Opinion ID: 1446255
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Secretary's Interpretations of the Text

Text: There are essentially two other interpretations of § 7907(a) advanced in this case, both of which would require the States to fully fund in compliance with NCLB regardless of federal funding. The first, which the district court adopted, is that this section merely prevents officers and employees of the federal government from imposing additional, unauthorized requirements on the participating States. The second is that this section simply emphasizes that State participation in NCLB is entirely voluntary, but that once a State chooses to participate, it must fully comply with NCLB requirements regardless of federal funding. As discussed below, neither of these interpretations is evident.
The view that § 7907(a) simply restricts federal officials from imposing additional requirementsthat is, those not authorized by the Acton participating States arises from the first part of § 7907(a), which discusses an officer or employee of the Federal Government. This reading, as shown in italics below, interprets the Act to preclude any such officer or employee from mandating that a State incur costs not paid for under (that is, not authorized by) the Act: General prohibition. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school's curriculum, program of instruction, or allocation of State or local resources, or mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act. 20 U.S.C. § 7907(a) (emphasis added). The district court accepted this interpretation when dismissing Plaintiffs' suit for failure to state a claim. Pontiac, 2005 WL 3149545, at , 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29253, at . As the district court explained, Defendant argues convincingly that this sentence simply means no federal `officer or employee' can require states or school districts to `spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act.' Id. 2005 WL 3149545, at , 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29253, at . The court further explained that, [b]y including the words `an officer or employee of,' Congress clearly meant to prohibit federal officers and employees from imposing additional, unfunded requirements, beyond those provided for in the statute. Id. 2005 WL 3149545, at , 2005 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 29253, at . In sum, the court concluded that § 7907 merely prevents rogue officers from imposing requirements not authorized by the Act. There are two problems with this interpretation. First, even if the Government presented a convincing argument that Congress intended this meaning, the requirements of the Spending Clause still would not have been met as this reading certainly falls short of being so evident that a State would clearly understand it to be the interpretation Congress intended. Second, it is not evident that the officer or employee language modifies the final clause discussing States incurring costs under the Act. In other words, the officer or employee language is reasonably read to modify only the middle clause regarding state and local control over curriculum, as follows: Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school's curriculum, program of instruction, or allocation of State or local resources. . . . This reading leaves the final clause to be modified simply by the opening clause, as follows: Nothing in this Act shall be construed to . . . mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act. In this way, the Act simply prevents federal officers from controlling school curriculum and allocation of local funds, but says nothing about these officers mandating States to spend funds or incur costs for unauthorized obligations. Third, even assuming that the officer or employee language modifies the final clause, more fundamental problems emerge. For one, the Secretary's view that this section is intended to prevent federal officers from imposing unauthorized requirements on States would have us substitute words that are not in the statutory text (Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to . . . mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not [ authorized under this Act ]) for words that are in the text (. . . or incur any costs not paid for under this Act ). Stating that a federal officer cannot require a State to incur any costs not paid for under the Act is, to say the least, an unusual way of prohibiting an officer from forcing a State to incur costs for something that is not authorized under the Act. Were Congress truly concerned about this sort of ultra vires conduct by federal officers and employees, it could have said so expressly. Moreover, nothing in the legislative history (discussed in more detail below) suggests that this was Congress's concern. Yet even if this were what Congress meant, we would be left with the following tautology: This Act does not authorize federal officers or employees to require that States incur costs for anything that the Act does not authorize. We doubt that Congress intended this empty meaning. For these reasons, we find this rogue-officer interpretation unconvincing. In any event, the interpretation is not so evident that a State would clearly understand it to be the interpretation Congress intended, and thus the interpretation cannot save the Act from violating the Spending Clause.
