A June 26, 2026 filing in the Ninth Circuit puts a threshold issue front and center: whether this case should remain in the court of appeals at all. Respondent Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) has filed a motion to dismiss in No. 25-8059, asking the court to terminate the proceeding before the merits are reached.

Although the docket entry provides only the motion’s caption-level detail, the filing itself is notable because motions to dismiss at the appellate level often turn on core gatekeeping doctrines that can decide a case without any substantive ruling on the challenged agency action. In petitions involving federal agencies, those arguments commonly include lack of jurisdiction, untimeliness, mootness, lack of final agency action, or failure to satisfy a statutory prerequisite for direct court-of-appeals review.

In the PHMSA context, those questions matter. The agency regulates hazardous materials transportation and pipeline safety, and challenges to its actions can implicate specialized review provisions, strict filing deadlines, and disputes over whether the challenged step is sufficiently final to be reviewed. A respondent agency moving to dismiss is often signaling that, in its view, the petitioner has chosen the wrong forum, arrived too late, or sought review of something not yet ripe for appellate intervention.

For litigators, this is the kind of motion worth watching because it highlights how administrative-law cases can be won or lost on procedure before anyone reaches Chevron-era, post-Chevron, or arbitrary-and-capricious arguments. Appellate dismissal motions force petitioners to prove the basics: that the court has statutory authority to hear the dispute, that the agency action is reviewable now, and that the petition was properly and timely filed. In regulated industries, especially those involving safety and transportation, those threshold issues can be as consequential as the underlying compliance dispute.

The broader takeaway is practical. Lawyers challenging federal agency conduct should map jurisdiction and reviewability at the outset, not after the record is assembled. Agencies, meanwhile, continue to use dismissal motions as an efficient early tool to narrow or eliminate exposure in high-stakes regulatory litigation. Whether or not PHMSA succeeds here, this filing is a reminder that appellate procedure is often the first battlefield in agency cases.

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