The federal court's interpretation of military leave entitlements in Butterbaugh v. Department of Justice

BUTTERBAUGH VS.DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE CASE

This paper is about the formation of an opinion concerning the Federal Court of Appeals decision on the Butterbaugh vs. Department of Justice case. The IRAC (issue, rule, analysis, and conclusion) metrics will be used for the formation of opinion and analysis of the case.

Case Background

In the case 336 F.3d 1332, Butterbaugh v. Department of Justice, a federal appeals court ruled that the department of justice in following the OPM rules, improperly charged staffs for military leave before the year 2000. Under the 5 U.S.C. §6323(a)(1), federal staffs who are also reservists are given up to fifteen days of yearly leave for national guard training or reserve. The court utilized the terms 'reserve training' and 'reservist' to incorporate members of the National Guard and their obligation. The litigants in this case were fulltime workers in the Department of Justice, the Bureau of Prisons at the Loretto, PA Federal Correctional Institution. Before the year 2000, federal employees including those of the Department of Justice, included days the staffs were not scheduled to engage in work but to be involved in reserve training when determining the leave an employee had taken (Butterbaugh Case Military Leave Claim). For instance, the appeals court noted that a worker, in a typical Monday-Friday workdays of the week, dealing with reserve training for a week beginning from Friday to the next Friday, and as a result be charged 8 days of military leave, although the worker had only been absent for 6 workdays (OpenJurist, 2003). The court also did note that this policy was not applied evenly, in that, non-workdays at the end or beginning of the leave were not included in the count, and however that, non-workdays that fell during the period of the military leave were included in the count. In the aforementioned example, a federal employee whose workweek started from Thursday to Monday had more leave days calculated against him than a worker whose workweek started from Monday to Friday (Butterbaugh v. Department Of Justice).

Issue

The matter as regarded by the board is the proper interpretation of the 5 U.S.C. § 6323(a)(1) rule: the petitioners could not claim that they had been denied an employment benefit if the Department of Justice gave them the complete or full measure of the leave due to them under the rule (Leagle, n.d.). Accordingly, the only matter we must then determine whether the board did interpret correctly is that of rule 5 U.S.C. § 6323(a) (1), the board's interpretation of this rule is a decision of that we will examine de novo on appeal (Butterbaugh v. Department Of Justice)

Rules

The language of a statute in its unadorned nature is our starting point for its interpretation. The federal government as well as the Board, regarded this case as hugely controlled by the language "fifteen days per fiscal year" as stipulated in section 6323(a)(1). From different authoritative sources, the ordinary and plain meaning of "day" is twenty four hours or in other words a calendar day, the federal government then claims that leave accruing at fifteen days per year ought therefore to be calculated at fifteen calendar days per year and not fifteen workdays (Butterbaugh V. Department Of Justice).

To put it in other words, the "days" referred to in section 6323(a) (1) are leave days and not "reserve duty days" or "training days." The statute therefore, purports to count the number of days of paid leave that the workers are entitled to, and not the number of days set aside for reserve training that they may attend. The implications could be different if the statute stipulated that federal workers were entitled to attend fifteen days of reserve training each fiscal year, a situation whereby the amount of leave would be calculated certainly, then, by the duration spent in reserve training (Butterbaugh V. Department Of Justice).

In fact, this should then have been the correct interpretation if the original version of the statute was still the in operation. Section 6323(a) of 1966 stipulated that a federal employee was entitled to leave with pay for every day, not exceeding 15 days in a calendar year, for which he was engaged in the field, on active duty or in coast defense training. Leave days were, therefore given based on the actual or real duration of time that the federal employee was on duty given that, the period did not exceed the fifteen days. However, in the year 1980, in the course of amending section 6323(a) to grant leave based on a fiscal year instead of a calendar year, the congress then changed the language of the statute into its current form, stipulating that a leave is calculated or it accrues for an individual or an employee at the rate of fifteen days per fiscal year. In amending this law the congress did also change, the counting of leave days from the measurement based on real days of actual training in the military to a rigid measurement of fifteen calendar days (Butterbaugh V. Department Of Justice). Even though leave calculated using the actual reserve training period essentially incorporates non-workdays in the computation, leave calculated using the constant measurement of days does not. We, thus conclude that at least since 1980, the statutory language of 5 U.S.C. § 6323(a)(1) has entitled federal government employees' leave without loss of pay for a training duration of fifteen days, a period which they are not required or scheduled to work.

Often, the federal government's argument for consistency in terms of statutory interpretation will be given quite some amount of consideration. However, the petitioners have directed our attention to another leave statute found in section 6326 subchapter II of title 63, that grants federal staffs 3 days of leave without loss of pay to attend the funeral service of an immediate family member who was in service in the armed forces and died in combat.

According to the federal government, section 6326 entitles one to three days of leave, which they argue refer to calendar days and not workdays (Butterbaugh v. Department Of Justice). Furthermore, Congress passed the funeral leave statute at the same time it passed the active duty leave part of section 6323(b). In both these statutes, we see the same separation of meaning in the use of the word "workdays" of active duty and "days" of funeral leave. One would thus conclude that section 6326 provides three 'calendar' days for funeral leave and not three 'workdays'. Yet immediately congress enacted section 6326, the Civil Service Commission (the predecessor of OPM) acting using their formal rule making powers and pursuant to the direct statutory authority, made active a regulation that interpreted section 6326 to entitle one to three workdays of funeral leave without loss of pay. That regulation has never been changed to date (Butterbaugh v. Department Of Justice).

Conclusion

As a matter of law and of fact, no federal employee-reservist who relying on Butterbaugh can prove that he or she was improperly charged for military leave during non-workdays "due to" or "because of" his military status or the his performance in military service. None of the employee's military performance or status was a "motivating factor" for them to have been mischarged during the military leave (Donohoe, 2008). The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has never ruled otherwise. Indeed even the court's 2003 Butterbaugh decision found that employee-reservists who were improperly charged military leave only "because of" a mistake of law that was not committed by them but by the OPM.

However, in any way that military leave was charged it always only was and is a benefit of employment enjoyed solely by the reservists. Furthermore, no other federal paid leave was improperly charged because of OPM's mistake of law which didn't violate USERRA's [section] 4316(b) (1) (B), since military leave was a specific and unique benefit that permitted dual compensation, and not allowed to non-reservist staffs, which proves that military leave is hugely different in character compared to any other type of federal staff leave (Donohoe, 2008). The Butterbaugh case and all its appeals were filed based on flawed analysis, logic, and ultimately application of specific USERRA protections.

Any appellant/claimant must then show that they were incorrectly charged for military leave on non-workdays, that the claimant was required to utilize a different type of leave to take future military duty. The harm is done when the claimant is then denied the use of that other form of federal leave for its future intended purpose. For instance, under the above mentioned rule if a federal employee went to military training for the duration beginning Monday 12th May until Saturday 25th May under the OPM (Office of the Personnel Management) rules of that time, the federal employee was charged twelve days of military leave, days which included the weekend (weekend days considered civilian non-duty days) (Am I Entitled). However after the Butterbaugh decision, it was determined that the employee-reservist should have been charged only ten days, since a federal employee whose workweek was from Monday to Friday was not scheduled or required to work on the weekend (Saturday and Sunday; 19th and 20th in this example). However, the MSPB case decisions, state that there is no harm to the federal employee-reservist unless the employee can provide evidence that he or she utilized all of their granted military leave days (fifteen days) during that fiscal year and had to take some other form of leave for any other extra military duty day (Am I Entitled).