S 2178 – Support for CFATS Program

With just 34 days left until the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program reaches its legislative termination, I admit that I was very happy to see S 2178 introduced earlier this week. I will be happier still when I can see the bill’s language, hopefully early next week. In the meantime, I am going to take a look at two Senate press releases and an industry press release to see what we can figure out about what the bill is going to do.

Industry Press Release

On Friday afternoon, I was notified that the American Chemistry Council had come out in support of the new legislation (that was no surprise). Their web site contains a press release supporting the new bill. The ACC is an industry organization supporting a wide swath of the chemical manufacturers in the United States. They have been long time supporters of the CFATS program, pushing for reauthorization for quite some time.

Unfortunately, there is nothing in their press release that gives any clue to the contents of S 2178.

Senate Press Releases

The first congressional press release that I saw this week on the topic was the one published by Sen Capito’s (R,WV) Office. It provides a brief background on the program and a clear statement about Capito’s support for the program:

“Over the past several years, I have worked so that this program is both authorized and funded at levels to ensure the safety of chemical facilities across this country. By coming together in a bipartisan way, we are demonstrating the importance of our nation’s efforts to support a regulatory framework that strengthens our ability to prevent these facilities from being vulnerable to terrorists,” Senator Capito said.”

There is one piece of actual information about the bill in the press release, the title: Protecting and Securing Chemical Facilities from Terrorist Attacks Act. Not much of a surprise here, this is the same name as the 2014 legislation that last reauthorized the program.

The second senatorial press release came from the office of Sen Peters (D,MI) who is the sponsor of the bill. The bill contains brief statements of support from the three cosponsors {Capito, Sen Carper (D,DE) and Sen Lankford (R,OK)}. Lots of good vibes and support, but not much in the way of information about the provisions of the bill. That is until you get down to the part of the release that provides “statements in support of the senators’ bipartisan legislation”. This portion of the press release provides brief statements made by representatives from a wide selection of chemical manufacturers:

• Dow North America,

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce,

• BASF Corporation,

• Lubrizol Corporation,

• Brenntag North America,

• American Chemistry Council (slightly different than the one discussed above),

• National Association of Chemical Distributors,

• American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers,

• Agriculture Retailers Association, and

• The Fertilizer Institute

Comment Analysis

Some interesting phrases pop up in some of those comments:

• Long-term reauthorization,

• 5-year reauthorization,

• Clean reauthorization,

• 5-year clean extension.

Long-term reauthorization has long been a goal of industry. It provides industry with a certain amount of certitude that the long-term investments that they continue to make in security measures will continue to support the program requirements. Unfortunately, politicians often prefer a shorter extension, because it allows them to meddle with the programs which they can generally only do during reauthorization. The regulators also prefer longer term reauthorization, since it allows them to refine their processes without having the politicians foisting off major changes on them.

The term ‘clean reauthorization’ is a vaguely defined technical term. In its purest sense ‘clean’ means no changes to the program. It takes no great insight to see why industry would like that, no legislative changes means no regulatory changes, which of course means no new spending by industry to make changes. The term in practice means no significant changes are made to the program, its hard to keep politicians from tweaking.

Unfortunately, it is hard to know if these commentors have actually seen the language in the proposed legislation, or they are mentioning what they want to see, or something in between. The best I can do is to note that industry appears to expect a 5-year clean extension of the CFATS program. We will have to see when the bill is published.