6 U.S.C. § 322 — Continuity of the economy plan

(a) Requirement. (1) In general. The President must create and keep up a plan for restoring and maintaining the U.S. economy if a "significant event" happens. (2) Principles. The plan must fit with a free-market economy, follow the rule of law, and respect private property rights. (3) Contents. The plan must do a long list of things. It must study how goods and services get distributed across the country so the economy keeps working during a significant event. It must identify the economic activities whose breakdown would seriously hurt security, economic security, military readiness, or public health and safety. It must identify, for each economic sector, the critical distribution systems that should be kept running first — specifically: the bulk power and electric grid; national and international financial systems, including payments, stocks, and currency exchange; national and international communications networks, data centers, and cloud services; interstate oil and gas pipelines; and the systems — road, rail, air, and sea — that move materials, food, and medical supplies across state and national lines. It must also identify economic activities whose breakdown would cause catastrophic economic loss, a loss of public trust, or a wide threat to human life; and separately identify economic activities so essential that their breakdown would undermine the country's ability to respond to, recover from, or mobilize for a significant event. The plan must build in, as much as possible, the ideas already used in the federal government's own continuity-of-government and continuity-of-operations plans. The plan must identify industrial control networks — the systems that run physical equipment — where losing internet access, losing network integrity, being hacked, or some other failure would seriously hurt security, economic security, military readiness, or public health and safety, and for each one, identify ways to reduce that risk, such as adding backup systems, using stand-alone non-digital equipment, or making the network much harder to break. It must identify critical economic sectors where keeping data safe, verified, and uncorrupted is necessary for a quick economic recovery. It must list the raw materials, industrial goods, and other items the country needs to sustain the functions described above, and analyze how diversified — spread across different suppliers — the supply chains for those items are. For those same items, it must recommend whether the U.S. should keep a strategic reserve, and if so, how to track what's in it. It must identify ways — both those that already existed as of January 1, 2021, and new ones that could be built — to make sure those items can still be delivered quickly if the normal distribution networks are disrupted, and it must provide guidance on how to prioritize handing out those items, including to states and Indian Tribes. The plan must weigh whether the government should extend credit or other financial support to key participants in the economy, if doing so is necessary to avoid severe economic harm or to help recovery. It must give guidance on which categories of workers should keep working, to sustain the critical functions described above, if people can't travel to work or work remotely — including thinking about military readiness. It must identify the economic sectors critical to supporting national defense. It must determine whether the DHS Secretary, the National Guard, and the Defense Secretary already have enough legal authority to help the country recover from severe economic harm, and review the authority and ability of any other agency heads the President thinks are relevant. Finally, it must consider anything else that would help protect and strengthen the resilience of the U.S. economy. (b) Coordination. In building the plan, the President must get advice from the Secretaries of Homeland Security, Defense, the Treasury, Health and Human Services, Commerce, Transportation, and Energy; the Administrator of the Small Business Administration; and the head of any other agency the President thinks is needed. The President must also consult critical-infrastructure industries through sector-coordinating councils, consult with state, Tribal, and local governments and the organizations that represent them, and consult any other non-federal group the President thinks is necessary. (c) Submission to Congress. (1) In general. By January 1, 2023 — two years after enactment — and at least once every three years after that, the President must send the plan, plus the extra information described below, to a long list of recipients: the majority and minority leaders of the Senate; the Speaker and minority leader of the House; the Armed Services Committees of the Senate and House; the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee of the Senate and the Homeland Security Committee of the House; the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee of the Senate; the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee of the Senate; the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House; the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee of the Senate; the Finance Committee of the Senate; the Financial Services Committee of the House; the Small Business Committees of the Senate and House; the Energy and Natural Resources Committee of the Senate; the Environment and Public Works Committee of the Senate; the Indian Affairs Committee of the Senate; the Oversight and Reform Committee of the House; the Budget Committee of the House; and any other committee of the Senate or House that has jurisdiction over the plan's subject matter. (2) Additional information. Along with the plan, the President must include any change to federal law needed to carry it out, and any proposed change to current-year funding — or any extra resources needed — to put the plan into action or to keep the staff and offices in place who maintain the plan (and the continuity-of-government/operations plans mentioned in subsection (a)(3)(F)) and who run exercises, assessments, and updates over time. (3) Budget of the President. The President may include that funding information in the regular federal budget submitted under 31 U.S.C. § 1105(a). (d) Definitions. "Agency" has the same meaning as in 5 U.S.C. § 551. "Economic sector" means a sector of the U.S. economy. "Relevant actor" means the federal government, a state, local, or Tribal government, or the private sector. "Significant event" means something that severely degrades U.S. economic activity, whether from a cyberattack or another serious natural or human-caused event. "State" means every U.S. state, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and any other U.S. possession.