The bill
To designate the facility of the United States Postal Service located at 80 Atlantic Avenue in Oceanside, New York, as the "Detective Luis G. Alvarez Post Office".
HR. 9026, 119th Congress.
Sponsored by
Rep. Gillen, Laura [D-NY-4]
ID: G000602
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The bill
HR. 9026, 119th Congress.
The sponsor
Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.
The money
24 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.
The alignment
This bill's text tracks the "Department of Health and Human Services" section, p. 521-523 of the Mandate for Leadership.
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Latest Action
Ordered to be Reported by Voice Vote.
July 21, 2026
📍 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!
**HR 9026: A Monumental Waste of Congressional Time Masquerading as Patriotism**
**1. Main Purpose & Objectives** The stated purpose of HR 9026 is to rename a U.S. Postal Service facility in Oceanside, New York, after Detective Luis G. Alvarez—a 9/11 first responder and advocate for the Zadroga Act who died of cancer linked to Ground Zero exposure. Ostensibly, it’s a tribute. In reality, it’s legislative masturbation: a feel-good gesture that costs nothing, solves nothing, and lets Congress pretend it’s doing meaningful work while ignoring actual crises like healthcare, inflation, or the fact that the Postal Service is bleeding money faster than a hemophiliac in a shark tank.
**2. Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law** This bill does exactly two things: - It renames a building. - It mandates that all future references to that building use the new name.
That’s it. No funding. No policy change. No reform. Just a semantic swap so constituents can feel warm and fuzzy when they mail their tax returns. It’s the legislative equivalent of putting a bandaid on a severed artery and calling it trauma care. The only “change to existing law” is the addition of unnecessary bureaucratic clutter—now every map, GPS system, and intern’s spreadsheet must be updated to reflect a name that changes nothing about the building’s function, which remains: processing mail and occasionally losing your packages.
**3. Affected Parties & Stakeholders** - **Detective Alvarez’s family**: Receives a hollow honor that won’t bring him back or fix the systemic failures that made his illness likely. - **USPS employees**: Must now explain to confused customers why the building has two names and why their pensions are still under threat. - **Taxpayers**: Fund the minutiae of this renaming—stationery, signs, website updates—while Congress ignores the $69 billion Postal Service unfunded liability. - **Voters**: Treated like sentimental idiots who’ll confuse a plaque with progress. - **Sponsors (21 cosponsors, bipartisan)**: Opportunistically riding Alvarez’s legacy to look compassionate without lifting a finger on actual 9/11 responder healthcare or postal reform.
**4. Potential Impact & Implications** Impact: Nearly zero. The building will still sort mail. Alvarez’s legacy deserves better than a naming rights deal that requires no sacrifice, no courage, and no confrontation with powerful interests. Implication: This bill reveals Congress’s true priority—symbolism over substance. It’s easier to rename a post office than to fix the broken system that failed Alvarez and thousands like him. It’s political pornography: satisfying to consume, nutritionally void, and ultimately embarrassing when you realize you’ve wasted time on it.
In short: HR 9026 isn’t a tribute—it’s a tombstone for legislative integrity. Congress would rather carve names in stone than lift a finger to stop the next Alvarez from getting sick in the first place. Pathetic.
Rep. Gillen, Laura [D-NY-4]
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: G000597
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ID: S001201
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ID: L000598
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No contribution data available
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ID: M001231
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ID: T000478
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ID: M001188
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ID: M000317
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ID: K000402
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22
Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.
Showing 42 nodes and 58 connections
Total contributions: $58
Showing top 17 donors by contribution amount
This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.
AI Analysis:
"The bill is a symbolic naming designation for a post office honoring a detective, with no connection to healthcare policy, reproductive rights, gender identity, or the specific objectives outlined in the Project 2025 HHS section."
