Opinion ID: 3168180
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Effect of a Motion for Reconsideration

Text: In many situations, a timely request for reconsideration is sufficient to render an agency decision non-final and thereby suspend the running of the appeal period. See, e.g., Locomotive Eng’rs, 482 U.S. at 284–85 (explaining that under the Hobbs Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2344, a petition GUARDIAN ANGELS MED. SERV. v. US 13 for administrative reconsideration stays the running of the limitations period until the petition has been acted upon by the agency); Clifton Power Corp. v. FERC, 294 F.3d 108, 110 (D.C. Cir. 2002) (“A request for administrative reconsideration renders an agency’s otherwise final action non-final with respect to the requesting party.”); V.I. Conservation Soc’y, Inc. v. Virgin Is. Bd. of Land Use Appeals, 881 F.2d 28, 31 (3d Cir. 1989) (“We think that the federal law is clear that a pending petition for agency reconsideration, timely filed, renders the underlying agency action nonfinal and thus nonreviewable with respect to the filing party. Thus, the statute of limitations for judicial review is tolled until the agency decides the petition for reconsideration.”); see also United States v. Dieter, 429 U.S. 6, 8 (1976) (noting “that the consistent practice in civil and criminal cases alike has been to treat timely petitions for rehearing as rendering the original judgment nonfinal for purposes of appeal for as long as the petition is pending”). Indeed, although the Administrative Procedure Act specifically states that “agency action otherwise final is final for the purposes of this section whether or not there has been presented . . . an application for . . . any form of reconsideration,” 5 U.S.C. § 704, the Supreme Court has made clear that this language serves “merely to relieve parties from the requirement of petitioning for rehearing before seeking judicial review . . . but not to prevent petitions for reconsideration that are actually filed from rendering the orders under reconsideration nonfinal.” Locomotive Eng’rs, 482 U.S. at 284–85; see also Am. Farm Lines v. Black Ball Freight Serv., 397 U.S. 532, 541 (1970). Here, however, we need not—and therefore do not— decide whether under section 7104(b)(3) a request for reconsideration vitiates the finality of a contracting officer’s decision only if the contracting officer actually “spends time” considering that request. For example, we do not hold, at this point, that all communications from a 14 GUARDIAN ANGELS MED. SERV. v. US contracting officer after receipt of a request for reconsideration will be sufficient to evince the necessary willingness to entertain the request for reconsideration. Given this recognition, we do not address the question of whether, in the absence of any indication that the contracting officer is open to reconsidering, the finality of the original decision may be suspended if the contracting officer nevertheless “spends time” considering the request. See Reconsideration Decision, 120 Fed. Cl. at 10; Arono, Inc. v. United States, 49 Fed. Cl. 544, 550 (2001) (“[A] reaffirmation of a final [contracting officer’s] decision does not, per se, constitute reconsideration of that decision. Instead, it is the amount of time, if any, a contracting officer spends reviewing a [contractor’s] request for reconsideration that suspends the finality of the decision regardless of whether that decision is ultimately reconsidered or reversed.”). Rather, we hold only that because the contracting officer agreed in March 2013 to obtain and evaluate additional evidence on the question of whether BPA 218 should have been terminated for convenience rather than cause, her August 2012 default termination notice was not a final decision sufficient to trigger the twelve-month statutory appeal period. Thus, the twelve-month statutory appeal period did not begin to run until the contracting officer rejected Guardian Angels’ request for reconsideration on May 3, 2013. Nor need we decide whether compliance with the twelve-month filing period set out in section 7104(b)(3) is a jurisdictional requirement. The Supreme Court in recent years has repeatedly emphasized that “filing deadlines ordinarily are not jurisdictional.” Sebelius v. Auburn Reg’l Med. Ctr., 133 S. Ct. 817, 825 (2013); see United States v. Kwai Fun Wong, 135 S. Ct. 1625, 1632 (2015) (“[T]he Government must clear a high bar to establish that a statute of limitations is jurisdictional.”); Henderson ex rel. Henderson v. Shinseki, 562 U.S. 428, 439–42 (2010) (concluding that the 120-day deadline for GUARDIAN ANGELS MED. SERV. v. US 15 filing a notice of appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims is a claim-processing rule rather than a jurisdictional requirement). Accordingly, we held in Sikorsky that the failure to comply with 41 U.S.C. § 7103(a)(4)(A), which requires a claim related to a government contract to be submitted within six years of the date it accrues, does not create a jurisdictional bar. 773 F.3d at 1322 (explaining that section 7103(a)(4)(A) “does not have any special characteristic that would warrant making an exception to the general rule that filing deadlines are not jurisdictional”). Here, however, the dispositive issue is not whether the twelve-month appeal period set out in section 7104(b)(3) is a jurisdictional prerequisite, but instead when that appeal period begins to run. See Stone v. INS, 514 U.S. 386, 395 (1995) (explaining that “[f]inality is the antecedent question” in assessing the timeliness of an appeal).