The Secretary also contends that the reference in the final clause of § 7907(a) to a State's costs under the Act simply emphasizes that a State's decision to accept federal funding under NCLB in exchange for complying with requirements under the Act is entirely voluntary. The Secretary notes that this section provides limits on what the Act (or, if one accepts the reading discussed above, on what federal officers and employees) can mandate the States to do: General prohibition. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school's curriculum, program of instruction, or allocation of State or local resources, or mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act. 20 U.S.C. § 7907(a) (emphasis added). The Secretary explains, as Congress fully understood, a statute [such as NCLB] that imposes conditions on a receipt of federal funds is not a `mandate.' (Secretary's Br. 22.) The Secretary here contends that nothing in the Act is a mandate, but that this section simply ensured that States would not be subject to mandates that formed no part of the conditions set out in the statute. ( Id. ) The Secretary additionally notes that the Unfunded Mandates Act (UMA), 2 U.S.C. § 658(5)(A)(i)(I), defines federal intergovernmental mandate to exclude voluntary participation with federal programs. ( Id. ) But Plaintiffs' contention is not that NCLB as a whole is an unfunded mandate forced upon the States; they appear willing to concede that it is a voluntary program, and their argument focuses on § 7907(a), not the UMA. [4] Plaintiffs argue that, now that they are participating in NCLB, the Secretary is imposing (that is, mandating) liabilities that they simply did not bargain forand that were expressly excused by § 7907(a)when they signed on to NCLB. This view is reasonable, and there are at least three additional reasons why the Act does not provide clear notice that § 7907(a) speaks merely to the voluntariness of the program as opposed to relieving the States of their obligation to comply with unfunded requirements. First, based on the plain language of § 7907(a), it is not apparent that this section speaks to the question of voluntary participation in NCLB as opposed to States' obligationssuch as complying with requirements where federal funding falls short after the States have agreed to participate (whether voluntarily or by coercion or otherwise). It would be one thing if the Act stated that nothing in it shall be construed to mandate a State to comply with the Act or that nothing in the Act shall be construed to mandate a State to incur any costs under this Act language like that would indicate that States can simply choose not to comply with the Act altogether. Instead, however, the text provides that nothing in the Act shall be construed to mandate a State to incur any costs not paid for under this Act language that a State could reasonably interpret to relate to its obligations after it has agreed to comply with the Act. Indeed, Vermont is one such State. It passed a law, based on this text, providing that neither the State nor its subdivisions will be required to incur any costs not paid for under the Act in order to comply with the provisions of the Act.  16 V.S.A. § 165 (emphasis added). In short, it is not apparent that § 7907(a) relates merely to the States' freedom to choose whether to opt into the Act in the first place. Second, the use of the exact language of § 7907(a) in the Perkins Vocational Education Act, 20 U.S.C. §§ 2301-2471 (1988), shows that the language is not about voluntary compliance; it is about a State's funding obligations under NCLB. Under the Perkins Act, federal grants are issued to assist the States to expand, improve, modernize, and develop quality vocational education programs in order to meet the needs of the Nation's existing and future work force for marketable skills and to improve productivity and promote economic growth. Pennsylvania v. Riley, 84 F.3d 125, 127 (3rd Cir.1996) (citing 20 U.S.C. § 2301(1)). Section 2306a of the Perkins Act, entitled Prohibitions, replicates NCLB's § 7907(a), but adds a final clause: (a) Local control. Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize an officer or employee of the Federal Government to mandate, direct, or control a State, local educational agency, or school's curriculum, program of instruction, or allocation of State or local resources, or mandate a State or any subdivision thereof to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under this Act, except as required under sections 112(b), 311(b), and 323. 