Institutional gap · United States
The US statutory authority to require security at high-risk chemical facilities expired on 2023-07-28 and no federal security requirement was in force at 2025-12-13 — a reauthorization passed the House by 409 votes to 1 on 2023-07-25 and the Senate did not vote on it before that date
The United States regulated security at high-risk chemical facilities through the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards, a program the Department of Homeland Security began running in 2006 under an appropriations provision and that Congress wrote into standing law in 2014. …
- Resolution status
- not confirmed
- Checked
- 2026-08-19
- Evidence type
- SecondaryPress reports and institutional documents
- Outlet
- not recorded
- Authoring mode
- Derived from press reports
- Views
- 11
What is happening?
The United States regulated security at high-risk chemical facilities through the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards, a program the Department of Homeland Security began running in 2006 under an appropriations provision and that Congress wrote into standing law in 2014. The authority was renewed on short terms rather than made permanent. It expired on 2023-07-28.
Three days before the expiry, on 2023-07-25, the House of Representatives passed a two-year reauthorization by 409 votes to 1. The Senate did not vote on it before the authority ran out, and the bill died at the end of the session.
What ended was legal power, not staff or money. A Congressional Research Service Insight describes the effect: since the expiry CISA cannot require a facility to report that it holds chemicals of interest, cannot inspect, cannot require a site security plan to be implemented, and no longer has the access it used to check newly hired personnel against the Terrorism Screening Database. The online reporting portal was closed. The agency describes what remains as a voluntary partnership.
The most recent source opened here that confirms the lapse is dated 2025-12-13, more than two years after the expiry. Nothing opened here reports a reauthorization after that date.
Whose problem is this?
| Role | Who |
|---|---|
| Affected | About 89 million people who live or work within two miles of a facility that carried the high-risk designation before the expiry, as of the pre-expiry designation set · the workforce at those sites · the roughly 3,200 designated facilities, which now hold plans nobody verifies |
| Raised by | CISA, which describes the loss of authority · the Congressional Research Service, which documented what the expiry removed · industry associations representing chemical manufacturers and refiners, which urged Senate action · members of both parties in the House |
| Decides | Congress, and specifically the Senate, since the House has already passed a reauthorization once · DHS and CISA, in what they attempt without authority · appropriators, who kept the money flowing |
| Bears the cost | People near the sites, who cannot tell from outside whether anything changed · operators who kept security measures in place and receive no verification for it · CISA staff funded to run a program they cannot require anyone to join |
The body that would have to restore the authority is not the body that lost it. CISA did not choose to stop inspecting and cannot choose to start again, because the power it used came from a statute with an end date on it.
Where does this problem end?
| Axis | This is the problem | This is not the problem |
|---|---|---|
| What | The expiry of the statutory authority behind the federal security program for high-risk chemical facilities, and the state that followed it | Accident prevention at chemical plants, which runs on separate legal authority under the Clean Air Act and was not affected by this expiry |
| Whether a mandatory federal security program is the right instrument at all, and how the cost of security should be divided between operators and the public, are value questions this document does not settle | ||
| Who | Facilities that held or would hold the high-risk designation, the people near them, and the agency that ran the program | Chemical hazards reaching the public through transport, waste or consumer products |
| Where | The United States, at the federal level | Chemical facility security regimes in other countries were not examined |
| When | 2023-07-28 onward | The years the program operated before the expiry are background here, not the subject |
| Scale | About 3,200 designated facilities and about 89 million people within two miles of one | The total population living near any chemical facility, designated or not, is outside this frame |
The line matters because the hazard this program addressed is deliberate action against a facility, not an accident inside one. Two separate legal regimes cover those two hazards, and only one of them expired.
What is the state now, and what should it be?
