Sponsors (7)
Introduced January 14, 2025 by Eric Swalwell · Last progress January 14, 2025
The bill directs substantially more federal mitigation money, planning, data, and targeted assistance to high‑risk and disadvantaged communities—improving long‑term resilience and equity—but does so by increasing federal costs, reallocating funds away from some immediate recovery uses, and raising implementation, data, and capacity challenges that may advantage better‑resourced jurisdictions.
Low-income, environmental-justice, Tribal, and other historically underserved communities will be explicitly prioritized for federal hazard mitigation funding, increasing equity and directing more resources to communities with disproportionate disaster risk.
Many small and fiscally constrained communities (expanded 'small impoverished' threshold) will be eligible for higher federal cost-shares (up to 90%), lowering local cost burdens and making mitigation projects financially feasible.
The bill increases the share of Disaster Relief Fund dollars available for predisaster mitigation (raising the predisaster set‑aside and adding a planning/capacity-building set‑aside), enabling more pre-disaster projects and resilience planning that can reduce future damages and recovery costs.
A larger share of federal discretionary resources and higher federal cost-shares increase overall federal spending and budgetary pressure, which could require offsets or new appropriations borne by taxpayers.
Shifting more funds to predisaster mitigation and reserving a 2% planning set-aside reduces the pool available for immediate post-disaster recovery grants, potentially lowering or delaying direct recovery assistance to disaster-affected homeowners and renters.
Expanding eligibility and prioritization categories could increase competition for limited mitigation dollars, diluting per-community aid and slowing project delivery for some jurisdictions.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Prioritizes and increases federal support for climate-informed hazard mitigation in high-risk and disadvantaged communities, adds outreach and requires a central public database of disaster and mitigation spending.
Updates FEMA’s predisaster hazard mitigation program to prioritize and better fund projects in high-hazard and disadvantaged communities, require use of climate-change projections in planning and design, expand outreach to increase applications from vulnerable places, and create a central public database of disaster and mitigation spending. It also raises the federal share for eligible projects in small impoverished and environmental justice communities and increases available mitigation fund set‑asides from certain disaster grants.