Court Opinion

ID: 9439134
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-03 06:23:10.40664+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:26:11.175705
License: Public Domain

STEPHEN F. WILLIAMS, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
I agree with the majority that we have jurisdiction, albeit on a different theory. On the merits, however, though the case is close, I would reverse.
Jurisdiction rests, I think, entirely on EPA’s policy of using contractors to do peer reviews of risk assessments under arrangements like those involved in the Benzene Update that triggered this suit. Because Byrd is a regular participant in risk assessment panels, the threat of future injury from the policy is likely and imminent enough to justify standing. Jurisdiction based on the policy rather than the benzene episode suffers no mootness problem: EPA never claimed it would back away from the alleged policy; indeed, counsel at oral argument more or less admitted that the procedures used for benzene represented EPA’s ongoing policy.
Unlike the future informational injuries that will flow from EPA’s refusal to apply FACA to its contractors’ consultative process, Byrd’s injury from EPA’s applying that view to the Benzene Update appears irredressable. His claim to the documents, of course, is mooted by EPA’s FOIA officer’s releasing them to him. And I do not see how a mere declaration that he should have had them at the time of the meeting constitutes redress for that loss. The majority suggests that a declaration would help Byrd attack this committee’s findings on benzene if EPA wishes to use them in some future proceeding. Perhaps this provides standing for one claiming threatened injury-in-fact from the outcome of this future proceeding, but Byrd made no such claim. Further, such a declaration would seem a telling weapon for Byrd in a hypothetical future proceeding only if he asserted that the documents belatedly turned over enabled him to poke a hole in the substance of the peer review, a hole that he was unable to perceive on a timely basis because of EPA’s original refusal to deliver them. But he has identified no such gap.
Nor do I think NRDC v. Pena, 147 F.3d 1012, 1026 n. 6 (D.C.Cir.1998), see Maj. Op. at 244, extended “informational injury” so far. That footnote merely observed that denying an injunction against future use of findings from a FACA-defective proceeding would not render FACA en*249tirely toothless. One such tooth may be declaratory relief, and its utility in some cases may depend on the winner’s being able to use it to delegitimate such findings. But nothing in Pena suggested that the prospect of securing such a benefit from the court could alone support standing as a general matter. The majority’s language extending the “informational injury” re-dressable under FACA appears to assume that a highly theoretical injury is adequate for standing; the language is unnecessary to jurisdiction here.
On the merits, I believe that FACA governs panels established under the challenged policy. Our precedent on this language is rather thin, but appears to say that an agency “establish[es]” a panel if it has real control over its personnel and subject matter at its inception. Thus in Food Chemical News v. Young, 900 F.2d 328, 333 (D.C.Cir.1990), we said that the agency had not “established” the panel because the contractor “proposed” it, “alone selected its members,” “set the panel’s agenda,” “scheduled its meetings,” and “would have reviewed the panel’s work.” Here EPA proposes the use of a panel, submits an initial list of suggested members to the contractor, retains veto power over the final membership, and sets the panel’s agenda. (The procedure used for the Benzene Update is evidently representative of EPA’s practice.) The veto power is key. That it was not used in the benzene episode does not much help EPA: not only may EPA exercise it in future applications of the policy, but the contractor was and is quite likely to take the fact of veto power into account in its selection decisions. Assuming that contractors will ignore this fact — as the majority appears to do, see Maj. Op. at 247 — seems akin to believing that the President takes no account of senators’ opinions when he nominates federal judges.
Although the issue of whether EPA “established” the panel is certainly a close one, it seems to me inconsistent with the statute’s language and intent to exempt from FACA a panel controlled so closely in membership and purpose.