Now
| Indicator | Value | As of |
|---|---|---|
| Federal security requirement for high-risk chemical facilities | none in force | 2025-12-13, the newest source opened here |
| Date the statutory authority expired | 2023-07-28 | 2023-07-28 |
| House reauthorization vote | passed 409 to 1 | 2023-07-25 |
| Senate action on that bill before the expiry | none | 2023-07-28 |
| Power to require reporting of chemicals of interest | removed | 2023 CRS Insight |
| Power to inspect and to require plan implementation | removed | 2023 CRS Insight |
| Access to the Terrorism Screening Database for personnel checks | removed | 2023 CRS Insight |
| Online reporting portal | closed | 2023 CRS Insight |
| Mode of operation that replaced it | voluntary partnership, no enforcement | 2023 CRS Insight |
| Facilities carrying the high-risk designation | about 3,200, reported as 3,310 or about 8 percent in one source | pre-expiry designation set, restated 2024-05-07 |
| People within two miles of a designated facility | about 89,000,000 | pre-expiry designation set, restated 2024-05-07 |
| Personnel screened each month before the expiry | about 9,000 | before 2023-07 |
| New facilities that began handling chemicals of interest unscreened | more than 200 in the first four months | 2023-07 to 2023-11 |
| Designated facilities awaiting inspection | more than 750, about 260 of them estimated to hold unidentified gaps | about 2024-02 |
| Program funding | retained in the FY2024 appropriation without enforcement authority | FY2024 |
Needs a new measurementthe target state: no source opened here names a date by which the authority is meant to be restored, and none names a level the inspection backlog or the unscreened intake is meant to return to. The House-passed two-year extension is an instrument, not a target — it says what would be re-enacted, not when, and not what would count as recovered. No agency document opened here sets a figure either. Nobody is missing a deadline, because no deadline exists.
How big is it?
About 89 million people. That is the count attributed to CISA of people who live or work within two miles of a facility carrying the high-risk designation, measured against the designation set as it stood before 2023-07-28 and restated on 2024-05-07 by one opened source. The agency page that would be the primary source returned HTTP 403 to automated retrieval and was not read here.
This figure counts proximity to a designated site, not people who were harmed in any year. Nothing opened here reports harm to any of them arising from the expiry.
The facility side of the count is about 3,200, with one source giving 3,310 or roughly 8 percent of a wider population of about 42,000 facilities that had filed an initial report of holdings as of 2019-12. The gap between 42,000 and 3,200 is the screening step the program performed: facilities reported, and a subset was designated high-risk on the basis of that report. Since the expiry there is no reporting step, so there is no designation step either, and the 3,200 is a frozen number rather than a current one.
Two flow figures sit under the stock. About 9,000 newly hired personnel a month were checked against the Terrorism Screening Database before the expiry, and CISA estimated that more than 200 new facilities began handling chemicals of interest without any screening in the first four months after it. Neither flow has been restated in any source opened here.
Under what conditions does it arise?
1. The program lived on a sunset clause. The authority had to be renewed on a schedule, and renewal is an affirmative act in two chambers. Nothing in the design continues the program if the schedule is missed, and nothing in the design fails loudly on the day it is missed.
2. Nothing degrades visibly at the moment authority ends. The facilities stayed where they were, the staff stayed employed, and the FY2024 appropriation kept the funding. What ended was the power to require anything, and a requirement that is no longer made leaves no trace when it is not met.
3. The screening was a flow, not a stock. About 9,000 personnel checks a month stopped at once. A stopped flow leaves the accumulated record intact and builds a shortfall that only grows with time, so the size of the gap on any given day is a function of how long the lapse has run rather than of anything that happened that day.
4. The replacement produces no record. A voluntary partnership can ask and cannot verify. From outside, a facility that kept its security plan and a facility that dropped it look the same, and no source opened here names a body that tries to tell them apart.
5. The remaining route is an amendment on a larger vehicle. After the standalone bills stalled, the attempts moved to amendments on a supplemental appropriations vehicle and a defense authorization. On that route a provision competes for room against everything else in the bill and can be dropped without a separate vote against it.
What has been tried?
| Attempt | By whom | What was done | When |
|---|---|---|---|
| Two-year reauthorization, H.R. 4470 | House of Representatives | Passed by 409 votes to 1 and sent to the Senate. The Senate did not vote on it before the authority expired and the bill died with the session | 2023-07-25 |
| Extension to 2028, S. 2178 | Senate | Referred to committee, where it did not advance. It expired with the 118th Congress | 2023 to 2024 |
| Amendment to a supplemental appropriations vehicle, H.R. 8035 | Members of both parties in the House | A reauthorization amendment was sought. It was not in the enacted text | 2024-04 |
| Amendment to the FY2025 defense authorization | Members of both parties in the House | A reauthorization amendment was sought. No source opened here reports that it was enacted, and the lapse is confirmed as continuing at 2025-12-13 | 2024-06 |
| Funding kept in place without authority | Congress and CISA | The FY2024 appropriation retained program funding while the enforcement authority stayed expired | FY2024 onward |
| Voluntary engagement in place of regulation | DHS and CISA | The agency describes its chemical security role as a voluntary partnership with facilities, without power to require reporting, inspection or plan implementation | 2023-07-28 onward |
| Public statement on the lapse | CISA | The agency published a statement on chemical security during the lapse, titled Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty. Automated retrieval returned HTTP 403 and its content was not read here | after 2023-07-28 |
Two directions were tried and both stalled at the same step. A standalone bill cleared one chamber and stopped in the other; amendments on larger vehicles did not survive to enactment. A third direction, keeping the organization funded and asking facilities to cooperate voluntarily, is running and is the only one that did not stall, because it needs nobody to vote.
