Opinion ID: 483803
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Career Appointments Provision: Committee Reports

Text: 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