S 2244 – TRIA Reauthorization – Reported in Senate

According to yesterday’s Daily Digest the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee favorably reported S 2244, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2014, with an amendment. This is the first of the five current bills intending to reauthorize the TRIA to be reported by Committee.

Unfortunately, the bill was reported without a written report, so it is not clear exactly what the amendment does to the bill.

This now clears this bill to be taken up any time that Sen Reid (D,NV) decides that it is appropriate to do so.

I mentioned earlier that I thought that the bill recently introduced by Rep. Neugebauer (R,TX), HR 4871, would have the best chance to move forward in the House. It now seems that Sen. Schumer’s bill has a slight edge just because it may come to the floor for a vote first.

S 2244 Introduced – Terrorism Insurance

As I noted in an earlier post, Sen. Schumer (D,NY) introduced S 2244, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2014, which would reauthorize the program under 15 USC 6701 Note.  This is the fourth bill introduced during this Congress that would extend this program that is currently scheduled to end at the end of the year.

Background

According to the ‘Findings’ section of the bill the TRIA was designed to “to establish a temporary Federal program that provides for a transparent system of shared public and private compensation for insured losses resulting from acts of terrorism” {§101(b)}. The program was re-authorized in 2005 (PL 109-144) and 2007 (PL110-160).

As with just about anything dealing with the insurance industry, the various provisions of this program are filled with jargon that is hard to understand by us mere mortals. Suffice it to say, the program is supposed to insure that the Federal government is responsible for ensuring that various insurance policies pay off as advertised in the event of a terrorist attack. It was thought at the time of the original crafting of this measure that the industry was not prepared for serious terrorist attacks on the scale seen in 2001 and that it would need assistance for any attacks during an interim period while it built up the necessary reserves to be able to pay off on claims resulting from a terrorist attack.

Comparison of Current Bills

This table provides a listing of the major provisions of the bill. It shows various dates in the program that the bills extend.

	Current	HR 508	HR 1945	HR 2146	S 2244
§102(11)(G)	2014	2019	2024	2024	Removes Dates
§103(e)(7)(E)(i)(III)	2017	2024	2024	2027	2024
§108(a)	2014	2019	2024	2024	2021
§108(e)(2)	2013		2013, 2017 2020, and 2023	2013, 2017 2020, and 2023

Moving Forward

There is no telling which if any of these bills will actually be considered by Congress. To date there has not been any committee action on any of the bills. HR 2146 does have the largest number of co-sponsors and it does have some fairly substantial bipartisan support. But there is a substantial amount of conservative Republican opposition to the program. I would bet that this is one of those types of legislation that largely gets settled out of the public eye and gets slipped through attached to something more important.