NENA Pressing Hill Republicans to Find Alternative NG-911 Funding by Congress' End
Leaders of two 911 advocacy groups in Tuesday interviews offered slightly diverging plans for pushing Congress to address funding for next-generation 911 tech upgrades. Republican lawmakers decided against allocating any future spectrum auction revenue for that purpose in the budget reconciliation package both chambers passed last week (see 2507030056). President Donald Trump signed the measure Friday, authorizing an 800 MHz spectrum auction pipeline through Sept. 30, 2034 (see 2507070045). A Hill briefing Tuesday with the NG9-1-1 Institute and Intrado on emergency communications issues barely touched on the funding issue.
National Emergency Number Association CEO Brian Fontes told us he's pressing Capitol Hill Republicans to act on the NG-911 funding issue before the end of this Congress. 911 officials in February were hoping to persuade GOP lawmakers to allocate some spectrum revenue in reconciliation to pay for the technology (see 2502260045). Meanwhile, National Association of State 911 Administrators President Pokey Harris told us she backs reexamining how much federal funding states will need to make the tech upgrades.
House Commerce Committee member Gabe Evans, R-Colo., said in a video played during the briefing that it remains “critically important … that we are doing everything that we can to support public safety and first responders through rolling out the best technology and the best [NG-911] services and resources that we possibly have.” He said he wants to ensure that public-safety officials have “the technology [and] resources to be able to do things like reverse 911s [or] geofence areas and send out shelter-in-place texts or other notifications.”
“The need is more urgent than ever" to fund NG-911, Fontes said after the briefing. “Congress has the power [and] the responsibility to ensure that our nation has the best 911 system in the world. Other countries are surpassing us in their capabilities.” Fontes said he and other NENA officials intend to hold House Communications Subcommittee Chairman Richard Hudson, R-N.C., to his May commitment to work on alternative funding for NG-911 after opposing Democrats’ attempts to allocate $14.8 billion in auction revenue for the technology in Commerce’s part of the reconciliation package (see 2505140062).
Hudson “speaks for [House Commerce] in this Congress, not multiple future [sessions], so I assume that he’s talking about having this achieved” by the beginning of 2027, Fontes said. He said he plans to ask Congress, "How are you going to fund it?” after lawmakers showed “some hesitancy to modify" the reconciliation package. NENA Vice President of Government Affairs Jonathan Gilad added that it would “be a dereliction of duty [for lawmakers] to not fund [NG-911] before the end of this Congress.”
The NG-911 funding issue “should come up” whenever House Communications reschedules a hearing on public-safety communications that it originally planned for Wednesday, Fontes said. House Commerce, like other committees, postponed hearings planned for this week after leaders decided to pause proceedings to make up for curtailing the chamber’s planned recess for the July Fourth holiday. House Commerce hasn’t yet announced a makeup date for the hearing, which an earlier notice said would examine strengthening FirstNet and other public-safety communications systems.
'Enough Data'
Fontes strongly pushed back against Hudson’s argument that Congress shouldn’t allocate spectrum proceeds for NG-911 because the estimate from the 911 Implementation Coordination Office, an effort of the NTIA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, dates to 2018 (see 1810050051). That estimate said full deployment of NG-911 would cost $9.5 billion-$12.7 billion. Hudson said in May that lawmakers would need a new “accurate number of dollars to appropriate” for NG-911. However, Fontes argued Tuesday that “there is enough data currently available that is usable,” including information from the White House OMB, to justify public-safety groups’ current estimate of $15 billion.
It took “six years of study” to produce the 2018 estimate, and seven years later, Congress still hasn't funded NG-911, Fontes said. “The last thing we need right now is an additional study that will take God knows how many years, [and then] God knows how many more years [for Congress] to actually act to fund” the tech upgrades. Gilad said that “while Congress is counting how much it will cost, we could be counting the lives lost because we don't have” NG-911 built nationwide.
NASNA's Harris said after the briefing that “we need to home in a bit” to update the 2018 NG-911 estimate so it better reflects what states need to fully build out the technology. “I don’t want to say that the [2018 estimate is now] inaccurate, but we're at a much more critical stage now than we were” then, said Harris, who's also executive director of the North Carolina 911 Board. She said she has talked to Hudson about the issue and “has support” from other members of the state’s congressional delegation.
Lawmakers should also “look at what bottlenecks” or other issues are affecting NG-911 buildouts, Harris told us. “Every state needs to level-set [at a] standard of being able to share 911 calls among each other. A state may have authority [to generate NG-911 funding], but they may not know how to execute implementation or deployment.”