Sponsors (2)
The bill improves preparedness and infrastructure resilience for terrorist attacks during extreme cold by exercising coordinated response and rapid oversight, but it imposes costs on government and private partners and risks limited transparency and potentially premature policy actions from quick reporting.
State, local, Tribal, and territorial emergency managers receive a tested response plan and exercise specifically for a terrorist attack during extreme cold, improving coordinated readiness and incident response.
Utilities and other critical infrastructure operators get evaluations and lessons from the exercise to strengthen resilience and reduce outage duration in extreme cold events.
Communities — including rural and urban areas — could see improved access to critical services during extreme cold if lessons from the exercise are incorporated into DHS operations and local plans.
Utilities and private sector partners may face added costs or regulatory scrutiny if the exercise identifies infrastructure weaknesses that require investment.
Running a large interagency and public–private exercise requires DHS staff time and resources that could raise program costs or divert funds from other priorities.
A mandated rapid (60-day) reporting deadline may yield preliminary or incomplete findings that risk prompting premature or misguided policy decisions.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Requires DHS to run an exercise simulating a terrorist attack during extreme cold, study cascading infrastructure failures, and deliver an after-action report with recommendations within 60 days.
Requires the Department of Homeland Security to design and run a multiagency exercise simulating a terrorist attack that occurs during an extreme cold weather event and causes cascading failures across critical infrastructure. The exercise must address maintaining access to essential services, cascading infrastructure impacts, mitigation and resilience actions by emergency managers and community stakeholders, and federal/state/local/tribal/private coordination, and DHS must deliver an after-action report with findings and recommended changes to two congressional committees within 60 days.
Official title: Weatherizing Infrastructure in the North and Terrorism Emergency Readiness Act of 2025
Introduced April 30, 2025 by Timothy M. Kennedy · Last progress July 14, 2026