The midterms and mail-in voting are approaching, and as they do, the federal courts are already deciding cases about postal operations. One such case began in the summer of 2020, a time of pandemic and postal policy changes. The policy changes “included a reduction in the number of high-speed mail sorting machines, a decrease in employee overtime, the elimination of late or extra mail delivery trips, and a change in the sequence by which some mail carriers sort and deliver the mail.” New York, New Jersey, Hawai‘i, and San Francisco sued in federal district court under general federal question jurisdiction because they were worried that these changes would interfere with public services and voting. 

It turns out that they should have complained to the Postal Regulatory Commission, or so the D.C. Circuit held in New York v. Trump, with Judge Rao writing for a unanimous panel. The Postal Reorganization Act created one of those “comprehensive administrative schemes” that preclude “direct actions in district court.” (Thunder Basin strikes again.) The D.C. Circuit rejected a “general ‘irreparable harm’” exception to the statutory scheme, notwithstanding the possibility that the Commission, which could take up to 90 days to act on a complaint, would have not acted on the complaint before the November 2020 election. This possibility was not really at issue because the government was challenging a 2022 grant of summary judgment to the plaintiffs. But, Judge Rao noted, it was a different question “whether the statutory review scheme would have foreclosed all meaningful judicial review at the preliminary injunction stage, when the States sought to halt the Postal Policy Changes only months before the November 2020 general election.”

All of this matters because, after all, elections have consequences. In Clean Air Council v. EPA, the D.C. Circuit gave a new presidential administration leeway to delay deadlines for compliance with the previous administration’s rules. Judge Rao, writing for a unanimous panel, held that the EPA had authority under the Clean Air Act (CAA) to give steel mills more time to comply with maximum achievable control technology (MACT) standards. The CAA deadlines are supposed to “provide for compliance as expeditiously as practicable.” Relying on the good  cause exception to notice and comment, the Trump Administration’s EPA promulgated an interim final rule to extend the industry’s deadlines in light of “compliance challenges.” Environmental groups challenged the interim rule. EPA issued a final rule during the litigation, which prompted another challenge, and the D.C. Circuit consolidated the petitions for review of the interim and final rules. EPA had acted reasonably and consistently with the CAA, Judge Rao reasoned, “[e]ven if EPA relied in part on needing more time to revise” the existing regulatory standards, because “EPA made clear that compliance challenges were a necessary and sufficient reason for the extending the deadlines.” Even though “EPA also candidly referred to ongoing efforts to update the 2024 Rule,” that alone did “not render the new deadlines arbitrary and capricious.”

The Court’s decision in Alignment Healthcare Inc. v. HHS was largely a fact-specific application of the arbitrary and capricious test to agency action. The underlying dispute was about whether a vendor for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) failed to survey Spanish-speaking customers of a health insurance company using Spanish-language questionnaires. The company argued that its customers gave it low marks on an annual satisfaction survey because they received the wrong questionnaire. Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Rogers rejected the company’s challenge to CMS’s refusal to disregard the survey results. The interesting twist in this otherwise straightforward administrative law case was the company’s private nondelegation argument, which turned on how the CMS uses vendors to collect and process data. Because the vendor had only a “fact-gathering role,” and CMS had the final say about the legal effect of the data, there was “no nondelegation issue.”

Think again, the D.C. Circuit told the IRS in Trongone v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Trongone wanted a whistleblower award from the IRS, who, as it turned out, was already investigating the taxpayers that she identified as Tax Code violators. The IRS collected from both of them but gave no whistleblower award to Trongone. The agency figured that Trongone’s information did not change much about its ongoing investigation. Writing for the unanimous panel, Judge Henderson held that the Tax Court erred when it denied Trongone’s request to supplement the record. As far as the D.C. Circuit could tell, the administrative record did “not support the decision” to deny Trongone at least some award, and so the court remanded for further consideration.

Diegelmann v. Bessent resolved a challenge to an OFAC sanctions decision. Writing for a unanimous panel, Judge Katsas explained that the case “involve[d] economic sanctions imposed on foreign nations for operating in the metals and mining section of the Russian economy,” and “turn[ed] on whether buying finished precious metals, including gold bars, constitutes procuring geological  materials within the meaning of the operative sanctions regime.” The challengers had forfeited the better of their arguments, leaving the court to resolve the interpretive issue before it by holding “the phrase ‘procuring geological materials’ incorporates the ordinary meaning of ‘procuring’ – the phrase means acquiring geological materials through special effort.”

The D.C. Circuit also decided several criminal law cases last week (see here, here, and here), including United States v. Littlejohn, which held that a five-year sentence was reasonable for a defendant charged with “unlawfully leak[ing] the tax records” of President Trump, and a case about minimum contacts for personal jurisdiction in D.C., which concluded that a “defendant may be haled into a local D.C. court on the same grounds that allow him to be haled into a state court.”