Court Opinion

ID: 9702527
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-25 23:15:19.513978+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:20:12.999207
License: Public Domain

MADDEN, Judge
(concurring).
In my opinion, the case should be decided upon the ground that, whether or not the express provision of Article 19 was applicable, the Government, like any other contractor, impliedly agrees that it will not by its acts increase the cost of performance of the contract by the other party. We need not consider the effect of acts of the Government in its sovereign capacity, such as increasing taxes, or setting wages or hours by laws of general application. Here the act complained of was the setting of wages on one specific job, which was the superstructure to be built on the foundation which the plaintiff had contracted to build.
*782The Government breached this term which we read into the contract because it is fair and the parties to the contract must have intended it. Yet the Government urges that Article 15 of the contract gave the Contracting Officer the power to read this term out of the contract, by deciding that the plaintiff was not entitled to a remedy for its breach. I think there are two objections to this argument.
(1) There is no indication that the Contracting Officer ever made a decision or gave any consideration to such a term of the contract, or was aware that it contained any such term. This fact points to one of the difficulties that would be created by lodging in a contracting officer, nearly always a layman, the power to decide a question which cannot be decided without an understanding of the way in which the law has traditionally interpreted the texts of writings which appear in litigation. The consequence would be an interpretation which would stick in the letter of the contract, and fail to reach its real meaning and equity. 1 think, therefore, that the Contracting Officer never decided the question which we are called upon to decide.
(2) I think that the parties never intended that the Contracting Officer should have the power to decide the question which we have before us, i. e., the question of whether or not the Government breached its contract. In spite of the broad language of Article 15 of the contract, it must be that there are limits to its scope. In fact, the evidence in cases before us shows frequent examples of situations in which the Contracting Officer has disclaimed any power to decide that the contractor is entitled to compensation for unreasonable delay caused by acts of the Government. He knows that his decision would be substantially meaningless, since he could not award compensation, except by the expedient of covering it into some change or adjustment which he is authorized to make as the contracting agent for the Government. So he advises the contractor to seek relief from the Comptroller General first and, if he does not get it there, from this court. The Comptroller General, whose powers are somewhat undefined and whose expenditures are, so far as the Government is concerned, practically unreviewable, sometimes gives relief. If he does not, the contractor may come to this court, and the Government may not urge that his case is concluded by a decision made somewhere else, since the Contracting Officer made no decision at all, and the Comptroller General’s decision does not, either by the contract or by law, foreclose resort to this court.
Since the Contracting Officer cannot make a decision, effective against the Government, that the Government has breached its contract, and since, if he did so, we would not be bound by it, he frequently does not decide the question at all if his decision would be against the Government. This means that, in practice, the contractor, if he meant, by agreeing to Article 15, to lodge in the Contracting Officer the power to decide questions of breach of contract, has given that official power to decide cases against him, but no power to decide cases, effectively, in his favor. No contractor in his right mind would ever intend to do that. And no Government official, in drawing a contract, would intend to include in it such an unconscionable provision. And if both of them did, with their eyes open, intend any such agreement, we would feel bound to conclude that the law permitting Government agents to make contracts, and the statutes giving to a victim of the Government’s breach of contract the right to sue in this court, do not authorize an agent of the Government to defeat that right by making such an unconscionable bargain about it. I therefore agree with the court that Article 35 was not intended to give to the Contracting Officer the power of decision which the Government claims for him, and that we are not foreclosed from deciding the case.
I recognize that, under Article 15 and other provisions of the standard Government contract, many matters of vital consequence to the contractor may be decided by the Contracting Officer without effective review by this court. The consequences are sometimes, in our opinion, harsh and unjust to the contractor. And the line between what the Supreme Court and this.' court have sanctioned in those cases, and what we refuse to sanction here may not always be easy to draw. But what the Government here urges, the power in the Contracting Officer to decide the ultimate question of whether his principal has breached its contract, should not be tolerated.