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form was out of date and therefore inaccurate. Respondent returned to the Navy in January 1987 and again was advised in error that eligibility would be determined under the old 2-year rule.

After receiving the erroneous information, respondent concluded that he could take on the extra work as a schoolbus driver in 1986 while still receiving full disability benefits for impaired vision so long as he kept his income for the previous and following years below the statutory level. He earned $19,936 during 1986, exceeding the statutory eligibility limit. OPM discontinued respondent's disability annuity on June 30, 1987. The annuity was restored on January 1, 1988, since respondent did not earn more than allowed by the statute in 1987. Respondent thus lost his disability payments for a 6-month period, for a total amount of $3,993.

Respondent appealed the denial of benefits to the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB). He argued that the erroneous advice given him by the Navy personnel should estop OPM and bar its finding him ineligible for benefits under the statute. The MSPB rejected this argument, noting that the officials who misinformed respondent were from the Navy, not OPM. The MSPB observed that, "[h]ad [respondent] directed his request for information to the OPM, presumably, he would have learned of the change in the law." The MSPB held that "OPM cannot be estopped from enforcing a statutorily imposed requirement for retirement eligibility." App. to Pet. for Cert. 22a. The MSPB denied respondent's petition for review, and respondent appealed to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

A divided panel of the Court of Appeals reversed, accepting respondent's contention that the misinformation from Navy personnel estopped the Government, and that the estoppel required payment of disability benefits despite the statutory provision to the contrary. The Court of Appeals acknowledged the longstanding rule that "ordinarily the government may not be estopped because of erroneous or unau

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thorized statements of government employees when the asserted estoppel would nullify a requirement prescribed by Congress." 862 F. 2d 294, 296 (1988). Nonetheless, the Court of Appeals focused on this Court's statement in an earlier case that "we are hesitant . . . to say that there are no cases" where the Government might be estopped. Heckler v. Community Health Services of Crawford County, Inc., 467 U. S. 51, 60 (1984). The Court of Appeals then discussed other Court of Appeals and District Court opinions that had applied estoppel against the Government.

The Court of Appeals majority decided that "[b]ased on the Supreme Court's acknowledgment that the estoppel against the government is not foreclosed and based on court of appeals rulings applying estoppel against the government, our view is that estoppel is properly applied against the government in the present case." 862 F. 2d, at 299. The Court reasoned that the provision of the out-of-date OPM form was "affirmative misconduct" that should estop the Government from denying respondent benefits in accordance with the statute. The facts of this case, it held, are "sufficiently unusual and extreme that no concern is warranted about exposing the public treasury to estoppel in broad or numerous categories of cases." Id., at 301. Judge Mayer dissented, stating that the majority opinion made "a chasm out of the crack the Supreme Court left open in Community Health Services," and that the award of benefits to respondent "contravenes the express mandate of Congress in 5 U. S. C. § 8337(d) . . . and Supreme Court precedent." Id., at 301, 303.

We granted certiorari, 493 U. S. 806 (1989).

II

From our earliest cases, we have recognized that equitable estoppel will not lie against the Government as it lies against private litigants. In Lee v. Munroe & Thornton, 7 Cranch 366 (1813), we held that the Government could not be bound

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by the mistaken representations of an agent unless it were clear that the representations were within the scope of the agent's authority. In The Floyd Acceptances, 7 Wall. 666 (1869), we held that the Government could not be compelled to honor bills of exchange issued by the Secretary of War where there was no statutory authority for the issuance of the bills. In Utah Power & Light Co. v. United States, 243 U. S. 389, 408-409 (1917), we dismissed the argument that unauthorized representations by agents of the Government estopped the United States to prevent erection of power houses and transmission lines across a public forest in violation of a statute: "Of this it is enough to say that the United States is neither bound nor estopped by acts of its officers or agents in entering into an arrangement or agreement to do or cause to be done what the law does not sanction or permit."

