Page:U.S. ex rel. Polansky v. Executive Health Resources.pdf/32

6 subsection (b),” the relator is usually entitled to between 15 and 25 percent of any recovery. §3730(d)(1). Conversely, “[i]f the Government does not proceed with [the] action,” the relator is entitled to 25 to 30 percent. §3730(d)(2). Given the majority’s view that intervention under paragraph (c)(3) counts as “proceed[ing] with the action,” it follows that even an eleventh-hour intervention by the Government would automatically shunt the relator out of paragraph (d)(2)’s more generous range and into paragraph (d)(1)’s less generous one. Surely, that result would qualify as “limiting the [relator’s] status and rights.” §3730(c)(3).

The majority bolsters its tenuous textual and structural case with an appeal to “the FCA’s Government-centered purposes.” But “every statute purposes, not only to achieve certain ends, but also to achieve them by particular means.” Freeman v. Quicken Loans, Inc., 566 U. S. 624, 637 (2012) (alteration and internal quotation marks omitted). And, while it is certainly the FCA’s ultimate goal to “redress injuries against the Government,”, its chosen means is to empower private parties to seek redress of those injuries through litigation that the Government does not necessarily control and might not have brought if left to its own devices. Allowing the relator to maintain the suit after the Government has declined its initial opportunity to take it over (even if only to dismiss it) is fully consistent with the FCA.

Indeed, the FCA’s history undermines the majority’s free-floating account of its “purposes.” As enacted in 1863, the original FCA contained no provision for the Government to intervene in a relator’s suit at all. See 12 Stat. 698. In 1943, Congress first gave the Government that opportunity by creating the 60-day seal period, which it set up to function as the very “on-off switch” the majority seems to consider implausible, : Either the Government intervened during the seal period and assumed sole control of