The bill
FEMA Act of 2025
HR. 4669, 119th Congress — read as touching Construction & Engineering.
Sponsored by
Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6]
ID: G000546
Follow the money
The bill
HR. 4669, 119th Congress — read as touching Construction & Engineering.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
28 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Introduction" section, p. 186-188 of the Mandate for Leadership.
Track this bill's progress through the legislative process
Latest Action
Ordered to be Reported (Amended) by the Yeas and Nays: 57 - 3.
September 2, 2025
📍 Current Status
Next: The bill will be reviewed by relevant committees who will debate, amend, and vote on it.
1. Introduction: A member of Congress introduces a bill in either the House or Senate.
2. Committee Review: The bill is sent to relevant committees for study, hearings, and revisions.
3. Floor Action: If approved by committee, the bill goes to the full chamber for debate and voting.
4. Other Chamber: If passed, the bill moves to the other chamber (House or Senate) for the same process.
5. Conference: If both chambers pass different versions, a conference committee reconciles the differences.
6. Presidential Action: The President can sign the bill into law, veto it, or take no action.
7. Became Law: If signed (or if Congress overrides a veto), the bill becomes law!
Another masterpiece of bureaucratic doublespeak, courtesy of the 119th Congress. Let's dissect this monstrosity and uncover the real disease beneath the legislative theater.
**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The FEMA Act of 2025 is a 419-section behemoth that claims to "authorize and improve" the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) while reforming disaster mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery. In reality, it's a Frankenstein's monster of a bill, stitched together from various special interests and lobbyist wish lists.
**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill creates a cabinet-level independent agency for FEMA, because what every bureaucracy needs is more autonomy and less accountability. It also establishes new offices, functions, and programs, including a Working Capital Fund (because who doesn't love a good slush fund?). The bill "reforms" public assistance by creating more bureaucratic hoops to jump through, while also increasing the federal government's role in disaster response.
**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The usual suspects are affected: FEMA, state and local governments, emergency responders, and the private sector. But let's be real, the only stakeholders who truly matter are the lobbyists and special interest groups who wrote this bill.
**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a perfect example of " disaster socialism" – where the federal government takes on more responsibility for disasters, while also creating new opportunities for cronyism and corruption. The increased bureaucracy will lead to more inefficiencies, delays, and waste. The "reforms" will likely result in more red tape, making it harder for those affected by disasters to receive aid.
In short, this bill is a symptom of the disease that plagues our government: a toxic mix of incompetence, corruption, and special interest pandering. It's a classic case of "legislative lupus" – where the cure (more bureaucracy) is worse than the disease (inefficient disaster response).
Diagnosis: Terminal bureaucratic sclerosis.
Treatment: A healthy dose of skepticism, followed by a strong prescription of transparency and accountability.
Prognosis: Poor. This bill will likely pass, and we'll be left with another bloated, ineffective government program that fails to deliver on its promises.
Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6]
Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle
No PAC contributions found
No committee contributions found
This bill has 10 cosponsors. Below are their top campaign contributors.
ID: L000560
Top Contributors
10
ID: W000806
Top Contributors
10
ID: S001211
Top Contributors
10
ID: R000603
Top Contributors
10
ID: E000235
Top Contributors
10
ID: E000246
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10
ID: H001099
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ID: T000460
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ID: F000483
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10
ID: C001103
Top Contributors
10
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 54 nodes and 43 connections (43 secondary connections hidden)
Total contributions: $271,474
Showing top 22 donors by contribution amount
Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 9 helped.
Section 101 (Rebuilding Public Infrastructure) authorizes grants for repair, restoration, reconstruction, or replacement of public facilities damaged by major disasters, which directly benefits construction and engineering firms involved in such projects.
Section 204 amends crisis counseling assistance to include substance use and alcohol use, which expands coverage and benefits for health insurance providers by increasing utilization of behavioral health services covered under health plans.
Section 305 (Utility Resiliency) allows electric utilities to carry out hazard mitigation activities jointly with power restoration efforts assisted by FEMA, providing a clear benefit to electric utilities.
Section 215 ensures access to lifesaving non-congregate sheltering without requiring credit cards or security deposits, which benefits long-term care providers by facilitating safer discharge planning and transitional housing for elderly and disabled individuals post-disaster.
Section 101 enables grants for repair/reconstruction of public and private nonprofit facilities, including housing and commercial real estate, directly benefiting real estate developers and owners through federal funding for post-disaster rebuilding.
Section 101 includes 'emergency medical care' in the definition of critical services eligible for grants to repair or replace private nonprofit facilities, benefiting hospitals and health systems.
+ 3 more industries not shown.
