Whether EPA's nearly eight-year delay in issuing a full and final response to the 2007 administrative petition warranted mandamus relief.
Holding
Yes. EPA's delay was egregious, and the court granted mandamus requiring EPA to act by October 31, 2015.
Reasoning
The Administrative Procedure Act requires agencies to conclude matters presented to them within a reasonable time and permits courts to compel agency action that has been unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed. Although mandamus under the All Writs Act is extraordinary and reserved for exceptional circumstances, it is available when agency delay becomes egregious. The court applied the six TRAC factors governing claims of unreasonable agency delay.
The most important TRAC consideration—the rule of reason—now favored the petitioners. When the court denied mandamus in 2013, EPA had considered the petition for six years but had committed to a concrete February 2014 deadline. By 2015, however, the delay had reached nearly eight years, EPA had missed that deadline, and it still would not provide a firm date for a final ruling. Its proposed April 2016 rulemaking was not a final response, and EPA acknowledged that even the proposed rule might never issue if discussions with industry made it unnecessary.
The human-health factors also weighed heavily toward relief. Delays that may be tolerable in ordinary economic regulation are less acceptable where health and welfare are at stake. Although EPA had certified chlorpyrifos as safe in 2006, its more recent actions and representations undermined that assurance: EPA imposed new labeling requirements and reported concerns that chlorpyrifos threatened drinking-water supplies and farmworkers. Its own assessment indicated that a nationwide ban might be justified, yet it offered no adequate justification for further delay.
The court recognized that EPA faced scientific complexity and competing priorities, considerations that had supported denial of the earlier petition. But those concerns no longer justified an open-ended process after years of review. EPA's sequence of partial responses, unmet promises, and contingent future plans showed that its timetable was a roadmap for further delay rather than a credible plan to resolve the petition.
No showing of bad faith or impropriety was necessary under the sixth TRAC factor. Still, EPA's repeated failure to meet its own deadlines reinforced the conclusion that voluntary assurances were inadequate. The administrative petition had already produced three nonfrivolous lawsuits, and the court concluded that judicially enforceable action was necessary to prevent continued delay.