Dissent

The Court holds today that the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act of 2000 authorizes a private suit for money damages against a state correctional officer in his individual capacity. The premise of the holding is that Tanzin v. Tanvir, 592 U. S. 43 (2020) — a case construing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 as applied to federal officers — transfers, on identical operative text, to a Spending Clause statute that applies to state officers. The conclusion follows, the Court reasons, because the words are the same and because Sossamon v. Texas, 563 U. S. 277 (2011), said only that "appropriate relief" excludes damages against sovereigns. Ante, at 13–15.

We do not read either Tanzin or Sossamon in that way, and we do not think the Court's holding is the better reading of the statute Congress actually enacted. The text Congress used is identical in vocabulary; it is not identical in legal context. RLUIPA reaches the States only by virtue of their voluntary acceptance of federal funds. Pennhurst State School & Hospital v. Halderman, 451 U. S. 1, 17 (1981). The reach of a statute so anchored is limited by the consent the recipient is presumed to have given. Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C., 596 U. S. 212, 219 (2022). For twenty-five years, every court of appeals to address the question has held that no funding recipient could have understood RLUIPA's "appropriate relief" formulation to mean that its officers — non-parties to the federal-state agreement — would be subject to personal damages liability. That consensus was not the product of accident or careless drafting. It was the product of the Spending Clause framework this Court has built and reaffirmed.

The Court's holding sets that framework aside in a single area, on the strength of an analogy drawn from a different statute applied to a different category of defendants. We would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals. We proceed in four parts: the text, the Sossamon–Cummings framework, the constitutional question, and the consequences of the Court's rule. We respectfully dissent.

I

The Court begins from the proposition that RLUIPA's operative text — "appropriate relief against a government" and the accompanying definition of "government" — is identical to RFRA's. Ante, at 5. It is. But the question presented is not whether the words are the same. It is whether the words speak with the clarity that Spending Clause legislation requires.

For the better part of half a century, this Court has held that a State accepting federal funds "must do so unambiguously," "enabl[ing] the States to exercise their choice knowingly, cognizant of the consequences of their participation." Pennhurst, 451 U. S., at 17; see South Dakota v. Dole, 483 U. S. 203, 207 (1987). The rule is not formal. It reflects what the Spending Clause is: an instrument by which the Federal Government bargains for state compliance with conditions in exchange for federal funds. The legitimacy of the bargain rests on the State's consent. The State's consent, in turn, rests on its understanding — at the moment of acceptance — of what it has agreed to.

Cummings v. Premier Rehab Keller, P.L.L.C. applied that framework to the question of remedies. The Court held that emotional-distress damages were not "appropriate relief" under a Spending Clause statute because the funding recipient was not on notice "that, by accepting federal funding, it exposes itself to liability of that nature." 596 U. S., at 213 (quoting Barnes v. Gorman, 536 U. S. 181, 187 (2002)). The notice the recipient must have, Cummings held, runs both to the kind of liability and to the conduct that gives rise to it. Id., at 213.

The Court today reads Cummings to ask only about the kind of remedy and not about the identity of the defendant. Ante, at 18. We do not see how the line can be drawn that way. The notice a funding recipient is presumed to have is notice of the bargain it has accepted. The bargain it has accepted runs to those who are within the contractual relationship — to the State itself, in the setting Sossamon described, one in which "the defendant is a sovereign" and "monetary damages are not" presumptively available. 563 U. S., at 286. To identify "appropriate relief" against the State's officers individually, one must locate a separate consent — given by someone — to that liability. The State cannot be presumed to have given it, because the State is not the person against whom the remedy would run. The officer cannot be presumed to have given it, because the officer is not a party to the federal-state agreement at all.

The Court answers this by importing Tanzin's reading of RFRA's identical text. Ante, at 5–7. RFRA, however, is not a Spending Clause statute as applied to federal officers. City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U. S. 507 (1997), confirmed that the version of RFRA before the Court in Tanzin applied only to the Federal Government, drawing its authority from Congress's plenary power to regulate the conduct of federal employees in their offices. The Federal Government's consent to be bound by congressional regulation of its own officers is not a Spending Clause consent at all. It is a different form of authority that produces a different doctrinal framework. As Chief Judge Sutton has explained, the proposition that Congress may regulate its own officers does not, of itself, establish that Congress may regulate state officers in the same fashion or by the same means. See Ali v. Adamson, 132 F. 4th 924 (CA6 2025). One can act with respect to one's own house without thereby being authorized to act with respect to a neighbor's.

