Method: How Deadlines Are Set

Each obligation page pairs a duty in a public law with the verbatim text that creates it, the arithmetic that turns the text into a date, and the public evidence searched for delivery.

Which Laws

Named statutes: Iran Sanctions Act of 1996; Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010; Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act of 2012; Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015; both Hizballah financing acts (2015, 2018); title I of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act; the Taylor Force Act; the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2019; and the Iran and Hamas divisions (J through S) of Pub. L. 118-50. Rule-based: the defense authorization acts for fiscal years 2025 and 2026 and the State and foreign operations appropriations for fiscal years 2024 and 2026, where a section heading or the duty itself names a Middle East or North African country, group or program. The same rule applies regardless of which administration the deadline falls under.

What Qualifies as an Obligation

A subsection whose text places a duty on an executive officer to report, certify, determine, notify, brief, submit a strategy or plan, or publish. Subsections that only describe form, contents or definitions attach to the duty they describe. Extraction is by fixed text rules; each obligation page says it awaits named human review.

Arithmetic

• “Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act” adds 90 calendar days to the enactment date printed on the law.
• Months and years move the calendar and stop at the last day of a shorter month: Aug. 31 plus 6 months is Feb. 28 (Feb. 29 in a leap year).
• “Every 180 days thereafter” runs from the first deadline: first deadline plus k times 180 days. Dates are never chained, so month-end rounding does not drift.
• “Annually” with no start date is assumed to start at enactment, and the obligation page says so.
• Deadlines that run from an event (a waiver, a determination, a license) get no date until the event is publicly documented.
• Repeal, sunset and the end of an appropriations year stop the clock; the stopping provision is cited on the obligation page.
• Laws later amended are projected from the text as enacted, marked on each obligation page, and listed apart from the headline figure.
• Timing words inside text that a law inserts into another statute, or tied to the enactment of a different act, get no date; the obligation page says why.
• Sunset and termination clauses anywhere in the section (“Subsection (a) shall cease to have effect…”) end the clock for the parts they name.

Status

• Delivered (public evidence): a public primary document, checked by a person and linked on the obligation page, shows the required item was issued or transmitted.
• Not publicly verifiable: the default. Reports sent only to committees or in classified form leave no public trace.
• Reported late by GAO, committee or agency: only with a linked statement from GAO, a committee or the agency. Before any such label appears in a Hill brief, the agency’s legislative affairs office and the committee clerks receive a dated query, and the reply is kept with its date.

Evidence Searched

• GovInfo Congressionally Mandated Reports collection: 1,209 packages listed Oct. 17, 2026; 55 summaries from State, Defense, Treasury and executive offices checked for citations to these laws.
• Federal Register API, phrase searches by statute name (275 documents, Oct. 17, 2026).
• Public law texts from GovInfo: USLM XML where published, GPO text for laws before 2013 (Oct. 17, 2026).

Corrections

Corrections and confirmations of receipt go to info@meforum.org; each one is noted, with its date, on the page it changes. This page takes no position on pending legislation.