What was found?
| Finding | Observed value | Evidence grade |
|---|---|---|
| A federal security requirement for high-risk chemical facilities is in force | no | high — three opened sources agree, the newest dated 2025-12-13 |
| Date the statutory authority expired | 2023-07-28 | high — two opened sources agree |
| House vote on the two-year reauthorization | 409 to 1 on 2023-07-25 | high — two opened sources agree |
| Senate vote on that bill before the expiry | none | high — two opened sources agree |
| What the expiry removed | reporting requirement, inspection, enforceable site security plans, screening database access, and the reporting portal | high — a Congressional Research Service Insight, read from a mirror publisher |
| Facilities carrying the high-risk designation | about 3,200, given as 3,310 or about 8 percent in one source | medium — two opened sources give 3,200 and one gives 3,310, and none states an as-of that reconciles the two |
| Facilities that had filed an initial report of holdings | about 42,000, as of 2019-12 | medium — one opened source |
| People within two miles of a designated facility | 89,000,000 | medium — attributed to CISA by one opened source; the agency page returned HTTP 403 and was not read here |
| Personnel screened against the screening database each month before the expiry | about 9,000 | medium — one opened source |
| Matches returned by that screening over the life of the program | more than ten | medium — one opened source. A database match is a hit against a list, not a determination about any person, and no source opened here reports what followed any of them |
| New facilities handling chemicals of interest without screening, first four months after the expiry | more than 200 | medium — a CISA estimate reported in one opened source, covering 2023-07 to 2023-11 and never updated in any source opened here |
| Designated facilities awaiting inspection about six months after the expiry | more than 750, about 260 of them estimated to hold unidentified gaps | low — one opened source, which does not name the document the figures come from |
| Program funding after the expiry | retained in the FY2024 appropriation without enforcement authority | medium — one opened source |
Why is it still unsolved?
Institutional gap — the program was neither repealed nor replaced. Its authority ran out on a date, and putting it back requires an affirmative act by two chambers that has not occurred.
The first part of the gap is that near-unanimity in one chamber buys nothing in the other. A vote of 409 to 1 measures how little disagreement there is about the substance, and it did not produce floor time in the Senate before the deadline. Once the deadline passed, the question changed from renewing a live program to reviving an expired one, which is the same text carrying a different urgency.
The second part is that the lapse produces no event. There is no failed inspection to report because there are no inspections, no violation notice because there is no requirement, and no missing filing because the portal is closed. The size of the gap is a count of things that did not happen, and no source opened here names a body that publishes that count. The one backlog figure available, more than 750 facilities awaiting inspection, dates from about 2024-02 and has not been restated since.
The third part, and the one that keeps the pattern stable, is that the organization survived the authority. Appropriators kept the program funded, the staff remained, and the agency continued to engage facilities on a voluntary basis. From outside, a funded office with people in it looks like a working program. The difference between asking and requiring is invisible in any photograph of the building, and it is the entire content of what expired.
What observation would mean it is solved?
Candidates — (a) Congress enacts a reauthorization with a stated effective date and the agency reopens reporting and resumes inspections (b) the count of designated facilities awaiting inspection returns to zero (c) new facilities handling chemicals of interest are screened at the rate that applied before the expiry.
(a) alone counts a signature. A reauthorization can arrive with a shorter term, a narrower list of covered chemicals, or a start date far enough out that nothing changes on any site for a year. It would also restore the same structure that produced this lapse, since the four attempts described here were all extensions with end dates rather than permanent authority. A program that has to be renewed can lapse again on the same mechanism.
(b) alone is a backlog number that nobody currently publishes. The single figure available here is more than 750 as of about 2024-02, from one source that does not name where it came from. A backlog cannot be observed to reach zero if no source reports it at all, and clearing it would in any case say nothing about facilities that entered the population unscreened after the portal closed.