The Court's holding therefore does not turn on identical text alone. It turns on the proposition that, in light of identical text, Congress's authority under the Spending Clause permits the same enforcement scheme it permits under the Federal Government's authority over federal officers. That is a constitutional proposition, not a textual one. We return to it in Part III.

The Court resists the supercharged clear-statement framework respondent offered. Ante, at 10–11. We do not view Pennhurst and Cummings as supercharging anything. They mean what they say. A State accepting federal funds must do so knowingly; Cummings's "liability of that nature" rule is one application of that requirement. The question is whether — when Louisiana renewed its acceptance of federal funds for its corrections facilities each year — it could reasonably have known that "appropriate relief" in § 2000cc-2(a) meant that its own officers, sued individually, would be subject to compensatory damages from the federal treasury.

We do not think it could have. Every court of appeals to address the question — beginning with the Eleventh Circuit's decision in Smith v. Allen, 502 F. 3d 1255 (CA11 2007), and continuing through the Sixth Circuit's decision in Ali v. Adamson in 2025 — held that no such remedy was authorized. Resp. Br. 12–18. The decisions were not on a single rationale; some rested on the direct-recipient theory, others on the kind of clear-statement reasoning that animates this dissent. But the bottom line was uniform. A State reading the appellate decisions construing the statute it had accepted — at the moment of each acceptance — would have understood that its officers faced injunctive relief, contempt sanctions, and the State's own substantive obligation, but not personal damages liability.

The Court answers that "[j]udicial construction of a statute ordinarily applies retroactively," ante, at 23 (quoting Rivers v. Roadway Express, Inc., 511 U. S. 298, 311 (1994)), so that what the Court holds today about RLUIPA's meaning is what RLUIPA has meant since 2000. We do not dispute the general rule. We dispute its application here. Rivers announced a rule about how this Court's authoritative interpretations apply to pending cases. It did not announce a rule that the Pennhurst clear-notice requirement is satisfied if some authoritative interpretation, decades after acceptance, would later reveal what the statute had clearly required all along. That cannot be the rule. If it were, Cummings's notice requirement would do no work. The State on accepting federal funds in 1992 was on notice, in Cummings's terms, of the remedy Cummings would later announce — because Cummings's announcement is, by retroactivity, what the statute meant in 1992. That is not how Cummings read itself. 596 U. S., at 220.

The Spending Clause rule requires clarity at the moment of acceptance. The unanimous appellate consensus is not "a form of qualified immunity" that immunizes officers from liability they should have foreseen. Tr. of Oral Arg. 123. It is evidence that no foreseeable reading of the statute supplied the clarity Pennhurst and Cummings require.

II

The Court treats Sossamon as a sovereign-immunity case whose context-dependent analysis of "appropriate relief" cuts in petitioner's favor outside the sovereign context. Ante, at 13–15. We read Sossamon differently.

Sossamon was decided unanimously on the proposition that "'[a]ppropriate relief' is open-ended and ambiguous about what types of relief it includes, as many lower courts have recognized." 563 U. S., at 286. The Court then turned to context. The context relevant to Sossamon was the sovereign-immunity setting, and the Court repeatedly framed its conclusion with reference to "the defendant" being "a sovereign." Ibid. But the Court's discussion of the contract analogy at page 290 was not so confined. There the Court explained that "applying ordinary contract principles here would make little sense because contracts with a sovereign are unique. They do not traditionally confer a right of action for damages to enforce compliance." 563 U. S., at 290. The reasoning was about the kind of contract from which the remedies inquiry proceeded. RLUIPA is a contract between sovereigns. The federal government bargains with the State. The bargain is the source of every obligation the statute imposes — including the obligation that gives rise to "appropriate relief" in the first place.

That contractual character of the underlying agreement does not vanish when the plaintiff sues an officer rather than the State. The officer's liability — if it exists — is a feature of the same bargain that gave rise to the underlying obligation. To say that the bargain confers a right of action for damages against the officer is to say that the bargain confers a right of damages against someone. The "contracts with a sovereign are unique" observation applies, on its own terms, to the inferred remedies that may run from such a bargain — full stop.

