National Credit Union Admin. v. First Nat. Bank & Trust Co., 522 U.S. 479, 20 (1998)

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498

NATIONAL CREDIT UNION ADMIN. v. FIRST NAT. BANK & TRUST CO.

Opinion of the Court

the Congress that enacted the McFadden Act was concerned about the competitive position of securities dealers. See 479 U. S., at 403. The provisions at issue in each of these cases, moreover, could be said merely to be safety-and-soundness provisions, enacted only to protect national banks and their depositors and without a concern for competitive effects. We nonetheless did not hesitate to find standing.

We therefore cannot accept petitioners' argument that respondents do not have standing because there is no evidence that the Congress that enacted § 109 was concerned with the competitive interests of commercial banks. To accept that argument, we would have to reformulate the "zone of interests" test to require that Congress have specifically intended to benefit a particular class of plaintiffs before a plaintiff from that class could have standing under the APA to sue. We have refused to do this in our prior cases, and we refuse to do so today.

Petitioners also mistakenly rely on our decision in Air Courier Conference v. Postal Workers, 498 U. S. 517 (1991). In Air Courier, we held that the interest of Postal Service employees in maximizing employment opportunities was not within the "zone of interests" to be protected by the postal monopoly statutes, and hence those employees did not have standing under the APA to challenge a Postal Service regulation suspending its monopoly over certain international operations. See id., at 519. We stated that the purposes of the statute were solely to increase the revenues of the Post Office and to ensure that postal services were provided in a manner consistent with the public interest, see id., at 526- 527. Only those interests, therefore, and not the interests of Postal Service employees in their employment, were "arguably within the zone of interests to be protected" by the statute. Cf. Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, 497 U. S. 871, 883 (1990) (stating that an agency reporting company would not have prudential standing to challenge the agency's failure to comply with a statutory mandate to con-

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