Cite as: 537 U. S. 149 (2003)
Opinion of the Court
quently has to mean that a statute directing official action needs more than a mandatory "shall" before the grant of power can sensibly be read to expire when the job is supposed to be done. Nothing so limiting, however, is to be found in the Coal Act: no express language supports the companies, while structure, purpose, and legislative history go against them.
Structural clues support the Commissioner in the Coal Act's other instances of combining the word "shall" with a specific date that could not possibly be read to prohibit action outside the statutory period. Congress, for example, provided that the UMWA Pension Plan "shall transfer to the Combined Fund" installments of $70 million on February 1, 1993, on October 1, 1993, and on October 1, 1994. § 9705(a)(1). It could not be that a failure to make a transfer on one of those precise dates, for whatever reason, would have left the UMWA Pension Plan with no authority to make the payment; October 1, 1994, was not even a business day. Or consider the Act's mandatory provisions that the trustees of the Combined Fund "shall" be designated no later than 60 days from the enactment date, § 9702(a)(1), and that the designated trustees "shall, not later than 60 days after the enactment date," give the Commissioner certain information about benefits, § 9704(h). No one could seriously argue that the entire scheme would have been nullified if appointments had been left to the 61st day, or that trustees (whose appoint-reasonably delayed,' " 476 U. S., at 260, n. 7 (quoting 5 U. S. C. § 706(1)). The companies assert that no such remedy would have applied to the Commissioner's duty under § 9706(a). Whether or not this is the case, the companies do not argue that they were aggrieved by the failure to assign retirees by the statutory date. On the contrary, they temporarily avoided payment of premium amounts for which they would indisputably have been liable had the assignments been timely made. It therefore does not appear that there was a need to provide operators "with any remedy at all—much less the drastic remedy respondent[s] see[k] in this case—for the [Commissioner's] failure to meet the [October 1, 1993] deadline." 476 U. S., at 260, n. 7.
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