*Note: This is the fourth in a series of posts compiling Washington Legal Foundation papers, briefs, regulatory comments, and blog commentaries relevant to critical legal and constitutional issues facing new senior leaders at specific federal agencies. To read posts addressing other federal agencies, click here.
Few agencies have been more active in the past eight years than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With its singular, near-myopic focus on combatting climate change, EPA has issued a series of regulations that not only threaten to raise energy costs dramatically, but have already cost tens of thousands of Americans their livelihoods. Similarly, the Department of Interior’s Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has continued to expand the scope of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), among other federal laws, in ways that fail to strike a proper balance between safeguarding ecological health and respecting private property rights and other individual and business civil liberties.
Through its public-interest litigation, publications, and other advocacy, WLF has influenced debates over many EPA and FWS policies and actions with timely papers and blog commentaries, and weighed in directly through regulatory comments and amicus briefs. Those activities have resulted in an impressive body of reference materials that are instructive for new leadership in the two agencies. Below we provide a summary of and links to those documents to simplify access to relevant WLF work product in specific areas. Continue reading
Over the last two decades, the False Claims Act (FCA) has become a popular tool for plaintiffs—and qui tam attorneys—to enrich themselves at the expense of government contractors. To keep the profits flowing, private plaintiffs, called relators, have invented new legal theories under which to bring their claims. As they test the FCA’s bounds, defendants have urged courts to maintain the law’s traditional limits. Last June, the US Supreme Court addressed one of FCA relators’ more successful liability expansions: the “implied-certification” theory. As a recent 