20 U.S.C. § 2306a(a) (emphasis added). The sections of the Perkins Act referred to in this final clause require agencies in States participating in the Act to spend non-federal funds. See, e.g., 20 U.S.C. § 2413(a) (Perkins Act § 323) (Except as provided in subsection (b), for each fiscal year for which an eligible agency receives assistance under this Act, the eligible agency shall provide, from non-Federal sources for the costs the eligible agency incurs for the administration of programs under this Act, an amount that is not less than the amount provided by the eligible agency from non-Federal sources for such costs for the preceding fiscal year.) (emphasis added). Thus, the preceding language in § 2306a(a), which mirrors NCLB § 7907(a), explains that participating States need not spend their own funds to comply with the Perkins Act; the final clauseabsent in NCLBprovides the explicit exceptions describing when participating States do have to expend their own funds. The common language in these Acts therefore does not simply reiterate that States may or may not participate in the federal program. The dissent is correct in noting that there are differences between the Perkins Act and NCLB. However, the differences in the overall structure of the statutes do not negate the informative role that the identical 62-word provision found in both of the statutes can provide. In the Perkins Act, the 62-word provision is followed by exceptions to the provision. In NCLB, the 62-word provision is followed by no exceptions. The difference between the Perkins Act and NCLB in this regard shows that Congress is capable of explicitly stating when States must provide funding under these Acts. Cf. Pennhurst, 451 U.S. at 17-18, 101 S.Ct. 1531 ([I]n those instances where Congress has intended the States to fund certain entitlements as a condition of receiving federal funds, it has proved capable of saying so explicitly.). The dissent's conclusion that these identical 62-word statutory phrases in the Perkins Act and NCLB have fundamentally different meanings because the Acts have different relationship[s] between requirements and funding, Dissenting Op. at 279, would be anything but clear to a reasonable state official. Third, comparison of the use of the word mandate in § 7907(a) with the provisions of the UMA shed little light here, as (1) NCLB makes no reference to the UMA's definition of mandate, which excludes voluntary participation in federal programs, and (2) the label `mandate' is often applied to obligations that states assume voluntarily in order to qualify for federal funds. Patricia T. Northrop, Note, The Constitutional Insignificance of Funding for Federal Mandates, 46 Duke L.J. 903, 903 n. 2 (1997). Indeed, another section of the UMA itself defines mandate to include a duty arising from voluntary participation in federal programs. 2 U.S.C. § 1555 (defining the phrase for purposes of a commission that would review federal mandates); see also Makram B. Jaber, Comment, Unfunded Federal Mandates: An Issue of Federalism or a Brilliant Sound Bite ?, 45 Emory L.J. 281, 288 (1996) (Read liberally, this definition [in Section 1555] considers as an `unfunded federal mandate' any federal statute or regulation that results in any duties imposed on state or local governments, even if the state takes on such duties voluntarily, so long as the resulting costs to these governments are not directly and fully funded by the federal government.). For all of these reasons, we conclude that if NCLB requires States to comply with all NCLB requirements even where States must incur additional costs not paid for through federal funds, there is no clear notice of that obligation. But we pause to emphasize one final point. There is no real dispute that States and school districts participating in NCLB must fulfill the Act's various educational and accountability requirements, such as submitting plans to the Secretary, effectively tracking student achievement, and so forth. In that respect, the States are on clear notice of these obligations. And, as the Secretary points out, that stands in contrast to Pennhurst, where the hortatory bill of rights in the DDA did not create legal obligations on the State, see Dissenting Op. at 282, and to Arlington, where the IDEA's arguable grant of expert fees to prevailing parties was not explicit in the text and therefore created no such obligation on the States. But Plaintiffs here do not contend that their obligation to comply with NCLB's various educational requirements is in any way unclear. See Dissenting Op. at 282. They contend that their obligation to spend additional funds or incur additional costs for that compliance is unclear. As Arlington instructs, we must ask whether the [NCLB] furnishes clear notice regarding the liability at issue in this case.  126 S.Ct. at 2459 (emphasis added). Faced with § 7907(a), which provides in a catchall phrase that [n]othing in this Act shall be construed to require States and localities to spend any funds or incur any costs not paid for under the Act, we conclude that Plaintiffs' liability in this respect is anything but clear. Accordingly, the Secretary's interpretations of § 7907(a) violate the Spending Clause.