Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, Inc.
606 U. S. ____ (2025) (2025)
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Rule of Law:
Members of a government body are inferior officers under the Appointments Clause if their work is directed and supervised by a principal officer, such as a cabinet secretary, who possesses the authority to remove them at will and to review and block their decisions before they become final.
Facts:
- In 1984, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) created the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (Task Force), a body of volunteer experts, to make recommendations on preventive healthcare services.
- Initially, the Task Force's recommendations were purely advisory.
- In 1999, Congress statutorily established the Task Force within the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), an agency within HHS's Public Health Service.
- The Affordable Care Act of 2010 mandated that most health insurers must cover, without cost-sharing, preventive services that receive an 'A' or 'B' rating from the Task Force, thereby making its recommendations legally binding.
- The 2010 Act also amended the governing statute to describe the Task Force as 'independent' and stated its members and recommendations should be, 'to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.'
- Braidwood Management, Inc., which operates a health and wellness center and provides a self-insured health plan to its employees, objected to being required to cover certain preventive services mandated by the Task Force's recommendations.
Procedural Posture:
- Braidwood Management, Inc. and other plaintiffs sued the Secretary of HHS in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.
- The district court (a court of first instance) granted summary judgment for Braidwood, holding that Task Force members were principal officers who were unconstitutionally appointed and enjoined the enforcement of their recommendations.
- The Government, as appellant, appealed the decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
- While the appeal was pending, the Secretary of HHS ratified the prior appointments of Task Force members and began appointing them personally.
- The Fifth Circuit (an intermediate appellate court) affirmed the district court's ruling in relevant part, agreeing that the members were principal officers.
- The U.S. Supreme Court granted the Government's petition for a writ of certiorari.
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Issue:
Does the appointment of members of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force by the Secretary of Health and Human Services violate the Appointments Clause of Article II?
Opinions:
Majority - Justice Kavanaugh
No, the appointment of Task Force members by the Secretary of HHS is consistent with the Appointments Clause because they are inferior officers. Inferior officers are those whose work is directed and supervised by a principal officer. The Secretary of HHS directs and supervises the Task Force through two key mechanisms: the power of at-will removal and the authority to review and block recommendations. First, the power to appoint includes the incident power of at-will removal, which this Court in Edmond v. United States described as a 'powerful tool for control.' Second, the Secretary possesses statutory authority to review and block Task Force recommendations during the minimum one-year interval before they take effect. Given these controls, the Task Force members do not render final decisions on behalf of the United States without permission from the Secretary. This conclusion aligns with precedents like Edmond, Free Enterprise Fund, and Arthrex, where officers subject to similar or even lesser degrees of supervision were deemed inferior. The statute's use of the term 'independent' does not create for-cause removal protection and is best read as ensuring members are free from undue influence from their outside professional affiliations, not from the Secretary.
Dissenting - Justice Thomas
Yes, the appointment of Task Force members by the Secretary of HHS violates the Appointments Clause. The constitutional default requires officers to be appointed by the President with Senate confirmation, and Congress may only depart from this rule by explicitly vesting the appointment of inferior officers in a department head. Congress has not done so here. The government's two-step argument fails because the AHRQ Director's power to 'convene' the Task Force is not an explicit grant of appointment power, and the constitutional avoidance canon counsels against such a reading since it would unconstitutionally vest appointment authority in a non-department head. Furthermore, Reorganization Plan No. 3 of 1966 cannot transfer a power of appointment that did not exist in 1966 and is legally distinct from the 'functions' it covers. By misreading these statutes, the majority reconfigures Congress's design for an independent Task Force that answers to the President into one improperly subordinate to the Secretary.
Analysis:
This decision solidifies the 'direction and supervision' test from Edmond v. United States as the primary framework for distinguishing inferior from principal officers. It strongly affirms that at-will removal power, combined with some form of substantive review authority by a principal officer, is sufficient to render a subordinate an inferior officer, even when a statute describes that officer's role as 'independent'. The ruling provides the Executive Branch with significant flexibility in structuring and staffing expert bodies, as it interprets the 'by Law vest' requirement of the Appointments Clause broadly, allowing appointment authority to be derived from the combination of a general term ('convene') and a decades-old reorganization plan. This may lower the bar for what constitutes a sufficient congressional vesting of appointment power in future cases.
