Cite as: 537 U. S. 149 (2003)
Scalia, J., dissenting
is whether the late exercise of an unquestionably authorized act will produce the consequences that the statute says will follow from a timely exercise of that act. It is as though, to pursue the tree-harvesting analogy, a contract provided that the landowner will harvest and deliver trees by December 15; even after December 15 passes, he can surely harvest and deliver trees, and the only issue is whether the December 15 date is so central to the contract that late delivery does not have the contractual consequence of requiring the other side's counterperformance. The Commissioner of Social Security, by contrast, being not a private entity but a creature of Congress, has no authority to assign beneficiaries to operators except insofar as such authority is implicit in the mandate; but the mandate (and hence the implicit authority) expired on October 1, 1993.
The last of these three provisions does confer a power that is not otherwise available to the private entities involved: the power to appoint initial trustees to the board of the Combined Fund. I do not, however, think it as clear as the Court does—indeed, I think it quite debatable—whether that power survives the deadline. If it be thought utterly essential that all the trustees be in place, it seems to me just as reasonable to interpret the provision for appointment of successor trustees (§ 9702(b)(2)) to include the power to fill vacancies arising from initial failure to appoint, as to interpret the initial appointment power to extend beyond its spec-ified termination date. The provision surely does not establish the Court's proposition that time-limited mandates include continuing authority.
III
None of the cases on which the Court relies is even remotely in point. In Brock v. Pierce County, 476 U. S. 253 (1986), the agency action in question was authorized by an explicit statutory grant of authority, separate and apart from the provision that contained the time-limited mandate.
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