# Model State Emergency Health Powers Act The **Model State Emergency Health Powers Act (MSEHPA)** is draft state legislation published in 2001, prepared at the request of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the weeks after the September 11 attacks and the anthrax letters. It was written to give states a modern template for public-health emergency authority — declaration, surveillance, control of property and facilities, isolation and quarantine, and management of persons — replacing quarantine statutes many states had not revisited since the early twentieth century. No state adopted it whole. Most adopted pieces, which is the fact that matters structurally: in much of the country a **public-health emergency is a second switch**, declared under its own chapter on its own trigger, carrying its own clock and its own termination rule, separate from the general emergency-management declaration the governor signs. A legislature that terminates "the emergency" under the emergency-management act has therefore often terminated nothing that anyone was objecting to. The Act was contested from publication, from civil-liberties organizations over the isolation, quarantine and compelled-treatment provisions and from state-sovereignty critics over its federal origin. The 2020–23 wave of state emergency-powers reform reopened both arguments. ## See also - [[State Emergency Powers Crosswalk]] · [[Emergency Powers]] · [[Emergency Powers Crosswalk]] · [[Federalism]]