164
Opinion of the Court
timely assignment, the part of the Act referring to "unas-signed" beneficiaries is not any such provision. The Act speaks of the beneficiaries not in terms of the Commission-er's failure to assign them in time, but simply as "beneficiaries who are not assigned." § 9704(d). The most obvious reason for beneficiaries' being unassigned, in fact, is the disappearance of a beneficiary's former employer, leaving no signatory operator for assignment under § 9706(a). This is not to say that failure of timely assignment does not also leave a beneficiary "unassigned" under the Act. It simply means that unassigned status has no significance peculiar to failure of timely assignment.
Second, to the extent that "unassigned" status is a consequence of mere untimeliness, there would be a far more obvious reason for specifying that consequence than a supposed desire for finality.9 On its face, the provision for a beneficiary left out through tardiness functions simply as a default rule to provide coverage under the new regime required to be in place by October 1, 1993; there had to be some source of funding for every beneficiary by then, and provisions for the "unassigned" employees tell the SSA what the source will be in the absence of any other. But we do not read a provision apparently made for want of something better as an absolute command to forgo something better for all time.
In fact, it is unrealistic to think that Congress understood unassigned status as an enduring "consequence" of uncompleted work, for nothing indicates that Congress even fore-saw that some beneficiaries matchable with operators still in
9 Many "consequences," of course, are intended to induce an obligated person to take untimely action rather than bar that action altogether. Section 9704(i)(1)(C), for example, denies certain tax deductions to operators who fail to make contributions during specified periods, and § 9707(a) provides a penalty for operators who fail to pay premiums on time. The first consequence is eliminated when the operator takes action that is necessarily untimely, and the second penalty ceases to run when the premiums are paid, albeit out of time.
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