During the 113 th Congress, the Obama Administration announced that certain federal agencies would not enforce specific aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) for a period of time in order to allow the public to further prepare for proper compliance with the law in the future. This has led to numerous questions regarding how courts treat administrative delays of regulatory programs. This report will discuss the general legal principles applicable to judicial review of administrative delays in two different contexts: (1) delays in meeting a specific statutory deadline for implementing rules or completing particular adjudications, and (2) delays in the enforcement of a provision of law on the public at large. The report will then address whether the procedures outlined in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) apply to these delays. The first type of agency delay—delays in meeting a specific statutory deadline for implementing rules or completing particular adjudications—arises when Congress has enacted a statute that expressly requires an agency to take a specific action by a specific date. For example, the ACA includes a number of mandatory rulemaking provisions that require agencies to issue certain substantive rules by certain dates. An agency's failure to meet this type of statutory deadline is generally assessed pursuant to a multi-factor balancing test established in Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC , discussed further below. The second type of delay occurs when an agency delays the enforcement of a statutory prohibition or requirement that Congress has imposed on third parties. An agency generally implements this delay by announcing that, as an enforcement policy, the agency will not pursue or punish non-compliance with the law for a certain period of time. The underlying law takes legal effect and conduct in violation of that law remains unlawful, but the agency—in an exercise of its enforcement discretion—does not take action in response to violations of the provision until after a certain date. For example, although a provision in the ACA requiring that health plans meet certain minimum coverage requirements became effective in January 2014, the Center for Medicaid Services has announced that it will not enforce these requirements for certain plans for at least one year. This type of enforcement delay would generally be assessed, if at all, pursuant to standards established for determining whether non-enforcement decisions are "committed to agency discretion by law" under the APA. Given this framework, it would appear that the context in which an agency delay arises may alter the manner in which the court evaluates the delay. We now turn to the question of the legal standards to be applied in the two identified scenarios: where an agency delay has resulted in the failure to meet a statutory deadline, and where an agency is relying on enforcement discretion to delay the enforcement of a duly enacted law. The APA does not provide concrete time limits for agency action—instead, it leaves most deadlines for Congress to establish, if at all, in the particular agency's enabling statute. Even absent a specific deadline, however, the APA states that an agency must "proceed to conclude a matter presented to it ... within a reasonable time." Further, Section 706 of the APA states that courts shall "compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed." As such, the APA provides individuals with a cause of action when an agency takes an unreasonable amount of time to act. However, a claim of unreasonable delay can only be brought against an agency for actions that the agency is legally obligated to take. The Supreme Court has stated that "a claim under § 706(1) [of the APA] can proceed only when a plaintiff asserts that an agency failed to take a discrete agency action that it is required to take." If the decision to act is "committed to agency discretion by law," then no claim can be made against the agency for failing to take such an action. In other words, an agency must be required to act by law in order to establish a claim that the agency has unreasonably delayed in acting. Cases involving claims that an agency has unreasonably delayed taking required actions are typically brought when an agency has failed to meet a statutorily mandated deadline. For example, if Congress requires an agency to promulgate rules by a certain date, or to complete adjudications within a specified period of time, a claimant may file suit against the agency for unreasonable delay if the statutory deadline has passed. Although courts generally are more willing to compel an agency to act if it has missed a statutory deadline, they will not necessarily do so. Instead, courts will often undertake a balancing test to determine whether the court should force the agency to act. The balancing test commonly used by most federal courts is referred to as the TRAC factor test, after the case in which the test was first established, Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC (" TRAC "). Under such an analysis, a court will assess whether Congress has established any indication for how quickly the agency should proceed; determine whether a danger to human health is implicated by the delay; consider the agency's competing priorities; evaluate the interests prejudiced by the delay; and determine whether the agency has treated any party less favorably than others. A court balances these TRAC factors on a case-by-case basis to determine whether