Compliance Stuff

  Organizations challenging an agency’s termination of a grant or government contract based on an allegedly illegal government policy need to master a two-step dance, according to a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision. Under the Court’s highly fractured decision in   National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association   (No. 25A103), plaintiffs challenging both the terminations of their individual government grants or contracts and the policy on which the terminations were based must generally file separate suits in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act and in federal district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”). The new Tucker Act-APA two-step is complicated—indeed, Justice Jackson in dissent criticized it as a “labyrinth”—and may make it harder for litigants to obtain relief. Significantly, because the Court of Federal Claims generally lacks authority to provide equitable relief for contractual breaches, the Supreme Court...

On May 21, 2025, Judge David C. Joseph of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana  issued a ruling  vacating the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s  final rule  under the 2022 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA), 1  to the extent that the final rule includes elective abortion as a condition for which employers are required to make accommodations. The court vacated this portion of the final rule, finding that it exceeded the EEOC’s statutory authority.  The  EEOC issued the final rule in April 2024 , establishing a broad interpretation of “pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions” that permitted individuals to seek accommodation in connection with choosing or not choosing to have an abortion. This approach had been announced in August 2023, when the EEOC published its  Notice of Proposed Rulemaking  (NPRM). In the final rule, the EEOC noted that it had first treated abortion as a “related medical condit...

 The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision on July 1 that will increase the amount of time CEOs and businesses have to challenge federal agency regulations. The majority opinion, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, noted that the dissent “warns that today’s opinion will devastate the functioning of the federal government. … This claim is baffling—indeed, bizarre—in a case about a statute of limitations.” We’ve gathered articles on the news from SHRM Online and other outlets. High Court Ruling and Dissent In Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, t he court ruled that a six-year statute of limitations for filing Administrative Procedure Act (APA) lawsuits begins to run when a regulation first affects a company , rather than when it’s first issued. In dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision, along with Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, erodes the power of administrative agencies. (The New York Times and The Hill) Chevron Defe...