Federal Tort Claims Act

The Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) is a 1946 law that Congress passed in order to let people sue the federal government over certain actions taken by federal employees that lead to personal injury or property damage. (For non-lawyers, a tort is a wrongful act that can allow someone to file a lawsuit.) Absent the law, the federal government cannot be sued because of a legal doctrine called sovereign immunity. Private employers, by contrast, can usually be sued for the actions of their employees. Before 1946, if someone was harmed by a federal government employee, their recourse was to sue the employee directly (who may lack the means to provide adequate compensation) or ask Congress to pass a “private bill” specifically to provide them relief.

Predictably, asking Congress to individually right the wrongs committed by federal employees was slow and led to unfair outcomes. Also, as the federal government grew rapidly during the Great Depression and World War II, Congress couldn’t keep up with all the worthy requests for compensation. The FTCA now allows people to sue in a federal court for things that were considered torts under state laws.

The FTCA is a very complicated statute that has been amended multiple times in the decades since its adoption. Much of its complexity comes from the scope of its exceptions.  One of these exceptions is the “discretionary function” exception. The general intent behind the exception is to prevent lawsuits against the federal government that second-guess laws or regulations that are otherwise constitutional but cause some harm. Congress didn’t want the federal courts to become a place where policy decisions were re-hashed or have federal employees face suit when they were doing their job as directed by Congress.

In the original FTCA, Congress included an exception for “intentional torts.” While the thought was to keep the federal government from being subject to lawsuit when any federal employee got into a fight or hurt someone intentionally, it became apparent that the exception allowed federal agents to get away with horrible abuses.

In the early days of the Nixon administration’s War on Drugs, federal agents without uniforms and without warrants invaded the homes of several innocent Illinois families. The wrong-house raids made national news. In 1974, Congress added an exception to the FTCA’s exceptions in order to allow for claims when law enforcement commits “assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest, abuse of process, or malicious prosecution.”

As with other legal mechanisms to hold the government accountable, courts have in recent decades interpreted the FTCA in ways that strip it of much of its power, largely by expanding the “discretionary function” exception beyond what Congress intended. Whether the FTCA actually provides the remedy Congress intended depends not on the language of the statute but on where in the country the language is being read.

In 2025, IJ secured a win at the U.S. Supreme Court to push back against this weakening of the FTCA. An FBI SWAT team raided Trina Martin’s home by mistake while looking for another address. Trina sued under the FTCA, but the 11th Circuit dismissed her case. Even though Congress amended the FTCA specifically in response to wrong-house raids just like the one Trina suffered, the 11th Circuit said that, because raiding the house involved mistakes that could be characterized as a “policy decision,” it was excluded by the discretionary function exemption.

IJ took Trina’s case to the Supreme Court, which unanimously reversed the 11th Circuit and ordered it to try again.