2 GROSS v. FBL FINANCIAL SERVICES, INC.
Syllabus
house and Desert Palace, Inc. v. Costa, 539 U. S. 90, 94–95. This
Court has never applied Title VII’s burden-shifting framework to
ADEA claims and declines to do so now. When conducting statutory
interpretation, the Court “must be careful not to apply rules applica-
ble under one statute to a different statute without careful and criti-
cal examination.” Federal Express Corp. v. Holowecki, 552 U. S. ___,
___. Unlike Title VII, which has been amended to explicitly author-
ize discrimination claims where an improper consideration was “a
motivating factor” for the adverse action, see 42 U. S. C. §§2000e–
2(m) and 2000e–5(g)(2)(B), the ADEA does not provide that a plaintiff
may establish discrimination by showing that age was simply a moti-
vating factor. Moreover, Congress neglected to add such a provision
to the ADEA when it added §§2000e–2(m) and 2000e–5(g)(2)(B) to Ti-
tle VII, even though it contemporaneously amended the ADEA in
several ways. When Congress amends one statutory provision but
not another, it is presumed to have acted intentionally, see EEOC v.
Arabian American Oil Co., 499 U. S. 244, 256, and “negative implica-
tions raised by disparate provisions are strongest” where the provi-
sions were “considered simultaneously when the language raising the
implication was inserted,” Lindh v. Murphy, 521 U. S. 320, 330.
Pp. 5–6.
(b) The ADEA’s text does not authorize an alleged mixed-motives
age discrimination claim. The ordinary meaning of the ADEA’s re-
quirement that an employer took adverse action “because of” age is
that age was the “reason” that the employer decided to act. See
Hazen Paper Co. v. Biggins, 507 U. S. 604, 610. To establish a dispa-
rate-treatment claim under this plain language, a plaintiff must
prove that age was the “but-for” cause of the employer’s adverse deci-
sion. See Bridge v. Phoenix Bond & Indemnity Co., 553 U. S. ___,
___. It follows that under §623(a)(1), the plaintiff retains the burden
of persuasion to establish that “but-for” cause. This Court has previ-
ously held this to be the burden’s proper allocation in ADEA cases,
see, e.g., Kentucky Retirement Systems v. EEOC, 554 U. S. ___, ___–
___, ___–___, and nothing in the statute’s text indicates that Congress
has carved out an exception for a subset of ADEA cases. Where a
statute is “silent on the allocation of the burden of persuasion,” “the
ordinary default rule [is] that plaintiffs bear the risk of failing to
prove their claims.” Schaffer v. Weast, 546 U. S. 49, 56. Hence, the
burden of persuasion is the same in alleged mixed-motives cases as in
any other ADEA disparate-treatment action. Pp. 7–9.
(c) This Court rejects petitioner’s contention that the proper inter-
pretation of the ADEA is nonetheless controlled by
Price Waterhouse,
which initially established that the burden of persuasion shifted in
alleged mixed-motives Title VII claims. It is far from clear that the