while the grievance board process ensures that someone will not be fired on the whim of a single individual. 24 The Post Office and Civil Service Committee Report is worded somewhat differently, and refers to appointment decisions rather than individuals being tenured or fired. Although Daniels does not make this precise point, it could be argued that appointment decisions refers only to tenuring and not to firing, and therefore that the Post Office and Civil Service Committee contemplated tenure board and grievance board involvement in the tenuring process. Nonetheless, we do not read this difference in wording as indicative of a relevantly distinct meaning. A comparison of the entire section-by-section analysis of the bill in the two Reports reveals a striking similarity in diction; the Reports appear to be the product of the same authors, or one may have been the basic source for the other. Thus, we have difficulty reading the phrase appointment decisions will not be arbitrary as expressive of an intent markedly different from the phrase individuals will not be tenured or fired on the whim of a single individual. In both cases it is the provision for group review, rather than single-individual decisionmaking power, that provides the assurance against arbitrary decisions. In that sense, both tenuring and firing decisions are subsumed within the phrase appointment decisions. 25 In any case, we would be reluctant to grant too much weight to a single line from one Committee Report. Construing the reference to appointment decisions in the Post Office and Civil Service Committee Report as referring solely to tenuring (not to firing) still leaves open the possibility that the grievance board's role was to be limited to ensuring that the grounds of tenure board recommendations are appropriate, and not to recommending tenure itself. See part II.B.2., infra. Finally, there is no mention of tenure as a grievance board remedy in Sec. 4137, suggesting that Congress never translated any amorphous thoughts some of its members might have had about grievance board power to recommend tenure into specific statutory authority to do so. 6
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.