Sponsors (4)
Introduced July 17, 2025 by Edward John Markey · Last progress July 17, 2025
This bill builds a federally led, funded, and science‑driven infrastructure to reduce climate‑related health harms—especially for vulnerable communities—but does so at the cost of new federal spending and added reporting, administrative, and compliance burdens for providers, states, and taxpayers.
Communities of color, low-income communities, Tribal nations, and medically underserved populations will receive formal recognition and prioritized federal attention to reduce climate-related health and environmental harms.
Creates a lead Office, a Director role, and requires a national strategic action plan (within 1 year) to coordinate federal climate-and-health efforts across agencies.
Improves preparedness for climate-linked health threats by expanding surveillance, modeling, forecasting, and establishing regional centers of excellence and workforce training.
The bill increases federal spending (new offices, programs, recurring reports and grants), which could raise taxpayer costs, add to deficits, or require offsets.
Creates new reporting, data‑sharing, and administrative requirements that will impose burdens on hospitals, health systems, state and local governments, and federal agencies.
Recommendations or new requirements to reduce health‑sector emissions could impose capital and operational costs on hospitals and clinics.
Based on analysis of 7 sections of legislative text.
Creates an HHS Office of Climate Change and Health Equity, a science advisory board, a national action plan, and authorizes funding to coordinate climate-related health preparedness and research.
Creates a permanent Office of Climate Change and Health Equity inside the Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate federal public health and health care system preparedness, response, research, and workforce development for the health impacts of climate change. It requires a national strategic action plan, establishes a science advisory board, commissions periodic National Academies reports, and authorizes multi‑year funding to support these activities. The Office must identify and prioritize needs of communities disproportionately harmed by climate change (including environmental justice and medically underserved communities), improve health‑sector resilience and emissions reductions, expand data and modeling, communicate risks and tools, and align federal programs to protect physical, mental, and behavioral health from climate threats. The law sets deadlines for plan publication and reporting and provides specified annual and one‑time authorized funds for FY2026–FY2031.