The Court replies that Tanzin distinguished Sossamon as "obviously different" because "this case features a suit against individuals, who do not enjoy sovereign immunity." Ante, at 14 (quoting 592 U. S., at 51). True. But Tanzin's defendant was a federal officer, and the suit there did not involve a contract between sovereigns. The "obvious difference" the Tanzin Court identified was the absence of sovereign-immunity considerations in a suit against an individual federal officer. That difference does not, on its own, dissolve the contract-of-sovereigns frame that operates in the Spending Clause context. The two doctrines coexist. Sossamon's defendant-focused framing supplied one reason that damages were not appropriate against the State. The contract-between-sovereigns framing supplied another. Both pointed in the same direction in Sossamon; one of them continues to point in the same direction here.

Cummings confirms the result. The presumption Cummings announces — "we may presume that a funding recipient is aware that, for breaching its Spending Clause 'contract' with the Federal Government, it will be subject to the usual contract remedies in private suits," 596 U. S., at 221 — is a presumption that runs to the recipient. The recipient agrees to be liable. The recipient's officers do not. To extend the Cummings presumption to officers — as the Court does today, ante, at 17–18 — is not to apply Cummings. It is to apply something Cummings did not say.

Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, 503 U. S. 60 (1992), does not save the Court's reading. Franklin was a suit against a Spending Clause recipient (the school district). It held that, against a recipient, damages are the presumptive remedy "absent clear direction to the contrary by Congress." 503 U. S., at 60. Cummings later confirmed that Franklin's rule operates within the contract framework, not in tension with it: the recipient is presumed to know that "usual contract remedies" attach. 596 U. S., at 214. Neither case authorizes extending that presumption to non-recipients. The Court's a fortiori reading of Franklin, ante, at 16, conflates the two questions Cummings kept distinct: whether the remedy is among those traditionally available against the recipient, and whether the remedy is sought against the recipient at all.

III

The Court reaches the constitutional question by way of three precedents — Salinas v. United States, 522 U. S. 52 (1997); Sabri v. United States, 541 U. S. 600 (2004); and Dixson v. United States, 465 U. S. 482 (1984) — and concludes that they authorize Congress to impose individual-capacity damages liability on state officers in federally funded programs. Ante, at 20–23. We do not read those cases that way.

Salinas upheld the application of 18 U. S. C. § 666(a)(1)(B) — the federal-funds bribery statute — to a deputy sheriff. Sabri extended that authority to a member of the general public who bribed a state-grantee official. Dixson held that officers of a nonprofit administering federal block grants are "public officials" for purposes of the federal bribery statute. The three cases share several features. Each construed a federal criminal statute targeting corruption in federally funded programs. Each rested on the Necessary and Proper Clause's authority to protect federal program integrity from being converted "into unearned private gain." Sabri, 541 U. S., at 601. None held that the Spending Clause supplies authority to create a private civil cause of action against non-recipient officers for ordinary violations of federally funded programs' substantive conditions.

Sabri drew the line in plain terms. The Court there described § 666(a)(2) as "authority to bring federal power to bear directly on individuals who convert public spending into unearned private gain, not a means for bringing federal economic might to bear on a State's own choices of public policy." 541 U. S., at 608 (emphasis added). The italicized portion is, we think, the controlling characterization. The federal-funds bribery statutes operate to protect federal expenditures from being diverted to private gain — a function for which federal authority has long been recognized. They do not operate as devices to convert a State's discretionary choices about its own institutions into bases for federal civil damages liability.

The Court answers that respondent's counsel acknowledged at oral argument that Sabri is "the outer limit" and that RLUIPA falls inside that limit. Ante, at 22; Tr. of Oral Arg. 109. We do not draw the same conclusion. The concession was that Sabri is the outer limit of Necessary and Proper authority to reach non-recipients. The concession does not extend the Sabri perimeter to civil causes of action of a kind Sabri did not address. The Sabri Court was at pains to confine its holding to a recognized anti-corruption category; this Court's subsequent decisions narrowing the reach of federal fraud and bribery statutes — Skilling v. United States, 561 U. S. 358 (2010); Kelly v. United States, 590 U. S. 391 (2020); Ciminelli v. United States, 598 U. S. 306 (2023); Snyder v. United States, 603 U. S. 1 (2024) — are difficult to reconcile with extending Sabri's reasoning past the anti-corruption frame the Court there identified.

