Sponsors (3)
The bill would increase public reporting and produce resiliency guidance to help reduce 9‑1‑1 outages and inform communities, but it risks limited disclosure via confidentiality claims and imposes new reporting and administrative costs on providers, agencies, and taxpayers.
Residents in affected areas will get more public transparency about outages — counts, durations, and 9‑1‑1 impacts — through required public hearings and published reports.
Emergency communications centers, public safety agencies, and related health systems may receive resiliency recommendations to reduce future 9‑1‑1 disruptions and improve emergency response.
Consumers and communities could benefit from improved outage reporting rules if the FCC adopts recommended changes after the one‑year investigation, potentially leading to better outage prevention and response.
Some outage details may be withheld from the public due to confidentiality claims, which can limit full transparency for residents, local governments, and advocates.
Broadband providers (including small ISPs) may face increased reporting or technical burdens if the FCC adopts new notification or visual-data requirements, raising costs for providers that can be passed to customers or affect small businesses.
Implementation and study activities could impose administrative costs on the FCC and industry, potentially diverting agency and industry resources from other priorities and imposing costs ultimately borne by taxpayers.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Directs the FCC to hold hearings and publish reports after DIRS activations and to study outage notification and 9‑1‑1 reporting improvements.
Requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to hold public hearings and publish reports whenever the FCC’s Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS) is activated for at least seven days, and to study specific outage-reporting and notification improvements. The FCC must hold at least one public hearing within one year of enactment (and annually thereafter when DIRS activations meet the threshold), publish a detailed report within 120 days after each hearing, and complete an initial study and report on notification and 9‑1‑1 outage issues within one year. The reports must include counts and durations of outages (broadband, interconnected VoIP, commercial mobile voice and data), estimates of infrastructure or users affected, 9‑1‑1 outage metrics, and recommendations to improve resiliency and reporting, while excluding confidential information. The bill preserves current limits on FCC authority and defines key terms used for reporting and hearings.
Introduced September 8, 2025 by Doris Matsui · Last progress September 8, 2025