Open Meetings of First Lady’s Panel Ordered : Government: Ruling is expected to have little impact since it does not apply to dozens of smaller task force units working on health care plans.

A federal judge Wednesday said that the health care reform task force headed by Hillary Rodham Clinton must open its meetings to the public, ruling that, because Mrs. Clinton is not a government employee, some sessions in which she participates must comply with a federal law requiring open meetings.

The ruling by federal District Judge Royce C. Lamberth will have little impact because it applies only to the task force itself and not to the dozens of smaller groups working on the Administration’s health care plans.

In addition, Lamberth ruled that the open-meetings law applies only to task force sessions whose purpose is “information gathering.” The group will be allowed to meet in private when it debates proposals for the President.

Administration officials already had said that the task force, which has met only once since being established, would conduct some public hearings later this spring.

The task force, made up of Mrs. Clinton, several Cabinet members and a small group of senior White House staff members, has a May deadline for producing a health care reform plan. It has delegated its work to a large number of subgroups.

Federal law allows government officials to meet in private and to meet secretly with private citizens. But panels officially made up of both government employees and private citizens must comply with open-meeting rules under a law, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, designed to limit special-interest influence on decisions.

Although the ruling will have little effect, the case has attracted considerable attention, at least within the small circle of policy experts and industry lobbyists who have been grasping for any bits of information about the highly secretive deliberations.

The lawsuit was brought by a conservative legal organization, a small group of doctors from Arizona and a largely unknown Virginia-based organization that espouses a “market environment free of costly government regulations” for health care.

The Administration had argued that the law should not apply to the First Lady because she is the “functional equivalent of a government employee.”

But Lamberth disagreed. In writing the advisory committee law, “Congress did not exclude the First Lady; nor did it then decree--and it has not decreed since--that the President’s spouse qualifies as an employee or even a quasi-employee of the federal government,” he wrote.

But, Lamberth added, because the working groups are made up only of federal employees, the advisory committee law does not apply to them. Nor does the law forbid the working groups from discussing the plan with private citizens, including Mrs. Clinton.