Enhancing First Response Act
Key claim: The Enhancing First Response Act would require the FCC to issue preliminary and final reports and hold field hearings after multi-day DIRS activations, publish findings on unreported 9-1-1 outages and visual outage notifications, reclassify public safety telecommunicators as a protective-service occupation, and have the FCC IG report on Kari’s Law implementation.
Abstract
(S725 · 119th Congress) Enhancing First Response Act This bill requires the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to report on certain activations of the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS). DIRS is a reporting system that is activated during severe weather and other events impacting communications service and enables communications providers to report outages and other degradations to service. If the system was activated for at least seven days, the FCC must issue a preliminary report that includes information about the number, duration, and nature of all associated outages. The FCC must also hold at least one public field hearing in the area affected by the event, and it must issue a final report that includes recommendations for improving the resiliency of affected networks or recovery efforts. Separately, the FCC must publish a general report on (1) the volume and nature of 9-1-1 outages that are not required to be reported under current outage notification rules, and (2) the value to public safety agencies of the inclusion of visual information in outage notifications from communications providers. The bill also requires the Office of Management and Budget, by 30 days after the bill’s enactment, to categorize public safety telecommunicators as a protective service occupation under the Standard Occupational Classification System. Finally, the Office of the Inspector General of the FCC is directed to publish a report on the implementation of Kari’s Law, which requires multiline telephone systems to be preconfigured to allow users to dial 9-1-1 directly from any phone without dialing any additional code or prefix. Latest action (2025-09-11): Held at the desk.
Why this matters
The bill would formally reclassify 9-1-1 telecommunicators as protective-service workers, a long-sought recognition that affects federal labor statistics, potential pay/benefits benchmarking, and eligibility framing for first-responder programs. It also layers new FCC transparency duties (DIRS post-activation reports, unreported 9-1-1 outage disclosures, Kari’s Law IG audit) onto existing frameworks, incrementally expanding oversight of the telecom infrastructure that public safety workers depend on.