The agent-third-party rule confirms the analytical gap. As a matter of well-settled agency doctrine — captured most prominently in the Restatement (Second) of Agency § 320 — an agent who knowingly violates a duty that his principal owes to a third party may be liable to the principal but not to the third party. Respondent's counsel acknowledged the rule at argument, and so did petitioner's. Tr. of Oral Arg. 17, 128–130. RLUIPA's operative structure presents a textbook application of that doctrine: the principal (the State) has accepted federal funds and agreed to substantive religious-accommodation obligations; the agents (the officers) act on the principal's behalf. The third party (the religious-exercise plaintiff) may have remedies against the principal for breach. He does not have remedies against the agent for the principal's breach absent some independent source of liability.

That independent source could have been supplied. As respondent's counsel acknowledged at argument, Congress could constitutionally have required Louisiana, as a condition of federal funding, to flow the substantive and remedial conditions of RLUIPA down through state employment contracts to its officers. Tr. of Oral Arg. 111. If Louisiana then accepted that condition — and accepted it knowingly — the resulting consent would supply the missing link in the chain of liability. But that is not what Congress did. RLUIPA does not require flow-down; it imposes the substantive condition on the State and authorizes private suit for "appropriate relief" against an undefined set of "government" defendants. The mechanism by which an officer became subject to personal liability was, on the face of the statute, left to inference.

The Court's contrary reading is that the State's acceptance of federal funds itself supplies the consent. Ante, at 17–18. But the State's acceptance of federal funds binds the State. It does not bind the State's officers — who did not, in any meaningful sense, accept the federal funds. The difficulty was identified at oral argument: the proposition that a Louisiana prison guard, on accepting employment, has thereby consented to the terms of the federal-state spending agreement "is based on a legal fiction." Tr. of Oral Arg. 25. The hiring of a prison guard is not the negotiation and consummation of a federal-state spending compact. The officer who shaved Damon Landor's head did not have notice — in any practical or constructive sense — that the Federal Government had bargained with his employer to subject him to personal damages liability. The State, as principal, may have had notice of some form of liability flowing from its breach. But the chain Cummings requires runs through the recipient to the contracting party. It does not run through the recipient to the agent.

Health & Hospital Corp. of Marion Cty. v. Talevski, 599 U. S. 166 (2023), does not bridge this gap. Talevski held that Spending Clause statutes can create rights enforceable under § 1983. Id., at 183. It did so on the premise that "Laws" means "laws," "no less today than in the 1870s." Id., at 171. But Talevski itself addressed suits against funding recipients — the nursing-home corporation and its agents standing in its operational role. Id., at 173–174. It did not authorize damages against non-recipient officers in their individual capacities under Spending Clause statutes that lack the specific authorization the Court found in the federal nursing-home statute. The Court today reads Talevski as establishing a general "structural compatibility" between Spending Clause statutes and individual-capacity enforcement. Ante, at 23. We do not read it that way. Talevski holds that certain Spending Clause rights are enforceable through § 1983; it does not transform the Cummings clear-notice framework into a mere formality.

Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U. S. 173 (1991), is similarly inapposite. Rust held that the federal government may, in funding a program, regulate the conduct of the employees who carry it out — that they "must perform their duties in accordance with the regulation's restrictions." Id., at 198–199. Rust did not hold that those employees may be personally sued for damages when they fail to do so. The Court today draws no such inference from Rust. Ante, at 22. But neither does Rust supply the affirmative authority the Court needs. The proposition that an employee must comply with program regulations while performing his job is the beginning of the analysis, not its end.

IV

A word about consequences.

The Court suggests that its reading of RLUIPA leaves "the constitutional framework" otherwise undisturbed. Ante, at 23. We do not think the holding can be so cabined.

