Administrative agencies have long been criticized by some for taking too long to issue and implement regulations. Of course, there are often justifiable reasons cited for agencies to take time before they act. Agencies are charged with administering complex statutory schemes. Rulemakings generally follow the Administrative Procedure Act's (APA's) notice-and-comment procedure, which entails soliciting input and marshaling information from the public, subject-matter experts, and other stakeholders. It takes time to analyze that information, balance competing interests, and draft appropriate regulatory language. Agencies may have limited resources, and there may be other, more pressing matters requiring their time and attention. Some delay is necessary for reasoned decisionmaking. However, excessive delay by agencies can raise serious policy concerns. Delays in rulemaking may violate statutory directives when Congress has ordered an agency to regulate in a particular area. If the regulatory area concerns the environment or public health, for instance, delays can endanger the public by leaving known harms unaddressed. For regulated industries, excessive delay can create uncertainty, inhibit long-term planning, and cause economic harm. Habitual delays can undermine public trust in agency process. In addition, not all delays are justified by deliberative process. Agency delays may be the result of capture by special interests, administrative error, misplaced priorities, or simple mismanagement. Excessive agency delay can therefore undermine the effectiveness of the statutory regime created by Congress. Congress has a number of tools that it can use to combat agency delay. To encourage agencies to act in a timely fashion, Congress may set nonbinding time frames or statutory deadlines for particular agency actions, or impose penalties on agencies should they fail to meet those deadlines. Even if Congress does not impose any specific timing requirements for a required agency action, the agency still must act within a "reasonable time" under the APA. Persons alleging unreasonable delay by agencies may sue in court to compel agency action. However, the recourse such individuals will have, if any, depends on the statutory scheme and the severity of the delay. In the absence of specific deadlines, most courts employ a multifactor balancing test to determine whether the agency's delay is "unreasonable"; this test examines, among other things, the length of the delay, the importance of the regulation at issue, and the interests harmed by the delay. Courts are generally deferential to agencies in this analysis. In other situations, such as when Congress has imposed a specific statutory deadline, courts are more willing to compel agency action, with some courts holding that an order compelling agency action is mandatory whenever a statutory deadline is violated. This report provides an overview of the various tools that Congress can use to encourage agencies to act within a particular time frame. It then analyzes how those tools inform judicial analysis of challenges to agency actions as "unreasonably delayed" or "unlawfully withheld" under the APA. The report concludes by noting that lawsuits are not the only way to force agencies to issue delayed regulations; Congress can also use political pressure, its oversight powers, or its power of the purse to encourage the agency to act. When drafting legislation granting agencies the power to engage in rulemaking, Congress can employ a variety of means that create incentives for the agency to issue regulations in a timely manner. At one end of the spectrum, Congress may decline to impose any timing requirements on the agency. In that case—presuming that the statute imposes some nondiscretionary duty to act —the agency will be subject only to the APA's general requirement that it complete its rulemaking within a "reasonable time." Courts have interpreted this requirement deferentially, requiring an "egregious" delay before they will compel an agency to issue a proposed or final rule. If the APA's default rule of reasonableness is not enough, Congress may choose to impose more stringent timing requirements on the agency, such as a nonbinding time frame or an explicit statutory deadline. Courts are generally more willing to order the agency to act by a date certain when the agency is subject to a statutory time frame or deadline. If Congress considers a matter so important and time-sensitive that a deadline alone is insufficient, it may enact penalties that will ensue should the agency miss the deadline. By imposing deadlines or other timing restraints on an agency, legislators face a potential tradeoff between timely action and deliberative process. If Congress dictates a deadline that is too constrained, it may decrease the thoroughness of agency decisionmaking and the quality of the final rule. Indeed, a principal reason that Congress may wish to delegate a matter to an agency is the complexity of the issue and the agency's expertise in a specialized area. Given its expertise, the agency is often in a better position to know how long it will take to investigate a matter, seek public comment and technical input, and develop a well-crafted rule on a particular issue. Perhaps for this reason, Congress declines to impose any specific statutory deadline for the vast majority of federal regulations. That said, given the potential