Court Opinion

ID: 9439279
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 06:29:27.153347+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:26:16.429673
License: Public Domain

SILBERMAN, Senior Circuit Judge,
concurring:
I concur with all parts of the court’s opinion including the portion dealing with reviewability. But it is an interesting question how one should categorize the agency’s action that we review. It might be thought to be an informal adjudication — a specific application of the regulation — but because it has only a future effect, I think it is accurately described as an interpretive rule. It certainly has more bite than the typical policy statement, many of which are not reviewable at all. See, e.g., Kennecott Utah Copper v. United States Dep’t of Interior, 88 F.3d 1191, 1223 (D.C.Cir.1996). In that regard, I should like to express a view on the question raised by the panel in Appalachian Power Co. v. EPA 208 F.3d 1015, 1021-22 (D.C.Cir.2000). In that case the panel, recognizing our split of authority, suggested that virtually all agency statements of future effect — including policy statements — were rules under the broad definitional language of § 551(4).
“rule” means the whole or a part of an agency statement of general or particular applicability and future effect designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy or describing the organization, procedure, or practice requirements of an agency and includes the approval or prescription for the future of rates, wages, corporate or financial structures or reorganization thereof, prices, facilities, appliances, services or allowances therefor or of valuations, costs, or accounting, or practices bearing on any of the foregoing; ....
The panel said “virtually all,” but in light of its suggested disagreement with Syncor International Corp. v. Shalala, 127 F.3d 90, 94 (D.C.Cir.1997), which described a typical policy statement as only an indica*313tion of an agency’s enforcement policy, I cannot imagine what the panel meant to exclude-or given its reasoning what could be excluded.
The panel criticized Syncor and our pri- or opinions on which Syncor relied for not considering explicitly the APA definition, but no less an administrative law authority than Justice Scalia once wrote:
Since every statement is of either general or particular applicability, and since everything an agency does is “designed to implement, interpret, or prescribe law or policy, etc.” the only limiting (that is to say, defining) part of the definition is “agency statement of ... future effect.” This is of course absurd. ... [Therefore] it is generally acknowledged that the only responsible judicial attitude toward this central APA definition is one of benign disregard.
Scalia, Vermont Yankee: The APA, the D.C. Circuit, and the Supreme Court, 1978 Sup.Ct. Rev. 345, 383.
I agree with then-Professor Scalia that the panel’s interpretation is not a reasonable reading (“absurd” might be too strong). Not every utterance, not every speech (with only future effect) legitimately can be described as a rule. Perhaps the key to the definition is the word “prescribed,” which in RANDOM House College DiCtionaey, means “to lay down a rule” (emphasis added), and in the 1941 Webster’s New International DictionaRY meant “to lay down authoritatively as a guide” (emphasis added). In other words, Congress surely meant that an agency statement that serves the purpose of a rule is a rule. If it walks like a rule, and quacks like a rule — ie., is laid down — it is a rule. But any agency statement which does not seek to authoritatively answer an underlying policy or legal issue does not fit that criteria. In this case, the agency authoritatively proclaims which substances qualify as known carcinogens, which is why I think it is properly described as an interpretive rule.