Private Meetings of First Lady’s Health Care Task Force Upheld

WASHINGTON —  President Clinton’s health care task force did not have to hold meetings in public just because it was chaired by his wife, a federal appellate court ruled Tuesday.

But the panel of three judges also provided a possible approach for groups trying to penetrate the secrecy of a 500-plus-member “working group” that put together health care alternatives for consideration by the task force and the President.

While the task force itself is not subject to open meeting requirements of the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) simply because it was chaired by Hillary Rodham Clinton, the working group may be, according to the panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

“We simply cannot determine how to classify the working groups . . . and determine the character of its members . . . based on the record before us,” Judge Laurence Silberman wrote in a ruling sending the case back to U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth for reconsideration.

If reconsideration leads to a determination that the working group and its subgroups were subject to the law, then the hundreds of thousands of transcripts, drafts, minutes, studies and other documents they generated from late January through May could be opened to the public.

The White House claims that virtually all of those papers are exempt from public disclosure because they represent confidential advice to the President. The Administration, nonetheless, says it is following court orders to preserve them until the case is resolved.

The court effectively overruled Lamberth’s decision in March that the task force had to conduct at least its information-gathering activities in public and that all activities of the working group were exempt from disclosure laws.

White House officials had acknowledged that the 13-member task force, primarily Cabinet members plus Mrs. Clinton, was mainly a shell and that the real work of drafting a legislative package for overhauling the nation’s health care system was being done by the working group.

Lamberth had ruled that Mrs. Clinton is neither a “full-time federal officer or federal employee,” and so the task force was covered by the advisory committee act’s open meeting requirements. But Lamberth said applying the law to meetings at which recommendations to Clinton are formulated is an unconstitutional infringement on his right to receive advice confidentially.

The 1972 statute requires that any presidential advisory committee that includes among its members anyone who is not a full-time federal officer or employee must meet in public.

“We see no reason why a President could not use his or her spouse to carry out a task that the President might delegate to one of his White House aides,” the appeals court said. “It is reasonable, therefore, to construe (the law) as treating the presidential spouse as a de facto officer or employee.”