Lincoln v. Vigil

Opinion

 [*184]   [***107]   [**2027]  JUSTICE SOUTER delivered the opinion of the Court.

 For several years in the late 1970's and early 1980's, the Indian Health Service provided diagnostic and treatment services, referred to collectively as the Indian Children's Program (Program), to handicapped Indian children in the Southwest. In 1985, the Service decided to reallocate the Program's resources to a nationwide effort to assist such children. We hold that the Service's decision to discontinue the Program was "committed to agency discretion by law" and therefore not subject to judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act, 5 U.S.C. § 701(a)(2), and that the Service's exercise of that discretion was not subject to the notice-and-comment rulemaking requirements imposed by § 553.

 [*185]  I

The Indian Health Service, an agency within the Public Health Service of the Department of Health and Human Services, provides health care for some 1.5 million American Indian and Alaska Native people. Brief for Petitioners 2. The Service receives yearly lump-sum appropriations from Congress  [****7]  and expends the funds under authority of the Snyder Act, 42 Stat. 208, as amended, 25 U.S.C. § 13, and the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, 90 Stat. 1400, as amended, 25 U.S.C. § 1601 et seq. So far as it concerns us here, the Snyder Act authorizes the Service to "expend such moneys as Congress may from time to time appropriate, for the benefit, care, and assistance of the Indians,"  [**2028]  for the "relief of distress and conservation of health." 25 U.S.C.  [***108]  § 13. ² The Improvement Act authorizes expenditures for, inter alia, Indian mental-health care, and specifically for "therapeutic and residential treatment centers." § 1621(a)(4)(D).

 [****8]  The Service employs roughly 12,000 people and operates more than 500 health-care facilities in the continental United States and Alaska. See Hearings on Department of the Interior and Related Agencies Appropriations for 1993 before a Subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations, 102d Cong., 2d Sess., pt. 4, p. 32 (1992); Brief for Petitioners 2. This case concerns a collection of related services, commonly known as the Indian Children's Program, that the Service provided from 1978 to 1985. In the words of the Court of Appeals, a "cloud [of] bureaucratic haze" obscures the history of the Program, Vigil v. Rhoades, 953 F.2d 1225, 1226 (CA10 1992), which seems to have grown out of a plan "to establish therapeutic and residential treatment centers  [*186]  for disturbed Indian children." H. R. Rep. No. 94-1026, pt. 1, p. 80 (1976) (prepared in conjunction with enactment of the Improvement Act). These centers were to be established under a "major cooperative care agreement" between the Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, id., at 81, and would have provided such children "with intensive care in a residential setting." Id., at 80.

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