Sponsors (2)
The bill strengthens preparedness and infrastructure resilience for extreme-cold terrorist scenarios and speeds congressional follow-up, but it requires public and private resources and risks rushed conclusions and reduced public transparency.
Utilities and critical infrastructure operators — and the communities they serve (rural and urban) — will get evaluations and lessons to strengthen resilience and reduce outage duration during extreme cold events.
State, local, Tribal, and territorial emergency managers will receive a tested, coordinated plan for responding to a terrorist attack during extreme cold, improving readiness and cross-jurisdictional response.
Congress (and therefore taxpayers) will receive timely oversight information and proposed legislative changes within 60 days of the exercise, enabling faster follow-up on identified gaps.
Taxpayers, DHS, and state governments may face added costs or diverted resources to plan and run the large interagency/public–private exercise, and utilities or small businesses may incur expenses if weaknesses requiring investment are identified.
State and local governments and other stakeholders risk acting on preliminary or incomplete findings because of the rapid 60-day reporting requirement, which could lead to misguided or premature policy decisions.
Local governments, tribal communities, and nonprofits may have reduced public access to vulnerability information due to information classification protections, undermining transparency, public confidence, and community-level preparedness.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Directs DHS to run a multiagency exercise on a terrorist attack during extreme cold with an after-action report to Congress within 60 days.
Official title: To require the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct a collective response to a terrorism exercise that includes the management of cascading effects on critical infrastructure during times of extreme cold weather, and for other purposes.
Introduced April 30, 2025 by Timothy M. Kennedy · Last progress April 30, 2025
Requires the Department of Homeland Security to design and run a multiagency exercise simulating a terrorist attack during an extreme cold-weather event that causes cascading failures of critical infrastructure. The exercise must address access to essential services, cascading infrastructure impacts, mitigation and resilience actions by emergency managers and communities, and coordination among federal, state, local, Tribal, territorial, private-sector, and community stakeholders. DHS must produce an after-action report with initial findings, plans to apply lessons learned, and any proposed legislative changes, and deliver that report to the relevant congressional homeland security committees within 60 days of the exercise, subject to classified-information protections.