On July 23, 2025 D.C. Circuit Court affirmed D.C. District Court’s dismissal of an age discrimination suit I filed against the Washington Post for an article it published in 2021 depicting me as a liar for misreporting my age on a candidate questionnaire. (Case 24-7190).
The circuit court ruled that I lacked standing because I failed to exhaust administrative remedies, even though there is no identifiable federal government agency with jurisdiction to hear discrimination claims against newspaper corporations.
At the district court level, I argued that because the questionnaire wouldn’t submit for publication without reporting a valid age, it was compulsory. Since compelling candidates to report their age is inherently discriminatory, it’s immaterial how they report it, because the Post has no right to compel someone to report their age under the Age Discrimination Act of 1975, 42 U.S.C. 6101-6107 (“The Act”).
The district court agreed with the Post that it isn’t covered by the Act, despite explicit statutory language that bars age discrimination by any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance “by way of grant, entitlement, loan, or contract [emphasis added] other than a contract of insurance or guaranty,” 42 U.S.C. 6103(a)(4).
Instead the court relied upon precedents stemming from cases brought under the Rehabilitation Act, Section 504, 29 U.S.C. § 794, whose implementing regulations exclude procurement contracts of the type that the Post negotiates with the federal government from its reach.
Thus a plain reading of applicable law has been substituted with language from another statute’s implementing regulations. Not only have my rights been read out of the Age Discrimination Act by this legal sleight of hand. So too have the rights of millions of other Americans over forty who want to withhold their age from institutions that don’t have a statutory or regulatory need to know.