In late February, I. Lanier Avant, the Majority staff director of the committee, stated a bill to reauthorise the Chemical Facility Anti- Terrorism Standards (CFATS) and add Inherently Safer Tec…nology (IST) provisions that will likely be introduced in “late winter to early spring”. His remarks first appeared at a public forum on homeland security priorities of the 111th Congress hosted by the George Washington University’s Homeland Security Policy Institute (HSPI) which featured staffers from the Homeland Security Committee from both the Democratic and Republican Party. The staffers anticipate DHS reauthorisation, bioterrorism, nuclear and homegrown terrorism as potential hot topics for legislation in addition to CFATS and heavy oversight of DHS.
Consensus among the committee staffers seems to be that CFATS is doing a “good job,” according to their assessments, and they highlighted the programme as a model for private-public partnerships. This brief show of bipartisanship among staffers, however, could be tested over IST, which was downfall last year of H.R. 5577, the “Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Act of 2008”.