Description:
H.R. 4347 would establish the Interagency Council on Extreme Weather Resilience, Preparedness, and Risk Identification and Management, made up of representatives from the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, Justice, and Transportation, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Security Council, and the Office of Management and Budget. Under the bill, the council would provide information on best practices for agencies to prepare for and respond to severe weather. The bill also would direct every agency to include a severe weather plan in its performance plans. Federal agencies are required to perform essential functions under a broad range of circumstances, including severe weather. Through the National Preparedness Framework, agencies have developed a series of policy and planning documents to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from many different types of threats and hazards. However, CBO expects that complying with the legislation’s provisions would increase the administrative and planning expenses of federal agencies. Based on the number of staff assigned to federal officials working with similar interagency councils, CBO estimates that the interagency council would need 14 full-time employees at an annual cost of about $100,000 each. Additional staff also would be needed at each of the twenty six major agencies at an average annual cost of about $100,000 for each employee. CBO expects that those employees would initially work on weather-related issues for six months each year with the amount of time they work on those issues declining after the plans are developed. In total, CBO estimates that implementing H.R. 4347 would cost between $2 million and $3 million annually. The cost of the bill, detailed in Table 1, fall within budget function 800 (general government). Enacting H.R. 4347 could affect direct spending by some agencies that are allowed to use fees, receipts from the sale of goods, and other collections to cover operating costs. CBO estimates that any net changes in direct spending by those agencies would be negligible because most of them can adjust amounts collected to reflect changes in operating costs.
