By Nadia Dreid

Law360 (June 24, 2021, 7:44 PM EDT) -- The U.S. Department of the Treasury won't have to set aside an additional $4 million in coronavirus relief money for the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation after a D.C. federal judge said the tribe's argument for putting the additional funds in reserve "makes little sense."

U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta broke the news to the tribe Wednesday in an eight-page opinion that walked through his reasoning for denying the request for $4 million in addition to the $7.6 million that the court has already ordered the government to set aside while litigation over the distribution of the COVID-19 relief money plays out.

Prairie Band believes it's owed the extra $4 million based on new information about how the government calculated its population for 2020. But Judge Mehta said he was struggling to understand how the population figure wasn't moot since the court has already decided that the Indian Housing Block Grant data wasn't any good.

But the government "has since abandoned that methodology and announced a new approach that, presumably, seeks to rectify its error," Judge Mehta said.

"Prairie Band's insistence that it is entitled to more Title V funds is premised on the assumption that a statutorily compliant allocation method would produce an outcome that resembles the now discredited [Indian Housing Block Grant] data as proxy approach," the judge said. "But that assumption makes little sense."

Judge Mehta agreed to set aside the funds for the Prairie Band, the Shawnee Tribe and the Miccosukee Tribe in April to protect them from being dispersed while Treasury recalculated, after the D.C. Circuit declared that the department had likely shorted the tribes by doling out the pandemic aid based on data that falsely recorded some tribes as having zero members.

The dispute kicked off in mid-2020, when the Shawnee Tribe told an Oklahoma federal court that it wouldn't get the funds it was due under the coronavirus relief bill because then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin decided to use Indian Housing Block Grant population data as a guide to determine allotment, but that data was bad.

The case got kicked to D.C. and landed on Judge Mehta's docket, who dismissed it a few months later after finding that the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act wasn't reviewable under the Administrative Procedure Act. But after a trip up to the D.C. Circuit., an appellate panel found that the Treasury Department likely underpaid the tribes by basing its funding decisions on data that vastly underestimated their populations.

The government is in the process of developing a new methodology for calculating how to divvy up the relief funds, and it told Judge Mehta Thursday that it was about nine days away from announcing that new method to the court and the public.

Representatives for the parties did not immediately respond to request for comment Thursday.

The Shawnee Tribe is represented by Pilar Thomas, Jonathan P. Labukas and Nicole L. Simmons of Quarles & Brady LLP.

The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation is represented as an amicus by Michael G. Rossetti, Carol Heckman and James P. Blenk of Lippes Mathias Wexler Friedman LLP.

The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida is represented as an amicus by Daniel G. Jarcho, Daniel F. Diffley, George B. Abney I and Jean Richmann of Alston & Bird LLP.

The government is represented by Kuntal Cholera and Jason C. Lynch of the U.S. Department of Justice's Civil Division.

The case is Shawnee Tribe et al. v. Mnuchin et al., case number 1:20-cv-01999, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

--Editing by Stephen Berg.

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