Cite as: 527 U. S. 229 (1999)
Opinion of the Court
investigation is equally strong whether they are being questioned by employees in NASA's OIG or by other representatives of the agency. And, as we indicated in Weingarten, representation is not the equivalent of obstruction. See 420 U. S., at 262-264. In many cases the participation of a union representative will facilitate the factfinding process and a fair resolution of an agency investigation—or at least Congress must have thought so.
Whenever a procedural protection plays a meaningful role in an investigation, it may impose some burden on the investigators or agency managers in pursuing their mission. We must presume, however, that Congress took account of the policy concerns on both sides of the balance when it decided to enact the IGA and, on the heels of that statute, § 7114(a)(2)(B).9
9 The dissent does not dispute much of our analysis; it indicates that NASA-OIG is an "ar[m]" of NASA "work[ing] to promote overall agency concerns." Post, at 260. The dissent's premise is that the Authority determined that the phrase "representative of the agency" means "representative of . . . agency [management]," and that this issue is now uncon-tested. See post, at 246-247, 248-259, 262. But see post, at 251, n. 3. Putting aside the fact that NASA's and NASA-OIG's construction of the statute—however one interprets their argument—is very much in dispute, see Brief for Respondent American Federation of Government Employees, AFL-CIO 26-32; Brief for Respondent FLRA 23-25, 31, and the rule that litigants cannot bind us to an erroneous interpretation of federal legislation, see Roberts v. Galen of Va., Inc., 525 U. S. 249, 253 (1999), we have ignored neither the actual rationale of the Authority's decision in this case nor NASA's and NASA-OIG's arguments before this Court. Focusing on its plain reasoning, we cannot fairly read the Authority's decision as turning on whether NASA "management" was involved. The Authority emphasized that FSLMRS rights do not depend on "the organizational entity within the agency to whom the person conducting the examination reports"; and in discussing NASA-OIG's role within the agency, the Author-ity's decision repeatedly refers to NASA headquarters together with its components—that is, to the agency as a whole. 50 F. L. R. A., at 615-616; id., at 621 (noting "the investigative role that OIG's perform for the agency" and concluding that NASA-OIG "represents" not only its own interests, "but ultimately NASA [headquarters] and its subcomponent of-
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