How We Helped Expose and Abolish ACUS, A Feculent Fascist Federal Agency

I was proud to clerk for two years for the Chief Administrative Law Judge of the United States Department of Labor, the Honorable Nahum Litt. he sent me to attend a meeting of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) in December 1986.  (My first ACUS meeting was held in the same place where JFK held some of his press conferences, the Departmental Auditorium, later renamed under President Reagan as the "Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium," after a rebarbative retromingent Robber Baron.)

I spent two days listening to reports and recommendations to gut FOIA, gut Sunshine, and otherwise to impose a Reichwing agenda, Judge Litt asked me what I thought. I replied, "I think they're a bunch of fascists!" Judge Litt agreed. He and the first judge I clerked for, the Honorable Charles P. Rippey, helped resist ACUS' efforts to violate Due Process, including efforts to inflict performance appraisals on independent Administrative Law Judges in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946. Congress cut off all federal funds to ACUS, 1995-2010, as a result of disclosures, which began with my Common Cause Magazine article, "No Sacred Cows: Business as Usual," in January 1989. thanks to Peter Montgomery and Viveca Novak for helping getting the article published in Common Cause Magazine.

Two years in a row, Congress scrutinized ACUS in critical report language about its violations of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), its lack of a fairly balanced membership, its unread studies, its questionable subsidies to law professors, and its bias in favor of powerful parties in administrative law litigation.  Under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, ACUS' budget was set at zero.   Zero.

Despite efforts by the administrative law Establishment, the zero budget held.  

Justice Antonin Scalia (former Chair of ACUS) and Justice Stephen Breyer both wrote propaganda and tried to save it, aided by Washington Post columnist Colman McCarthy, ACUS ceased to exist from 1995-2010.

Footnote: Judge Litt was such an amazing man. I was the very last law clerk hired in 1986.  A former Air Force JAG Corps Officer, USDOL Deputy Chief Judge E. Earl Thomas, told Judge Litt that the Law Clerk hiring committee voted 4-3, four judges voted yes and three clerks voted no. Deputy Chief Judge Thomas showed him my resume and my published March 1986 ABA Student Lawyer article (on a 1968 federal  law, the Indian Civil Rights Act, which actually provided for lawyers for Indians in Tribal Courts only "at their own expense."  Judge Litt told me that he responded, "We need somebody like that to raise Hell around here!"