Specific-license applications have no decision deadline, and OFAC can let one sit for years. The Administrative Procedure Act gives the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia the power to compel a decision — and the firm files exactly this suit.
A specific license is how a transaction that sanctions would otherwise prohibit becomes lawful — filed with OFAC's Licensing Division under 31 C.F.R. § 501.801(b). The regulation tells you how to apply. It does not tell OFAC when to answer, and no statute does either. Applications from foreign companies — wind-downs, releases of blocked funds, payments through a blocked bank, authorization to keep a business alive while a delisting petition runs — routinely sit for a year or longer with nothing but an acknowledgment. Emails to the licensing officer go unanswered. There is no administrative appeal from silence.
What most applicants are never told: silence is actionable. Federal law requires every agency, OFAC included, to conclude matters presented to it "within a reasonable time" (5 U.S.C. § 555(b)), and the Administrative Procedure Act instructs a reviewing court to "compel agency action unlawfully withheld or unreasonably delayed" (5 U.S.C. § 706(1)). That is not a request for sympathy. It is a cause of action, and the firm files it in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
In the D.C. Circuit, unreasonable-delay claims are measured against the factors from Telecommunications Research & Action Center v. FCC, 750 F.2d 70 (D.C. Cir. 1984). Six things, weighed together:
A well-built OFAC delay case is TRAC-factor evidence assembled before the complaint is drafted: the application date and completeness, every follow-up and OFAC's non-answers, the concrete commercial destruction the freeze is causing — payroll unmet, vessels idle, contracts cancelled, insolvency approaching — and, where people depend on the blocked business, the human stakes. The complaint that recites "it has been a long time" loses to the complaint that proves what the time is costing.
Not "the government" in the abstract. The complaint names the Office of Foreign Assets Control; its Director in an official capacity; the Department of the Treasury; and the Secretary of the Treasury. Venue is proper in the District of Columbia under 28 U.S.C. § 1391(e)(1) because the defendants reside here. Jurisdiction rests on the federal-question statute, with review supplied by the APA (5 U.S.C. § 702) and, where pleaded, the mandamus statute (28 U.S.C. § 1361) — the same delay toolkit described on the mandamus page.
A 5 U.S.C. § 706(1) order compels a decision, not a grant. No court will order OFAC to issue the license; the court orders OFAC to stop not answering — sometimes by a date certain, sometimes through a schedule of status reports the agency must keep. That is worth more than it sounds. An application in litigation is an application someone at Treasury now owns, with a Department of Justice lawyer asking the licensing office hard questions on a deadline. For an applicant whose alternative is unbounded silence, a decision — even one that must be fought on other grounds if adverse — restarts commercial life.
Representative posture, stated generically: the firm brings these suits for foreign businesses — among them foreign fishing companies whose vessels, accounts, and buyers froze with a designation — whose specific-license applications sat undecided at OFAC long past any rule of reason. No client or case is identified on this page.
There is no bright line; the TRAC factors govern. As a practical matter, courts have little patience for suits filed within months, and increasing sympathy as an application crosses the one-to-two year mark with documented follow-up and documented harm. The record you build during the wait matters as much as the wait.
The fear is universal and the evidence for it thin. Licensing decisions are made under written policy, and an application in litigation gets attention it was not otherwise getting. What a suit does change is the audience: a judge is now watching how the agency treats you.
Yes. The APA's review provision extends to persons aggrieved by agency action, and foreign applicants litigate against OFAC in the D.C. district court regularly. Sanctions rules about paying for legal services are handled in the engagement itself — that is part of the first conversation, not an afterthought.
No, and a complaint that asks for that reads as amateur. The court compels a decision within a reasonable or fixed time. The merits of the license stay with OFAC — and if the decision is an unexplained denial, that is a different suit, on the record, under the arbitrary-and-capricious standard.
That is a win, and it is the quiet outcome of many delay suits. The case becomes moot, the client has an answer, and business planning restarts. We structure the engagement so that outcome is treated as success, not anticlimax.