Cite as: 505 U. S. 788 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
to the President under 22 U. S. C. § 1978(a)(1) automatically triggered sanctions by the Secretary of State under 16 U. S. C. § 1821(e)(2)(B), regardless of any discretionary action the President himself decided to take. Japan Whaling, supra, at 226. Under 13 U. S. C. § 141(a), by contrast, the Secretary's report to the President has no direct effect on reapportionment until the President takes affirmative steps to calculate and transmit the apportionment to Congress.
Appellees claim that because the President exercises no discretion in calculating the numbers of Representatives, his "role in the statutory scheme was intended to have no substantive content," and the final action is the Secretary's, not the President's. Brief for Appellees 86. They cite the Senate Report for the bill that became 2 U. S. C. § 2a, which states that the President is to report "upon a problem in mathematics which is standard, and for which rigid specifications are provided by Congress itself, and to which there can be but one mathematical answer." S. Rep. No. 2, 71st Cong., 1st Sess., at 4-5.
The admittedly ministerial nature of the apportionment calculation itself does not answer the question whether the apportionment is foreordained by the time the Secretary gives her report to the President. To reiterate, § 2a does not curtail the President's authority to direct the Secretary in making policy judgments that result in "the decennial census"; he is not expressly required to adhere to the policy decisions reflected in the Secretary's report. Because it is the President's personal transmittal of the report to Congress that settles the apportionment, until he acts there is no determinate agency action to challenge. The President, not the Secretary, takes the final action that affects the States.
Indeed, it is clear that Congress thought it was important to involve a constitutional officer in the apportionment process. Congress originally considered a bill requiring the Secretary to report the apportionment calculation directly
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