Court Opinion

ID: 9477656
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:28:14.057147+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:58.968680
License: Public Domain

WALD, Chief Judge,
dissenting:
I respectfully disagree with my colleagues that there is no “law to apply” in this case. Although the regulation in question can be literally read to permit NHTSA to take account of nonsafety factors in deciding whether to grant a petition to investigate a possible safety defect, it specifically requires that the decision be made “at the conclusion of the technical review” of safety and remedy feasibility data compiled by the agency, and it sets out a definite standard that the petition must be granted if there is a “reasonable possibility that the order requested in the petition will be granted.” 49 C.F.R. § 552.8.
A review of the agency’s past published decisions under this regulation demonstrates that in fact it has always relied on safety and remedy factors, not on the resource factors that Heckler v, Chaney, 470 U.S. 821, 105 S.Ct. 1649, 84 L.Ed.2d 714 (1985) thought unsuitable for judicial review. In this particular case, the Administrator’s published reasons for denying the CAS petition at no point rely on agency resources or priorities. The Administra*1536tor’s letter and the affidavit of the Associate Administrator for Enforcement who prepared the “technical review” make it crystal clear that it was the lack of any “new engineering evidence” that motivated the denial. The Associate Administrator stressed exclusively the “exhaustive data analysis” conducted by NHTSA engineers on the accident and injury information available.
Because there is no evidence that resource factors played any part in NHTSA’s denial of CAS's petition, I disagree that Chaney bars review. I fear that we have taken Chaney’s mandate too far in applying it to a decision made explicitly on safety and remedy grounds after a “technical review” of safety and engineering data in the context of a statute which specifically authorized citizen petitions to open investigations and which mandated public responses to those petitions. 15 U.S.C. § 1410a(d) See generally Davis, No Law to Apply, 25 San Diego L.Rev. 1 (1988). We should take the agency at its word that only a safety and technological remedy assessment was involved here. The record of that assessment along with the regulation’s “reasonable possibility” standard provides plenty of law for us to apply on review.