ACCURATE Act

Key Points

• The bill creates a new Commission on Hazard Risk Assessment Tools, housed under the Commerce Department. This commission will review the maps, scores, and models that federal agencies use to predict natural disasters like floods, wildfires, and earthquakes, and will recommend standards to improve their accuracy and consistency.
• The commission will include a wide range of members from government, industry, and academia, covering sectors like insurance, banking, construction, real estate, emergency management, and universities working on AI-powered hazard modeling.
• Once standards are adopted, federal agencies will be required to follow them when buying risk assessment tools from private companies. Vendors selling these tools to the government must document how their products meet the new standards.
• The commission will produce three reports over roughly three years, cataloguing existing tools, recommending new standards, and evaluating whether those standards are working. The commission itself sunsets after five years.
• The bill covers a broad range of natural hazards including extreme weather, floods, wildfires, earthquakes, and droughts. Better risk data could eventually affect how communities plan for disasters, how insurance is priced, and where new buildings go up.