Opinion ID: 425934
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Process or Result

Text: 70 The majority argues that those cases forbidding courts to intrude upon an agency's discretion speak only to situations where the court would make the agency's final decision on the merits of the question before it. 24 This claim has two flaws. First, it is not supported by the case law. The prior cases limiting a court's power to intrude upon an agency's discretion dealt with issues as far removed from final determination on the merits as the order in which applications should be considered by the agency, 25 and the agency's method of gathering evidence. 26 71 More subtly, the argument overstates the distinction between merits and procedural determinations. Where, as here, the process oriented decree requires the creation of new programs the court's decree always will affect substantive agency actions. The consent decree commits the EPA Administrator to certain choices--choices as to priorities, choices as to methods, choices as to allocation of resources. Such choices are not free. By choosing to follow the course of action outlined in the consent decree, the EPA necessarily has incurred certain costs. Some of those costs relate to the balancing of conflicting goals--here, the EPA is committed to a certain level of environmental protection, even though that level of protection might ultimately generate uneconomic costs for the public. Still other costs relate to the EPA's allocation of its own resources. By committing some of its all-too-scarce resources to the programs mandated by the consent decree, the EPA necessarily foregoes developing or enforcing other priorities. 72 The court, by confining the Administrator's discretion, thus involves itself--subtly but nonetheless inevitably--in issues of agency policy. The EPA, in its unsuccessful bid to be released from the strictures of the decree, made much the same argument to an unsympathetic district court: Extra obligations not required by statute necessarily infringe on EPA's ability to allocate its limited resources in the way it finds best. 27 As the Supreme Court's experience with the outcome determinative test in the context of applying Erie Railroad Co. v. Tompkins 28 goes to show, the line between those acts that decide the merits and those that do not is one the existence of which can be postulated, but not proved.