agency action should be compelled. It can be difficult to predict which way a court will decide any particular case as "[t]here is no per se rule as to how long is too long to wait for agency action." Courts will often take a missed deadline into heavy consideration, but, generally, will still evaluate the remaining factors when determining the outcome of the case. If Congress is not satisfied with relying on judicial enforcement of statutory deadlines, Congress may insert "hammer" provisions into the text of certain statutes. These provisions dictate what is to happen if a regulatory deadline is missed. The consequences for missing a deadline vary. Some laws establish a regulatory scheme that will be put in place if an agency misses a deadline, while others mandate that the agency's proposed rule will go into effect if a final rule is not promulgated by the deadline. Finally, at least one law has withheld funding from an agency until certain rules are promulgated. Although these provisions can force an agency to act quickly, they can also be challenging for Congress to establish due to the extensive time that is often required to develop an effective regulatory scheme. In addition to these hammer provisions, Congress may always use political pressure, congressional hearings, and the appropriations process to influence agencies to act with more urgency. These types of administrative delay are relatively common as agencies may encounter difficulties in meeting statutory deadlines. However, they differ fundamentally from situations where agencies use "administrative enforcement discretion" when deciding whether to enforce a statute or regulatory scheme. When an agency decides not to enforce a statute against regulated parties for a certain period of time, courts are likely to review this as an act of enforcement discretion. Federal agencies generally have flexibility in determining whether and when to initiate an enforcement action against a third party for violations of a law the agency is charged with administering. This freedom in setting enforcement priorities, allocating resources, and making specific strategic enforcement decisions is commonly described as "administrative enforcement discretion" and arises principally from a combination of the President's constitutionally assigned obligation to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," and the APA's command that courts avoid reviewing discretionary agency decisions. Discretionary enforcement activities may include any range of actions, including, but not limited to, the imposition of penalties or the initiation of an agency investigation, prosecution, adjudication, lawsuit, or audit. In situations where an agency refrains from bringing an enforcement action, courts have historically been cautious in reviewing the agency determination—generally holding that such non-enforcement decisions are "committed to agency discretion" and therefore not subject to judicial review under the APA. The seminal case on this topic is Heckler v. Cha ney , a Supreme Court case in which death row inmates challenged the Food and Drug Administration's refusal to initiate an enforcement action to block the use of certain drugs in lethal injection. In rejecting the challenge, the Supreme Court held that "an agency's decision not to prosecute or enforce ... is a decision generally committed to an agency's absolute discretion." The Court noted that agency enforcement decisions involve a "complicated balancing of a number of factors which are peculiarly within [the agency's] expertise," including whether agency resources are best spent on this violation or another, whether the agency is likely to succeed if it acts, whether the particular enforcement action requested best fits the agency's overall policies, and, indeed, whether the agency has enough resources to undertake the action at all. An agency generally cannot act against each technical violation of the statute it is charged with enforcing. Agencies, the court reasoned, are "far better equipped" to evaluate "the many variables involved in the proper ordering of its priorities" than are the courts. Consistent with this deferential view, the Heckler opinion proceeded to establish the standard for the reviewability of agency non-enforcement decisions, holding that an "agency's decision not to take enforcement action should be presumed immune from judicial review ." However, the Court also clearly indicated that the presumption against judicial review of agency non-enforcement decisions may be overcome in certain situations. The Heckler Court suggested that a court may review an agency enforcement determination "where the substantive statute has provided guidelines for the agency to follow in exercising its enforcement powers." Additionally, the Court suggested that judicial review of non-enforcement may be appropriate when an agency has "consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities." However, lower federal courts have only rarely had the opportunity to clarify these exceptions to Heckle r's presumption of non-reviewability. It should be noted that dismissal of a challenge to an agency non-enforcement decision under the APA is not necessarily recognition by the court that the agency was acting within its authority. A legal distinction must be made between a decision in which a court reviews the merits of a challenge and approves of the agency action or inaction, and one in which a court dismisses the challenge for lack of jurisdiction before reviewing the merits.