Committee Asks for Information on CFATS Program – 6-12-23

Yesterday, the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to CISA Director Easterly asking for information on the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program. The letter notes that:

“On July 27, 2023, the statutory authority undergirding the entire CFATS program is scheduled to sunset. In anticipation of any congressional efforts to extend the CFATS’s program, we would like to better understand the current operation of CFATS.”

The letter then goes on to ask seven multi-part questions about the program. While Congress certainly has the right (actually the obligation) to ask such questions about existing regulatory agencies, the Committee leadership should be ashamed of the fact that they have waited until almost the last minute to ask such questions. And to make matters worse, the Energy and Commerce Committee is not the committee with primary oversight responsibility for the CFATS program in the House. At least publicly, the House Homeland Security Committee has not taken even this much effort to address their responsibility to ensure that the CFATS program continues to support the chemical community and help protect the country from potential terrorist attacks using industrial chemicals.

Director Easterly will do a much better job than I in replying to these questions in a polite and informative manner. I will instead ask these congressional leaders a set of questions of my own:

• When was the last time that your committee held a hearing to look at the progress being made in the CFATS program?

• When was the last time that your committee requested a report from the Government Accounting Office about the CFATS program.

• When was the last time that your staff or committee members drafted a piece of legislation addressing issues covered by the CFATS program?

• How can you ask CISA what they intend to do about drone activities around chemical facilities when Congress has not authorized any violations of the various statutes that prohibit anyone from taking actions against unmanned aircraft in US airspace, nor have they taken any action to require the FAA to take long-overdue congressionally-mandated action to implement regulations allowing critical infrastructure facilities (certainly including CFATS covered facilities) to request that their facilities be designated as no fly zones for unmanned aircraft?

Since they are waiting to the last minute to pretend to care about the program or its impact on the regulated community, the four signatories of this letter should immediately offer a short term extension of the CFATS program like I have proposed in a recent post. That will give the two Committees in the House and the one in the Senate a reasonable chance to do their job in reviewing the CFATS program, determining what changes are appropriate and reauthorizing the program for a reasonable amount of time (5 to 7 years would be good). Long term reauthorization will allow them to forget about the program again.