We will hear argument this morning in case 231127, Wisconsin-Bell v. United States,

X-Rail Todd Heath. Ms. Hope?

Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court, the False Claims Act, which casts its shadow

over every aspect of the administrative state, has always been trained on guarding the public fisc.

The FCA protects government funds by defining a claim as a request for money the government

provides or that's presented to a government agent. As a result of political branch choices,

e-rate reimbursement requests check neither box.

The program could have been funded with public money and administered by a government agency,

but the political branches chose private funding and a private administrator

to prevent e-rate money from being used to mask budget shortfalls

and to avoid the Government Corporation Control Act.

The consequence of those choices is that e-rate reimbursement requests aren't FCA claims.

First, the government doesn't provide any money in the E-rate program.

Text, context, structure, and history all confirmed that the government doesn't provide any money in the E-rate program. Text, context, structure, and

history all confirm that the government provides money for FCA purposes only if it supplies

money from its own funds, putting the public FISC at risk. That never happened here. The government

doesn't provide money by making one private party pay another

private party, and the government doesn't provide money by collecting debts owed to a private party

and in which the government has no financial stake. Second, the program's private administrator,

the administrative company, isn't a government agent.

By design, it lacks power to bind the government, which in turn lacks control over what matters here,

grants of e-rate reimbursement requests. In fact, we know the company can't be a government agent,

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