The principles of these and many other cases were reiterated in Federal Crop Ins. Corporation v. Merrill, 332 U. S. 380 (1947), the leading case in our modern line of estoppel decisions. In Merrill, a farmer applied for insurance under the Federal Crop Insurance Act to cover his wheat farming operations. An agent of the Federal Crop Insurance Corporation advised the farmer that his entire crop qualified for insurance, and the farmer obtained insurance through the Corporation. After the crop was lost, it was discovered that the agent's advice had been in error, and that part of the farmer's crop was reseeded wheat, not eligible for federal insurance under the applicable regulation. While we recognized the serious hardship caused by the agent's misinformation, we nonetheless rejected the argument that his representations estopped the Government to deny insurance benefits. We recognized that "not even the temptations of a hard case" will provide a basis for ordering recovery contrary to the terms of the regulation, for to do so would disregard "the duty of all courts to observe the conditions defined by Congress for charging the public treasury." Id., at 385–386.

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Despite the clarity of these earlier decisions, dicta in our more recent cases have suggested the possibility that there might be some situation in which estoppel against the Government could be appropriate. The genesis of this idea appears to be an observation found at the end of our opinion in Montana v. Kennedy, 366 U. S. 308 (1961). In that case, petitioner brought a declaratory judgment action seeking to establish his American citizenship. After discussing petitioner's two statutory claims at length, we rejected the final argument that a consular official's erroneous advice to petitioner's mother that she could not return to the United States while pregnant prevented petitioner from having been born in the United States and thus deprived him of United States citizenship. Our discussion was limited to the observation that in light of the fact that no legal obstacle prevented petitioner's mother from returning to the United States,

"what may have been only the consular official's wellmeant advice-'I am sorry, Mrs., you cannot [return to the United States] in that condition'-falls far short of misconduct such as might prevent the United States from relying on petitioner's foreign birth. In this situation, we need not stop to inquire whether, as some lower courts have held, there may be circumstances in which the United States is estopped to deny citizenship because of the conduct of its officials." Id., at 314-315. The proposition about which we did not "stop to inquire" in Kennedy has since taken on something of a life of its own. Our own opinions have continued to mention the possibility, in the course of rejecting estoppel arguments, that some type of "affirmative misconduct" might give rise to estoppel against the Government. See INS v. Hibi, 414 U. S. 5, 8 (1973) (per curiam) ("While the issue of whether 'affirmative misconduct' on the part of the Government might estop it from denying citizenship was left open in Montana v. Kennedy, 366 U. S. 308, 314, 315 (1961), no conduct of the sort

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there adverted to was involved here"); Schweiker v. Hansen, 450 U. S. 785, 788 (1981) (per curiam) (denying an estoppel claim for Social Security benefits on the authority of Merrill, supra, but observing that the Court "has never decided what type of conduct by a Government employee will estop the Government from insisting upon compliance with valid regulations governing the distribution of welfare benefits"); INS v. Miranda, 459 U. S. 14, 19 (1982) (per curiam) ("This case does not require us to reach the question we reserved in Hibi, whether affirmative misconduct in a particular case would estop the Government from enforcing the immigration laws"); Heckler v. Community Health Services, 467 U. S., at 60 ("We have left the issue open in the past, and do so again today").

The language in our decisions has spawned numerous claims for equitable estoppel in the lower courts. As JusTICE MARSHALL stated in dissent in Hansen, supra, "[t]he question of when the Government may be equitably estopped has divided the distinguished panel of the Court of Appeals in this case, has received inconsistent treatment from other Courts of Appeals, and has been the subject of considerable ferment." 450 U. S., at 791 (citing cases). Since that observation was made, federal courts have continued to accept estoppel claims under a variety of rationales and analyses. In sum, Courts of Appeals have taken our statements as an invitation to search for an appropriate case in which to apply estoppel against the Government, yet we have reversed every finding of estoppel that we have reviewed. Indeed, no less than three of our most recent decisions in this area have been summary reversals of decisions upholding estoppel claims. See Hibi, supra; Hansen, supra; Miranda, supra. Summary reversals of courts of appeals are unusual under any circumstances. The extraordinary number of such dispositions in this single area of the law provides a good indication that our approach to these cases has provided inadequate

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