(c) alone measures intake. Screening new personnel and new facilities restores a flow, and the stock accumulated during the lapse stays where it is unless something separately reaches back over it. The three have to be read together, and each of them depends on a public count that does not exist today.
What is it connected to?
Fills with researchaccident prevention at chemical plants under the Clean Air Act, process safety requirements under occupational safety law, state chemical accident-prevention statutes, and the wider pattern of federal programs that carry sunset clauses and depend on renewal within a session. Relation type and evidence grade were not confirmed in this round.
What these sources do not say
- Why the reauthorization has not passed. No source opened here carries an on-the-record reason from the Senate, from any committee, or from the agency. Sources describe the expiry and the failed attempts and none reports an explanation from anyone in a position to give one.
- Whether any facility reduced its security after the expiry. No source opened here counts facilities that scaled back or dropped measures, and none names a body that tracks it. The voluntary mode leaves no record either way, so the absence of a count is a property of the arrangement rather than a gap in reporting.
- How large the unscreened intake is now. The estimate of more than 200 new facilities covers only 2023-07 to 2023-11. No source opened here updates it, so the figure for the years since the first four months is not stated anywhere in this material.
- Where the backlog figures come from. The one opened source reporting more than 750 uninspected facilities and about 260 with unidentified gaps does not name the agency document or dataset behind them. That is why those two values carry a low grade here.
- Whether a state program fills the gap. No source opened here surveys state law for a program that replaces the federal security requirement. The one state statute that appears in the opened material is an accident-prevention law, which addresses a different hazard.
- Whether incidents changed. No source opened here compares rates of attempted attack or theft at these facilities before and after the expiry. A weaker regime and a change in incidents are two different claims, and only the first is documented in this material.
- What the program actually achieved. The one opened source that reports an effect gives a figure of about 60 percent improvement in facility security measures without describing what was measured, over what period, or against what baseline. No primary measurement of the effect appears in any source opened here.
- What CISA says about the lapse. The agency published a statement on chemical security during the lapse and maintains a program page. Automated retrieval of both returned HTTP 403, so the position of the agency appears in this document only as other sources describe it.
- The state of the authority on the check date. The newest source opened here that confirms the lapse is dated 2025-12-13. No source opened here reports either a reauthorization or a continuation after that date, so the status on 2026-08-19 is inferred from silence rather than observed.
See the evidence
| Item | Source | Confirmation |
|---|---|---|
| Expiry date of 2023-07-28 and its legal effect · House vote of 409 to 1 on 2023-07-25 · about 9,000 personnel screened a month · more than ten matches over the life of the program · more than 200 new facilities unscreened in the first four months · about 3,200 designated facilities | Chemistry World | 2026-08-19 |
| Confirmation that the lapse was still in effect at 2025-12-13, more than two years after the expiry · course of S. 2178 · absence of reauthorization through that date | LegalClarity | 2026-08-19 |
| What the expiry removed in legal terms — reporting requirement, inspection, enforceable site security plans, screening database access, closed portal, shift to voluntary partnership | Congressional Research Service Insight IN12235, text read from a mirror publisher, EveryCRSReport.com | 2026-08-19 |
| Statutory history from the 2006 appropriations provision to the 2014 statute and the short-term renewals · 3,310 designated facilities or about 8 percent · about 42,000 facilities that filed an initial report as of 2019-12 | Congressional Research Service report IF10853, text read from a mirror publisher, EveryCRSReport.com | 2026-08-19 |
| Industry association statement welcoming the House vote of 409 to 1 and urging Senate action | American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers | 2026-08-19 |
| Industry association account of the program effect, given as about 60 percent improvement without a stated basis · the amendment attempt on the FY2025 defense authorization in 2024-06 | American Chemistry Council | 2026-08-19 |
| 89,000,000 people living or working within two miles of a designated facility · about 3,200 designated facilities · about 9,000 personnel screened a month · FY2024 appropriation retaining program funding without authority | Dakota Software, dated 2024-05-07 | 2026-08-19 |
| More than 750 designated facilities awaiting inspection about six months after the expiry and about 260 of them estimated to hold unidentified gaps, with no document named as the source of either figure · breadth of covered sectors under a list of more than 300 chemicals of interest | Williams Mullen | 2026-08-19 |
| Confirmation that accident prevention at chemical plants runs on separate legal authority under the Clean Air Act and was not affected by this expiry | US Environmental Protection Agency | 2026-08-19 |
| Agency program page, the origin of the facility count and the 89,000,000 proximity figure | CISA | URL not confirmed: automated retrieval returned HTTP 403 |
