Ammonium Nitrate Security Program Update – 4-5-22

I received an interesting email last week from EventBrite. This is the company that many government organizations use to organize public online meetings and conferences. One of those organizations is CISA’s Office of Chemical Security; they used it last year to organize their Chemical Security Seminar’s last December. That is how I got on their mailing list. The email was announcing an upcoming meeting for a “Virtual consultation on CISA’s proposed AN Security Program”.

Needless to say, I immediately clicked on the ‘Get Tickets’ link. I have been following the Ammonium Nitrate Security Program here since the first advanced notice of proposed rulemaking was published in 2008, so I was certainly interested in seeing what CISA was planning for the program development. Unfortunately, instead of taking me to a sign-up page, I got taken to a message that said: “Whoops, the page or event you are looking for was not found.”

It turns out that the meeting was not intended to be a public meeting, but rather an interdepartmental meeting to discuss pending program developments. Someone made a mistake about the notification list and used the public notification list.

No one is ready to talk about where CISA is headed with this program, but it looks like we should be seeing something soon. The Fall 2021 Unified Agenda listing for the rulemaking noted that a new notice of proposed rulemaking was expected in March 2022. Those UA listings are always aspirational at best, but I would not be surprised to see a notice in the not-too-distant future that an NPRM was being sent to OMB for review.