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

Heading: Division Reports

Text: It is equally clear that a division of the Board has no legal authority to decide. Once again, it may analyze and recommend, but the power to decide remains with the full Board. The evidence is uncontradicted that the Division Reports were prepared before the Board reached its decision, were used by the full Board as a basis for discussion, and, as the Chairman testified, were prepared for and designed to assist the members of the Board in their deliberations; nor is the discussion limited to the material and analysis contained in the Division Report. Following the discussion, any Board member may disagree with the report's conclusion or agree with it for reasons other than those contained in the report. Indeed, as Chairman Hartwig testified, it is likely that this will occur because of the highly judgmental nature of the Board's decisions given the number and generality of the statutory criteria. In any event, the reasoning of the Division Report is never adoptedthough its conclusion may beand no effort is made to reach agreement on anything but the result. It is true that those who participate in the writing of the Division Report are among those who participate in the Board's decision, and that, human nature being what it is, they may not change their minds after discussion by the full Board. This creates a greater likelihood that the Board's decision will be in accordance with the Division Report than is the case with respect to a Regional Board Report and that, where the Board's decision is different, the Division Report will reflect the final views of at least one of the Board's members. See NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co ., ante, at 158-159, n. 25. However, this is not necessarily so. The Board obviously considers its discussion following the creation of the Division Report to be of crucial importance to its decision for, not-withstanding the fact that a division is made up of a majority of the Board, it has been delegated no decisional authority. The member of the Board who wrote the report may change his mind as a result of the discussion or, consistent with the philosophy of Exemption 5, he may have included thoughts in the report with which he was not in agreement at the time he wrote it. The point is that the report is created for the purpose of discussion, and we are unwilling to deprive the Board of a thoroughly uninhibited version of this valuable deliberative tool by making Division Reports public on the unsupported assumption that they always disclose the final views of at least some members of the Board. [26] The effect of this decision is that, in those cases in which Statements and Summaries were not issued, the public will be largely uninformed as to the basis for decisions by the Renegotiation Board. Indeed, the decisions of both courts belowconceding as they both did the absence of decisional authority in either the Regional Boards or divisions of the statutory boardappear to have rested in the final analysis on the notion that the Renegotiation Board has an affirmative obligation under the Act to make public the reasons for its decisions; and that it must disclose its opinion or the nearest thing to an opinion in every case. However, Congress explicitly exempted the Renegotiation Board from all provisions of the Administrative Procedure Act except for the Public Information Section. 50 U. S. C. App. § 1221. Thus the opinion-writing section of the APA, 5 U. S. C. § 557 which itself applies only to adjudication required by statute to be determined on the record after opportunity for an agency hearing and even then only if the agency decision is not subject to de novo court review, 5 U. S. C. § 554is inapplicable to Board decisions. The Freedom of Information Act imposes no independent obligation on agencies to write opinions. It simply requires them to disclose the opinions which they do write. NLRB v. Sears, Roebuck & Co ., ante, p. 132. If the public interest suffers by reason of the failure of the Board to explain some of its decisions, the remedy is for Congress to require it to do so. It is not for us to require disclosure of documents, under the purported authority of the Act, which are not final opinions, which do not accurately set forth the reasons for the Board's decisions, and the disclosure of which would impinge on the Board's predecisional processes. The judgment of the Court of Appeals is Reversed.