Fire Innovation Unit Act

Summary#

This bill directs the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior, acting together, to create a public-private pilot program called the Fire Innovation Unit. The pilot program must be set up within one year of the bill becoming law and runs for seven years. The program will find, test, and show new and existing technologies for wildfire prevention, detection, communication, response, and mitigation. It defines which Federal, state, Tribal, local, and other agencies count as "covered agencies," and which groups can apply as "covered entities" (private companies, nonprofits, and colleges).

The Secretaries must consult the National Wildfire Coordinating Group and work with covered agencies to identify priority technology areas. The bill lists example priorities such as hazardous fuels reduction, spatial planning for human-caused ignitions, wildfire modeling, dispatch communications, remote sensing and tracking, safety equipment, operational dashboards, interoperable data, autonomous suppression, grid resilience, home and community hardening, and decision-support tools. The program will connect selected applicants with the appropriate agencies for real-time and on-the-ground testing, set criteria to evaluate technology success, and help coordinate procurement and partnerships to scale effective technologies.

The Secretaries must invite applications, may treat some existing partnerships as successful for pilot purposes, and must publish the priority areas publicly. They must also report to several Congressional committees 180 days after the program starts and then every year. Reports must describe technologies tested, estimate costs to buy and scale them, summarize outreach, describe coordination with NOAA activities (including the Fire Weather Testbed), and list procurement barriers and solutions.

What it means for you#

• Private companies, nonprofits, and colleges can apply to test wildfire technologies with Federal and non-Federal partners.
• Federal, Tribal, state, and local fire and resource agencies named in the bill could be matched with applicants for field testing and training.
• The program will publish technology priority areas so potential applicants know which kinds of tools are being sought.
• The program must measure and report how well tested technologies perform and estimate what it would cost to use them at scale.
• The pilot will exist for up to seven years after the bill becomes law.

Expenses#

No publicly available information on specific funding amounts, appropriations, or new budget authority appears in the bill text. The bill requires the Secretaries to estimate costs of technologies in annual reports to Congress, but it does not specify how the pilot program will be funded.

Proponents' View#

No publicly available information.

Opponents' View#

No publicly available information.