Page:U.S. ex rel. Polansky v. Executive Health Resources.pdf/20

16 and in the name of the Government. The suit alleges injury to the Government alone. And the Government, once it has intervened, assumes primary responsibility for the action. Given all that, a district court should think several times over before denying a motion to dismiss. If the Government offers a reasonable argument for why the burdens of continued litigation outweigh its benefits, the court should grant the motion. And that is so even if the relator presents a credible assessment to the contrary.

In light of those principles, this case is not a close call. A district court’s Rule 41 order is generally reviewable under an abuse-of-discretion standard, and the Third Circuit properly applied that standard here. But in the interest of providing guidance, it might be useful for us to put that standard of review to the side, and simply to say that the District Court got this one right. The Government, in moving to dismiss, enumerated the significant costs of future discovery in the suit, including the possible disclosure of privileged documents. At the same time, the Government explained in detail why it had come to believe that the suit had little chance of success on the merits. Polansky vigorously disputed the latter point, claiming that the Government was “leaving billions of dollars of potential recovery on the table.” 17 F. 4th, at 393 (emphasis deleted). But that competing assessment, the District Court thought, could not outweigh the Government’s reasonable view of the suit’s costs and benefits. We agree. The Government gave good grounds for thinking that this suit would not do what all qui tam actions are supposed to do: vindicate the Government’s interests. Absent some extraordinary circumstance, that sort of showing is all that is needed for the Government to prevail on a (2)(A) motion to dismiss.

The Government may move to dismiss an FCA action under Subparagraph (2)(A) whenever it has