S 3845 Introduced – Fire Investigations

Last week, Sen Gillibrand (D,NY) introduced S 3845, the Empowering the U.S. Fire Administration Act. The bill would amend the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1974 to authorize the United States Fire Administration to conduct investigations of major fires. No funding is authorized for this program. This is a companion (identical wording) bill to HR 7077 which was also introduced last week.

Moving Forward

Neither Gillibrand nor her sole cosponsor {Sen Schumer (D,NY)} are members of the House Homeland Security Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This typically means that there is no enough influence to see this bill considered in Committee (yes, Schumer is the Majority Leader, but he typically does not exert that influence to see bills considered in Committees in which he is not a member). If the bill were considered in Committee I suspect that it would receive significant bipartisan support.

There is a possibility that this bill could move to the floor of the Senate (particularly because of Schumer’s interest) under the unanimous consent process, but that could be blocked by a single Senator objecting to the bill. That objection would not need to be directly tied to concerns about the content of the bill, it is frequently used to pressure the Leadership to take action (or stop action) on other bills.