6 U.S.C. § 318 — National Advisory Council

This section creates the National Advisory Council (NAC) and a rail-safety subcommittee within it. (a) Establishing the Council. Within 60 days of October 4, 2006, the Secretary must set up an advisory body under section 451(a) of this title, called the National Advisory Council. Its job is to keep federal preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation efforts for natural disasters, terrorism, and other man-made disasters effectively coordinated on an ongoing basis. (b) What the Council does. (1) The NAC advises the Administrator on every aspect of emergency management. It brings state, local, and tribal government input, and private-sector input, into developing and revising the national preparedness goal, the national preparedness system, the National Incident Management System, the National Response Plan, and other related plans and strategies. (2) On grant programs specifically, the Administrator must regularly consult and work with the NAC on administering and assessing the Department's grant programs — including developing program guidance and developing and evaluating risk-assessment methods. (c) Membership. (1) The Administrator appoints NAC members. As much as practical, the members must represent a geographic cross section (urban and rural) and a substantive cross section of officials, emergency managers, and emergency response providers from state, local, and tribal governments, the private sector, and nongovernmental organizations. As appropriate, this includes: (A) people from the emergency management field and emergency response providers — fire service, law enforcement, hazardous materials response, emergency medical services, emergency management personnel, or groups representing them; (B) health scientists, emergency and inpatient medical providers, and public health professionals; (C) experts from federal, state, local, and tribal governments and the private sector who represent standards-setting and accrediting organizations, including the voluntary consensus codes and standards community, especially those expert in emergency preparedness and response; (D) state, local, and tribal officials expert in preparedness, protection, response, recovery, or mitigation, including Adjutants General; (E) elected state, local, and tribal executives; (F) experts in public and private infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, and communications; (G) representatives of people with disabilities and others with special needs; and (H) any other individuals the Administrator finds appropriate. (2) When choosing health or emergency medical services members, the Administrator must work with the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Transportation. (3) The Administrator must also name at least one federal officer to serve as an ex officio member. (4) Members normally serve 3-year terms. But for the Council's very first group of appointees: one-third serve just 1 year, and another one-third serve 2 years, so terms end up staggered. (d) The RESPONSE Subcommittee. (1) Within 30 days of December 16, 2016, the Administrator must create a subcommittee of the NAC called the Railroad Emergency Services Preparedness, Operational Needs, and Safety Evaluation Subcommittee — the "RESPONSE Subcommittee." (2) Unlike the rest of the NAC, this subcommittee's membership is fixed by name and title, not by the categories in subsection (c). Nine specific federal officials (or their designees) sit on it automatically: the FEMA Deputy Administrator for Protection and National Preparedness; the Chief Safety Officer of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration; that agency's Associate Administrator for Hazardous Materials Safety; the Assistant Director for Emergency Communications; the NTSB's Director for the Office of Railroad, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Investigations; the Federal Railroad Administration's Chief Safety Officer and Associate Administrator for Railroad Safety; the TSA's Assistant Administrator for Security Policy and Industry Engagement; the Coast Guard's Assistant Commandant for Response Policy; and the EPA's Assistant Administrator for the Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response. Beyond these nine, the co-chairpersons jointly appoint other qualified people, drawn from: NAC members with rail emergency response expertise (including from emergency management and response fields, and state, local, and tribal officials); people with the right technical knowledge, including at least one representative each from the rail industry, rail labor, companies that offer oil for rail transport, the communications industry, emergency response providers, emergency response training providers, tribal organizations, technical experts, and vendors or manufacturers of emergency-response equipment; and representatives of any other stakeholders the co-chairpersons think appropriate. (3) The two officials named first above — the FEMA Deputy Administrator and the PHMSA Chief Safety Officer — serve as the Subcommittee's co-chairpersons. (4) The Subcommittee must hold its first meeting within 90 days of December 16, 2016. (5) The Subcommittee, along with the program offices for emergency responder training and resources, must consult with other relevant agencies and groups not on the Subcommittee — including federally funded research entities and academic institutions — to consider new and developing technologies and methods for rail hazardous materials incidents. (6) The Subcommittee must develop recommendations for improving emergency responder training and resource allocation for railroad hazardous materials incidents, after evaluating three things: (A) the quality and availability of training for state and local responders on rail hazmat incidents, especially in small communities near railroads — looking at how easy the training is to access, how well training content keeps up with trends like changing oil shipment volumes, where training content overlaps and could be combined, and options like online platforms, train-the-trainer programs, and mobile training; (B) how available and effective federal, state, local, and nongovernmental funding is for that training — looking at overlapping funding, cost savings, combining government and nongovernment funding, adjusting funding priorities for emerging trends, and historic funding levels; and (C) the strategy for connecting commodity flow studies, mapping, and rail and hazmat databases to state and local responders, and for improving how quickly individual responders can access that information through communications technology. (7) Within 1 year of December 16, 2016, the Subcommittee must send the NAC a report with its recommendations, timeframes for the ones that don't need Congress to act, and a list of which ones do need congressional action. Within 30 days of getting that report, the NAC must begin reviewing it, and may ask the Subcommittee for clarification or changes before approving it. Once approved, the NAC must send the report to the Subcommittee's co-chairpersons, the head of every other agency on the Subcommittee, and four congressional committees: the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the House Committee on Homeland Security, and the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. (8) After the report goes out, the Administrator must give the named congressional committees annual updates on how the recommendations are being carried out, and must coordinate implementing certain of them as appropriate; this update duty ends 2 years after the report was submitted. (9) The RESPONSE Subcommittee itself terminates no later than 90 days after that report is submitted to Congress. (e) Applying other federal advisory committee rules. Despite section 451(a) of this title, and subject to the exception below, chapter 10 of title 5 — including subsections (a), (b), and (d) of section 1009 of title 5, and section 552b(c) of title 5 — applies to the National Advisory Council. The one exception: section 1013(a)(2) of title 5 does not apply to the NAC.