costs of agency delay, Congress may not always want to leave the timing of regulations entirely up to the agency's discretion. If Congress decides not to impose a firm deadline, but still wants to offer a general expectation of how much time is reasonable, it may impose a nonbinding time frame on the agency. For example, with respect to the processing of immigration benefit applications, a statute states that "[i]t is the sense of Congress that the processing" of such applications by the agency "should be completed not later than 180 days after the initial filing of the application." Several commentators support such nonbinding time frames—whether set by the agency itself or by Congress—as encouraging timely agency action without the "problematic" aspects of true deadlines, which are less flexible and can sometimes prove unrealistic in practice. Because congressionally established time frames are one of the factors that courts consider in determining whether to compel an agency to act, courts are generally more likely to compel agency action when a suggested time frame is violated than if no time frame was imposed by Congress. Nonbinding time frames thus offer a middle ground between imposing no timing guidance at all and a hard statutory deadline. When Congress chooses to control the timing of agency action, the most common means is the statutory deadline: legislation explicitly requiring that an agency shall take a particular action by a certain time. Deadlines are frequently used with respect to environmental regulations and other public health matters. For example, as part of the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was given twelve months to issue regulatory guidance on motor vehicle inspection and maintenance requirements that states could use to comply with national air quality standards. Similarly, as part of the Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (passed in response to the Exxon Valdez oil tanker accident), Congress ordered the Coast Guard to issue regulatory standards for tank level and pressure monitoring devices within one year. Deciding how long a particular deadline should be can be a complicated issue for Congress. On average, an administrative rulemaking takes somewhere between one and two years . However, there is significant variation in the length of rulemaking depending on the agency and the particular rule. Many statutory deadlines are roughly the length of an average rulemaking, that is, between 12 and 24 months. However, deadlines that are shorter or longer are common. In addition to (or in lieu of) setting a deadline for promulgation of a final rule, Congress may also enact separate deadlines for different stages of the rulemaking process. For example, Congress may set a deadline by which the agency must issue a proposed rule or specify a maximum length for the public comment period. If speed is of paramount importance, Congress can exempt a particular rule from the usual procedural requirements of notice-and-comment rulemaking. This could have a cost in that the regulation might be formed with less deliberation and input from stakeholders and the public. Even absent an express congressional exemption, agencies may claim that a looming deadline constitutes "good cause" to forgo notice-and-comment under the APA. Although the mere existence of a statutory deadline will not suffice to establish good cause, courts have permitted deviations from standard notice-and-comment rulemaking procedures "where congressional deadlines are very tight and where the statute is particularly complicated." Evidence of the practical effectiveness of statutory deadlines is mixed. Several studies have found that agencies miss statutory deadlines much more often than they meet them. However, there is empirical evidence showing that, other things being equal, the presence of a statutory deadline does correlate with faster agency rulemaking. This effect is fairly modest, though—on average, agencies act a few months faster when subject to a deadline. As discussed below, explicit statutory deadlines do make it significantly easier for litigants to obtain a court order compelling an agency to act. The most stringent means that Congress can use to encourage agency action are so-called "hammer provisions." These statutes not only set hard deadlines for an agency to act, but also impose a specific penalty (the "hammer") on the agency if it fails to meet the deadline. The particular penalty imposed varies, but often the hammer comes in the form of a specific alternative regulatory result. For example, the Hazardous and Solid Waste Amendments of 1984 provided that if regulations of certain waste disposal methods were not issued by the deadline, those disposal methods would simply be prohibited outright. Similarly, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 specified that if final rules regarding food labeling were not promulgated within 24 months, the agency's proposed regulations would be treated as the binding final regulations. The hammer imposed need not be regulatory in nature, however: one statute, for example, withheld a percentage of the budget for certain agency offices until the agency issued a final rule. Hammer provisions, even more than statutory deadlines, appear to be fairly effective at encouraging agencies to accelerate their decisionmaking and place a matter foremost among the agency's priorities.