For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Rep. Graves, Sam [R-MO-6])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.
— 154 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise insurance at prices lower than the actuarially fair rate, thereby subsidizing flood insurance. Then, when flood costs exceed NFIP’s revenue, FEMA seeks taxpay- er-funded bailouts. Current NFIP debt is $20.5 billion, and in 2017, Congress canceled $16 billion in debt when FEMA reached its borrowing authority limit. These subsidies and bailouts only encourage more development in flood zones, increasing the potential losses to both NFIP and the taxpayer. The NFIP should be wound down and replaced with private insurance starting with the least risky areas currently identified by the program. Budget Issues FEMA manages all grants for DHS, and these grants have become pork for states, localities, and special-interest groups. Since 2002, DHS/FEMA have provided more than $56 billion in preparedness grants for state, local, tribal, and territorial governments. For FY 2023, President Biden requested more than $3.5 billion for federal assistance grants.13 Funds provided under these programs do not provide measurable gains for preparedness or resiliency. Rather, more than any objective needs, political interests appear to direct the flow of nondisaster funds. The principles of federalism should be upheld; these indicate that states better understand their unique needs and should bear the costs of their particularized programs. FEMA employees in Washington, D.C., should not determine how bil- lions of federal tax dollars should be awarded to train local law enforcement officers in Texas, harden cybersecurity infrastructure in Utah, or supplement migrant shelters in Arizona. DHS should not be in the business of handing out federal tax dollars: These grants should be terminated. Accomplishing this, however, will require action by Members of Congress who repeatedly vote to fund grants for political reasons. The transition should focus on building resilience and return on investment in line with real threats. Personnel FEMA currently has four Senate-confirmed positions. Only the Administrator should be confirmed by the Senate; other political leadership need not be con- firmed by the Senate. Additionally, FEMA’s “springing Cabinet position” should be eliminated, as this creates significant unnecessary challenges to the functioning of the whole of DHS at points in time when coordinated responses are most needed. CYBERSECURITY AND INFRASTRUCTURE SECURITY AGENCY (CISA) Needed Reforms CISA is supposed to have two key roles: (1) protection of the federal civilian government networks (.gov) while coordinating the execution of national cyber defense and sharing information with non-federal and private-sector partners — 155 — Department of Homeland Security and (2) national coordination of critical infrastructure security and resilience. Yet CISA has rapidly expanded its scope into lanes where it does not belong, the most recent and most glaring example being censorship of so-called misinformation and disinformation. CISA’s funding and resources should align narrowly with the foregoing two mission requirements. The component’s emergency communications and Chem- ical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) roles should be moved to FEMA; its school security functions should be transferred to state homeland security offices; and CISA should refrain from duplicating cybersecurity functions done elsewhere at the Department of Defense, FBI, National Security Agency, and U.S. Secret Service. Of the utmost urgency is immediately ending CISA’s counter-mis/disinforma- tion efforts. The federal government cannot be the arbiter of truth. CISA began this work because of alleged Russian misinformation in the 2016 election, which in fact turned out to be a Clinton campaign “dirty trick.” The Intelligence Commu- nity, including the NSA or DOD, should counter foreign actors. At the time of this writing, release of the Twitter Files has demonstrated that CISA has devolved into an unconstitutional censoring and election engineering apparatus of the political Left. In any event, the entirety of the CISA Cybersecurity Advisory Committee should be dismissed on Day One. For election security, CISA should help states and localities assess whether they have good cyber hygiene in their hardware and software in preparation for an election—but nothing more. This is of value to smaller localities, particularly by flagging who is attacking their websites. CISA should not be significantly involved closer to an election. Nor should it participate in messaging or propaganda. U.S. COAST GUARD (USCG) Needed Reforms The U.S. Coast Guard fleet should be sized to the needs of great-power compe- tition, specifically focusing efforts and investment on protecting U.S. waters, all while seeking to find (where feasible) more economical ways to perform USCG missions. The scope of the Coast Guard’s mission needs to be focused on protecting U.S. resources and interests in its home waters, specifically its Exclusive Economic Zone (200 miles from shore). USCG’s budget should address the growing demand for it to address the increasing threat from the Chinese fishing fleet in home waters as well as narcotics and migrant flows in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. Doing this will require reversing years of shortfalls in shipbuilding, maintenance, and upgrades of shore facilities as well as seeking more cost-effective ship and facility designs. In wartime, the USCG supports the Navy, but it has limited capability and capacity to support wartime missions outside home waters.
Policy matches are calculated using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text. A score of 60% or higher indicates meaningful thematic overlap. This does not imply direct causation or intent, but highlights areas where legislation aligns with Project 2025 policy objectives.