Opinion ID: 109242
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Regional Board Reports

Text: It is undisputed that the Regional Boards had no legal authority to decide whether a contractor had received excessive profits in Class A cases. [22] In such cases, the Regional Boards could investigate and recommend, but only the Board could decide. 32 CFR §§ 1472.3-1472.4. The reports were prepared long before the Board reached its decision. The Board used the Regional Board Report as a basis for discussion and, even when it agreed with the Regional Board's conclusion, it often did so as a result of an analysis of the flexible statutory factors completely different from that contained in the Regional Board Report. Chairman Hartwig testified: [W]hen the recommendation clearance of the Regional Board comes up on the Board agenda, the Board simply approves or disapproves the clearance. It does not adopt any of the memoranda that are before it. It does not ratify or adopt any of these staff memoranda. It simply, in the exercise of its judgment, says it is a clearance or it isn't clearance. And there is no Board-adopted document which you could call an opinion. App. 79. The Regional Board Reports are thus precisely the kind of predecisional deliberative advice and recommendations contemplated by Exemption 5 which must remain uninhibited and thus undisclosed, in order to supply maximum assistance to the Board in reaching its decision. Moreover, absent indication that its reasoning has been adopted, there is little public interest in disclosure of a report. The public is only marginally concerned with reasons supporting a [decision] which an agency has rejected, or with reasons which might have supplied, but did not supply, the basis for a [decision] which was actually adopted on a different ground. NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co ., ante, at 152. Indeed, release of the Regional Board's reports on the theory that they express the reasons for the Board's decision would, in those cases in which the Board had other reasons for its decision, be affirmatively misleading. Sterling Drug, Inc. v. FTC, 146 U. S. App. D. C. 237, 246-247, 450 F. 2d 698, 707-708 (1971); International Paper Co. v. FPC, 438 F. 2d 1349, 1358 (CA2), cert. denied, 404 U. S. 827 (1971). Accordingly, these reports are not final opinions, they do fall within the protection of Exemption 5, and they are not subject to compulsory disclosure pursuant to the Act. The Court of Appeals' attempt to impute decisional authority to Regional Boards by analogizing their final recommendations to the final decisions of United States district courts must fail. The decision of a United States district court, like the decision of the General Counsel of the NLRB discussed in NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co ., ante, at 158-159, n. 25, has real operative effect independent of review by a court of appeals: absent appeal by one of the parties, the decision has the force of law; and, even if an appeal is filed, the court of appeals will be bound, within limits, by certain of the district court's conclusions. [23] The recommendation of a Regional Board, by contrast, has no operative effect independent of the review: consideration of the case by the Board is not dependent on the decision by a party to appealsuch consideration is an inevitable event without which there is no agency decision; and the recommendation of the Regional Board carries no legal weight whatever before the Boardreview by the latter is, as the Court of Appeals conceded, de novo. Indeed, review is an entirely inappropriate word to describe the process by which the Board decides whether to issue a clearance following a recommendation to that effect by the Regional Board. The latter's recommendation is functionally indistinguishable from the recommendation of any agency staff member whose judgment has earned the respect of a decisionmaker. There is simply no sense in which Regional Boards have the power to make final dispositions and thus no sense in which the explanations of their recommendations can be characterized as final opinions. [24] See NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co ., ante, at 158-159. In concluding that the Regional Board Reports are within the scope of Exemption 5, it is unnecessary to decide whether, as respondent strenuously argues and the Court of Appeals concluded, the Regional Boards are themselves agencies for the purposes of the Act. Respondent and the court below proceed on the premise that the final written product of an agency's deliberations may never fall within Exemption 5, and reason that since the Regional Board Report is the final product of the Regional Board, it must therefore be disclosable if the Regional Board is a separate agency. [25] The premise is faulty, however, overlooking as it does the fact that Exemption 5 does not distinguish between inter -agency and intra -agency memoranda. By including inter -agency memoranda in Exemption 5, Congress plainly intended to permit one agency possessing decisional authority to obtain written recommendations and advice from a separate agency not possessing such decisional authority without requiring that the advice be any more disclosable than similar advice received from within the agency. Thus, if the Regional Boards are agencies for Class A purposes, their final recommendations are inter -agency memoranda; and, if they are not agencies separate from the Board, their recommendations are intra -agency memoranda. In either event, the Regional Board's total lack of decisional authority brings their reports within Exemption 5 and prevents them from being final opinions.