D.C. Circuit Says House Committee Minority Can Sue to Get GSA Info

Steven D. Schwinn, University of Illinois Chicago Law School

The D.C. Circuit ruled this week that members of a House committee have standing to sue to enforce their statutory right to obtain information from executive agencies, in this case the General Services Administration.

The ruling means that the plaintiff-House members can pursue their claim to get the information, but it does not say that they'll win. In any event, the case is likely to become moot under President Biden, when the administration seems much more likely to comply with the request. (The ruling is likely to embolden minority Republican House members to ask for information from the Biden Administration.)

The case, Maloney v. Murphy, arose when Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, then in a minority, sought information from the GSA related to the Agency's lease with a Trump corporation for the Old Post Office. The members invoked 5 U.S.C. Sec. 2954, which authorizes seven members of the House Oversight Committee or five members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to request and obtain information from any executive agency. The statute functionally allows a minority group of lawmakers on those committees to obtain information from an executive agency, even if the full committee does not seek that same information. 

GSA balked, and the members sued. The district court granted the GSA's motion to dismiss for lack of standing, but the D.C. Circuit reversed.

The court said that the plaintiffs suffered a cognizable informational injury--that the GSA deprived them of information to which they were entitled, and that their lawsuit would redress that injury. 

The court went on to say that the injury was "personal," and not "institutional," and therefore the individual lawmakers had standing. (A personal injury is a direct harm to a person, or in this case a lawmaker; the harmed individual, even if a lawmaker, has standing to sue. An institutional injury, in contract, is a generalized harm to the institution, in this case the Committee; the Committee would have standing, but not an individual lawmaker.) The court explained:

The Requestors do not assert an injury to institutional powers of functions that "damages all Members of Congress and both Houses of Congress equally." The injury they claim--the denial of information to which they as individual legislators are statutorily entitled--befell them and only them. Section 2954 vested them specifically and particularly with the right to obtain information. The 34 other members of the Committee who never sought the information suffered no deprivation when it was withheld. Neither did the nearly 400 other Members of the House who were not on the Committee suffer any informational injury. Nor was the House (or Senate) itself harmed because the statutory right does not belong to those institutions.

Judge Ginsburg dissented:

The Plaintiff-Members here allege harm to the House rather than to themselves personally. Their theory of injury is that the General Services Administration (GSA), by refusing their request for certain documents, hindered their efforts to oversee the Executive and potentially to pass remedial legislation. The Complaint is clear and consistent on this point: The Plaintiff-Members were harmed through the "impedance of the oversight and legislative responsibilities that have been delegated to them by Congress . . . ."