Iyengar v. Barnhart, District Court for the District of Columbia

Several nonimmigrants residing lawfully in the US filed a lawsuit challenging a new Social Security Administration policy of not issuing social security numbers solely for the purpose of obtaining a driver’s license. The plaintiffs claimed that because they cannot obtain SSNs, they cannot obtain driver’s licenses, and sought an injunction against the SSA to prevent it from enforcing the new policy. At this point, before the court were the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case.

SSNs are used primarily to verify that a person is eligible to work and to track their earnings. Nonimmigrants who are authorized to work may obtain numbers. SSA regulations also allow the issuance of SSNs to anyone legally in the US, not authorize to work, but who needs the number for a “valid nonwork purpose.” Under this provision, for many years the SSA has issued numbers so that people may obtain driver’s licenses if the state requires one for a license. The SSA policy change was made internally, without being published in the Federal Register any without opportunity for public notice and comment. This, the plaintiffs argued, violated laws dealing with how government agencies are to introduce new regulations.

The SSA argued that the new policy was only an interpretative rule, and thus not subject to the notice and comment procedure. The court found that even if this was the case, because the new rule changed policies that had been announced in the Federal Register, the new rule had to go through the same process. Therefore, the court granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment and found that the SSA had violated rule-making procedures in the way it introduced the new rule.

The case is available online at http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/02-0825.pdf.