The Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS): Primer and Issues for Congress

Emergency alerting is critical to emergency response. Effective dissemination of emergency alerting communications at all stages of an emergency can increase the likelihood that people take protective actions. The government operates and maintains a national alerting system, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), which is an internet protocol (IP)-based network that serves as a gateway between official entities that need to communicate an emergency alert and the national communications networks capable of delivering those alerts to relevant public audiences. The President as well as authorized federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal entities can use IPAWS to send national and geographically targeted alerts. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created IPAWS pursuant to Executive Order (E.O.) 13407, signed by President George W. Bush on June 26, 2006. Managed by DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), IPAWS enables the simultaneous distribution of a single emergency alert across multiple communication networks (e.g., radio, television, cell phone). In 2006, Congress passed the Warning, Alert, and Response Network Act (Title VI of P.L. 109-347), which expanded the reach of IPAWS to include wireless devices and required the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to adopt technical standards, protocols, and procedures for commercial mobile service providers that voluntarily transmit alerts across their networks to cell phones. IPAWS operates as an input system that authenticates, validates, and distributes alerts across the following communication pathways: Emergency Alert System (EAS), Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA), National Weather Radio All Hazards, and internet-based systems. Many of these communications pathways predate IPAWS, and transmitting alerts through each pathway required a separate process. IPAWS integrated the separate pathways into one communications system. FEMA manages the nationwide activation, tests, and exercises of IPAWS and confirms the functionality of WEA and EAS communication pathways. FEMA also handles the procurement, construction, and improvements of IPAWS. The FCC creates and enforces operational rules for EAS and establishes technical requirements that participating wireless carriers must follow for delivering WEA. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration creates EAS messages for severe weather events, and its National Weather Service issues WEA for severe weather risks. Congress has maintained interest in FEMA’s management of IPAWS, including the system’s modernization and adoption by state and local authorities. In 2016, Congress passed the IPAWS Modernization Act of 2015 (P.L. 114-143) to improve IPAWS and ensure that federal, state, local, territorial, and tribal governments can alert and warn the public in a timely and effective manner about natural disasters, acts of terrorism, and other human-made disasters. P.L. 114-143 codified several elements of E.O. 13407, such as requiring IPAWS to be adaptive to people’s geographic locations and accessible for people with disabilities and limited-English proficiency and improving the system’s resiliency and security. In 2019, Congress passed P.L. 116-92, which required that FEMA develop mandatory minimum requirements for state, local, territorial, and tribal governments participating in and using IPAWS. IPAWS and the individual emergency alerting pathways on which IPAWS relies may be topics for congressional consideration. Technological advances and changes in the way people consume information may present opportunities (e.g., technological advances that may enhance the accuracy of geotargeted alerts) and challenges (e.g., growing reliance on evolving internet-based applications that may be incompatible with IPAWS) for emergency alerting. Considerations for Congress may include updates to existing emergency alerting systems; factors influencing user adoption of IPAWS, including asserted concerns about the associated initial and ongoing costs as well as the perceived difficulty and limitations of submitting an alert for distribution via IPAWS; and FEMA’s implementation of legislative direction, including asserted delays in modernization and efforts to improve the reliability of IPAWS given asserted network connectivity issues and outages.