| Agency statement on chemical security during the lapse, titled Resilience in a Time of Uncertainty | CISA | URL not confirmed: automated retrieval returned HTTP 403 |
| Bill text and legislative history of H.R. 4470 in the 118th Congress, the two-year reauthorization passed by the House | Congress.gov | URL not confirmed: automated retrieval returned HTTP 403 |
| The same Congressional Research Service Insight as published on the congressional site | Congressional Research Service via congress.gov | URL not confirmed: PDF binary, automatic text extraction failed. Content was read from the mirror publisher listed above |
No primary federal document was read in full here. The two Congressional Research Service texts were read from an independent mirror publisher because the congressional PDF did not extract; they are the closest thing to a primary account in this material and they are the basis for every statement about what the expiry removed. The two agency pages and the congressional bill page returned HTTP 403 to automated retrieval and were left blank rather than replaced with a substitute address. Everything else comes from trade, legal and professional sources that cite the agency. Where sources overlap they agree: the expiry date of 2023-07-28 appears in two, the House vote of 409 to 1 appears in two, the figure of about 3,200 designated facilities appears in two, and the finding that the program had not been reauthorized appears in three, the newest dated 2025-12-13. Where they differ the difference is left visible rather than resolved — the count of designated facilities is 3,200 in two sources and 3,310 in a third with no as-of that reconciles them, and the backlog figures of more than 750 and about 260 rest on a single source that names no document behind them. This is a Path A output, so observation_refs is empty and provenance_mode: press-derived.
This table holds 13 evidence rows, 9 of which carry a source you can open · 8 distinct sources. How this table is made
People affected
Estimated range 89,000,000–89,000,000 As of designation set as it stood before 2023-07-28, restated 2024-05-07
Derivation chain
| Term | Value | Source | Assumption |
|---|---|---|---|
| People living or working within two miles of a chemical facility carrying the federal high-risk designation, counted against the designation set as it stood before the statutory authority expired on 2023-07-28 | 89,000,000 | Attributed to CISA and restated by an opened secondary source dated 2024-05-07. The agency page that would carry the figure directly returned HTTP 403 to automated retrieval and was not read. | Every person in this count sits near a facility that is no longer subject to any federal security requirement, because the requirement expired for the whole designated population at once rather than facility by facility. The figure therefore serves as both bounds: it is the only national count attributed to the agency that ran the program, and no source opened here restates, updates or narrows it. |
Sensitivity The interval has zero width and is not a confidence interval. It is a single published round number attributed to the agency, and no source opened here attaches a margin to it or recomputes it. The one direction of movement that is documented runs upward and cannot be sized. The designation set is frozen at its pre-expiry state, because the reporting step that produced designations stopped when the portal closed, and CISA estimated that more than 200 new facilities began handling chemicals of interest without screening in the first four months after 2023-07-28. No source opened here extends that estimate past 2023-11 or converts it into a population figure, so the count of people near facilities that would today meet the designation criteria is higher than 89,000,000 by an unknown amount. Two further limits run in opposite directions and neither can be computed from the opened sources: the facility side of the count is itself reported as about 3,200 in two sources and 3,310 in a third, with no as-of that reconciles them; and the count measures proximity to a designated site rather than harm, so it says how many people stand near an unregulated facility and not how many were affected in any year. Nothing opened here reports harm to any of them arising from the expiry.
Regional breakdown No source opened here gives a state-level or county-level count either of designated facilities or of the population near them. The only figure available is a single national number. Splitting it by state population would be proportional allocation, which this system does not do, and nothing opened here establishes that these facilities are distributed in proportion to population, so the split would have no basis in either direction.
What is missing 2
Grouped by how it gets filled, not by block number — that axis is the only one that tells a reader what can be done next.
- SectionWhat is it connected to?
accident prevention at chemical plants under the Clean Air Act, process safety requirements under occupational safety law, state chemical accident-prevention statutes, and the wider pattern of federal programs that carry sunset clauses and depend on renewal within a session. Relation type and evidence grade were not confirmed in this round.
Fills with research
- SectionWhat is the state now, and what should it be?
the target state: no source opened here names a date by which the authority is meant to be restored, and none names a level the inspection backlog or the unscreened intake is meant to return to. The House-passed two-year extension is an instrument, not a target — it says what would be re-enacted, not when, and not what would count as recovered. No agency document opened here sets a figure either. Nobody is missing a deadline, because no deadline exists.
Needs a new measurement
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