If "appropriate relief" in a Spending Clause statute is "presumptively" damages-inclusive against non-recipient individual officers — and if Pennhurst's clear-notice rule is satisfied by the State's general acceptance of the substantive condition without specific consent from the officer — then the doctrinal foundation that has supported the Spending Clause framework for forty-four years is, in considerable measure, set aside. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the Federal Nursing Home Reform Act, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Public Health Service Act all use language sufficiently similar that the Court's reading invites the inference that "appropriate relief" against "officials" of state grantees in these contexts likewise includes individual-capacity damages. The hypotheticals pressed at oral argument — a coach allowing a transgender student on a women's sports team, an HHS family-affairs employee who has an abortion, with private causes of action for damages running directly against the individuals — are not idle. Tr. of Oral Arg. 37–38. They are the predictable next-step applications of the rule the Court announces today.

The Court does not engage these consequences directly. Petitioner's counsel did, under questioning. Asked whether his theory required that a coach in the Title IX hypothetical could be held personally liable in damages if the condition were constitutionally valid, counsel ultimately answered "yes." Tr. of Oral Arg. 53. The Court's analytical framework requires no less. We do not say the constitutional outer limit petitioner's theory would reach. We say only that the Court has not drawn the limit, and that the Salinas-Sabri-Dixson line — confined to a narrow anti-corruption category by this Court's own subsequent decisions — does not, in our view, supply the doctrinal grounding for a rule of much broader scope.

A related concern is structural. Louisiana, like a number of States, maintains its own state-law analog to RFRA that expressly provides money damages for violations of religious-exercise rights, including in correctional settings. Tr. of Oral Arg. 113–114. Petitioner did not pursue the state-law remedy. Whether that state remedy would have applied in this case is a question for Louisiana courts; respondent represented at argument that the State's statute is available, and petitioner's counsel responded that it "departs from the compelling-interest test for prison safety or security regulations." Tr. of Oral Arg. 138. The disagreement, on that record, is not one this Court can resolve. But the existence of state-law backstops bears on the question whether RLUIPA must be read to provide a damages remedy that Congress did not unambiguously create. Petitioners who can establish that they were unconstitutionally subjected to substantial burdens on their religious exercise are not without remedy. Where the conduct violates the Federal Constitution, § 1983 supplies a damages action against the officer in his individual capacity. Where the conduct violates state religious-freedom law, the State's own remedy attaches. Where the conduct violates RLUIPA's substantive condition, the funding recipient — the State, in this case — remains subject to injunctive relief and to the termination of federal funding that this Court has described as "the typical remedy for noncompliance with a federal statute enacted pursuant to the Spending Clause." Talevski, 599 U. S., at 167.

These are not theoretical. Each is a working part of the framework Congress assembled when it enacted RLUIPA against the backdrop of the existing Spending Clause doctrine, the existing § 1983 doctrine, and the existing state-law landscape. The premise of the Court's holding is that none of these is sufficient — that without individual-capacity damages, RLUIPA is, in petitioner's framing, "totally meaningless." Tr. of Oral Arg. 14. We do not see how that premise can be defended on the actual record. RLUIPA has, on the Court's own description, been the subject of repeated successful prospective enforcement. Holt v. Hobbs, 574 U. S. 352 (2015); Ramirez v. Collier, 595 U. S. 411 (2022). The class of cases for which damages provide the only effective relief is a real but bounded subset. Congress, having chosen the language it did and having chosen the funding mechanism it did, made a judgment about how to balance enforcement against the constitutional sensitivities of regulating state institutions through the spending power. That judgment is one this Court is not free to revisit by inference.

* * *

The Court's opinion today reads RLUIPA's "appropriate relief" language to encompass a remedy — individual-capacity damages against non-recipient state officers — that no court of appeals has, over the last quarter century, found in that language. The Court reads Tanzin to transfer where Tanzin's constitutional framework does not transfer. The Court reads Sossamon to confine its analysis to sovereign defendants where Sossamon's reasoning extended beyond. The Court reads Salinas, Sabri, and Dixson to authorize what those cases conspicuously declined to authorize: the application of federal civil liability to state-officer non-recipients outside the anti-corruption category for which Necessary and Proper authority has historically supported it.

What occurred at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center was wrong. Everyone agrees on that. The question this case presents is one of remedy, not of substance. The remedy Congress wrote — read against the framework Congress legislated within — does not authorize the suit the Court allows today. We would affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

We respectfully dissent.