Every year, the federal government gets sued by thousands of people, for-profit corporations, and non-profit corporations. When the government loses or agrees to a settlement, the plaintiffs can not only take a bite out of the taxpayer, but they can also get the government to pay their legal fees.
Many of these settlements and attorney payments are meritorious. Some are not. To sort them out, one would have to study the cases and look at the settlements. Unfortunately, at the moment, there is no good place to find that information. Senators Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Deb Fischer, R-Neb., are co-sponsoring a bill that would fix this problem and bring transparency to the Judgment Fund, the treasury account that pays judgments and settlements to plaintiffs.
The Judgment Fund Transparency Act is just two pages long. It simply requires the Treasury Department to make public through its website the details of every payment the fund makes. For the first time, basic and up-to-date information about these judgments and settlements would be easily available, all in the same place — the agency being sued, the amount paid, the plaintiff, the attorneys’ names, and a brief description of the case.
Amazingly, this isn’t already done. And there are several beneficiaries of the current opacity — among them radical environmentalist non-profits that sue the government dozens of times each year and make bank, at times demanding huge, inflated legal expenses. In some cases, they have even managed to talk the courts into covering their legal fees in cases they have lost.
That this occurs is an established fact, but the extent of it is difficult to grasp. In 2009, a Wyoming rancher named Karen Budd-Falen came forward with records suggesting that the dollar amounts run in the billions, with some groups filing literally hundreds of lawsuits. Environmentalists strenuously objected to her claims, but the dispute was hard to settle because there is no good or efficient way for journalists or the public to verify or update those numbers, and because some settlements are unjustifiably kept hidden from taxpayers behind a seal of court confidentiality.
Information about the Judgment Fund would be easy for the government to provide in one place, but it is currently scattered and hidden throughout the federal court system. Some information is simply unavailable, and the task of rounding up the rest is a lot like finding hundreds of needles in dozens of haystacks. The federal judiciary’s PACER database, in addition to being somewhat user-unfriendly, is simply not designed to identify the kind of case that would be listed under this bill. Even when such cases can be identified, one might have to search, perhaps in vain, through dozens of filings and court orders to find the relevant dollar amounts — if they are even contained in the docket.
The Judgment Fund Transparency Act would remedy this problem instantly, giving the public clear and consistent notification of who is suing the government and how much they are getting from the taxpayer. The bill deserves broad bipartisan support. For anyone who believes in government transparency, it’s a no-brainer.
