HR5200-119

What This Bill Does

This bill adds a public accountability process after major communications-disruption events. If the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System is activated for at least seven days during the preceding year, the Commission must hold at least one public hearing about those events. The hearing can include affected state, local, and Tribal governments; residents and consumer advocates; communications service providers; higher-education faculty; other federal agencies; electric utilities; communications infrastructure companies; first responders; emergency managers; and 9-1-1 directors.

Within 120 days after a hearing, the FCC must issue a report using information known without requiring new data collection. The report must cover the number and duration of outages affecting broadband internet access, interconnected VoIP, commercial mobile service, and commercial mobile data service; the approximate number of users and infrastructure potentially affected; outages that prevent emergency communications centers from receiving caller location or number information; and outages that affect emergency-call receipt and routing. The bill therefore turns long disaster activations into recurring public hearings and post-event outage reports.

Who Benefits and How

Residents in disaster-affected areas benefit from a public forum and report explaining communications failures. State emergency-management offices, local emergency managers, Tribal emergency officials, first responders, and 9-1-1 directors benefit because the FCC hearing can surface outage patterns that affect emergency response. Broadband, mobile, VoIP, and communications infrastructure providers benefit from a structured forum to explain network conditions and recovery barriers. Electric utilities benefit because communications outages and power restoration are often connected. Consumer advocates and academic researchers benefit from public reporting on outage duration, user impact, infrastructure effects, and emergency-call failures.

Who Bears the Burden and How

FCC public safety staff must organize annual hearings when DIRS activations meet the seven-day threshold and write reports within 120 days. Communications service providers may face public scrutiny over network outages and recovery performance. Emergency communications centers may need to explain caller-location, callback-number, call-routing, or 9-1-1 service failures. Electric utilities and communications infrastructure companies may have to participate in hearings and provide context on interdependent outages. FCC reporting staff must compile useful findings while the bill bars mandatory new information collection for the report.

Key Provisions

• Requires at least one FCC public hearing after annual DIRS activations lasting seven days or more.
• Allows affected governments, residents, providers, utilities, first responders, emergency managers, and 9-1-1 directors to participate.
• Requires an FCC report within 120 days after each hearing.
• Directs the report to address broadband, VoIP, commercial mobile, and mobile-data outages.
• Requires reporting on emergency communications center outages affecting caller location, callback numbers, emergency-call receipt, and routing.