— 489 — Department of Health and Human Services 1. Colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during COVID. 2. Colluding with abortion advocates and LGBT advocates to violate conscience-protection laws and the Hyde Amendment. The Life Agenda. The Office of the Secretary should eliminate the HHS Repro- ductive Healthcare Access Task Force and install a pro-life task force to ensure that all of the department’s divisions seek to use their authority to promote the life and health of women and their unborn children. Additionally, HHS should return to being known as the Department of Life by explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care and by restoring its mission statement under the Strategic Plan and elsewhere to include furthering the health and well-being of all Americans “from conception to natural death.” The next Administration should create a dedicated Special Representative for Domestic Women’s Health. In the Trump Administration, there was a Special Representative for Global Women’s Health that focused on international issues, but this position lacked authority to be the lead on international policies because of overlapping issues with the U.S. Department of State and USAID (and at times a lack of clarity as to the lead point of contact and policy decisions at the White House). The new Special Representative would serve as the lead on all matters of federal domestic policy development related to life and family with support from the DPC for implementation and coordination among agencies. In the post-Dobbs era, advancing support for mothers will include coordination among agencies out- side of HHS, and the Special Representative would provide a clear focal point for all issues related to protecting life and serving families. The Family Agenda. The Secretary’s antidiscrimination policy statements should never conflate sex with gender identity or sexual orientation. Rather, the Secretary should proudly state that men and women are biological realities that are crucial to the advancement of life sciences and medical care and that married men and women are the ideal, natural family structure because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them. OFFICE OF THE ASSISTANT SECRETARY FOR HEALTH (OASH) / OFFICE OF THE SURGEON GENERAL (OSG) The Assistant Secretary for Health (ASH) is the four-star admiral for the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps (USPHS), and the Surgeon Gen- eral (SG) is the three-star admiral. The ASH is tasked with overseeing not only the USPHS, but also 10 regional health offices, multiple presidential and secretarial advisory committees, and other offices such as the Offices of Minority Health, Women’s Health, and Population Affairs. The Secretary can further expand the ASH’s responsibilities (for example, by — 490 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise designating the ASH as liaison to the CDC). The SG officially oversees the daily oper- ations of the USPHS, although those are actually under the control of the Director of the USPHS Commissioned Corps Headquarters. The SG also issues information to the public (Surgeon General’s advisories, Calls to Action, and Reports), serving in effect as a key public health spokesperson for the federal government. USPHS officers are assigned to various agencies such as the CDC, NIH, and Bureau of Prisons. Their organizational structure is similar in some respects to the National Guard’s, and their salaries are paid primarily by the agencies to which they are assigned (which serves to limit USPHS appropriations). USPHS officers can be deployed on missions to respond to domestic or international crises (for example, a hurricane in Florida or an Ebola outbreak in Africa) at any time. The USPHS should be restructured to make it more like its sister uniformed services with a more streamlined chain of command and corresponding appro- priations to ensure efficiency and clarity of mission. Its core mission should be refocused to emphasize prompt, responsive deployments that meet specific criteria and are less dependent on the various agencies to which the officers are assigned. Fulfillment of specific tasks should not be duplicated by non-uniformed civil ser- vants and USPHS officers, and any roles that can be filled by civilians should be filled by them. The ASH and SG positions should be combined into one four-star position with the rank, responsibilities, and authority of the ASH retained but with the title of Surgeon General and some of the SG’s communications responsibilities, which would include disseminating other HHS messages and sharing general medical advice without legal weight. The holder of this consolidated position, which should be filled by a health care provider, would be better positioned to ensure that the USPHS is properly focused and deployed. With such reforms, the supporting office (previously the OASH and OSG) would be better equipped than other HHS offices or agencies to reduce silos and con- solidate or eliminate duplicative functions. Congress should consider legislation that would require this office to take such actions or at least make such recom- mendations to the Secretary. Such legislation would require a thorough analysis of the various legal authorities impacting the department’s current organiza- tional structure. The position previously known as the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health should be combined with and have the title of Deputy Surgeon General and become a three-star position with operational control including financial and deployment decisions. The Director of the Headquarters should be responsible for implementing the decisions of the Deputy Surgeon General. Promoting Life and Family. In dealing with sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, the OASH should focus on root-cause analysis with a focus on strengthening marriage and sexual risk avoidance. Strong leadership is needed
AI Analysis:
"The bill is a symbolic naming designation for a post office honoring a first responder, with no connection to immigration enforcement, USCIS restructuring, border security, or any of the substantive policy objectives outlined in the Project 2025 DHS section."
— 147 — Department of Homeland Security Personnel USCIS should be classified as a national security–sensitive agency, and all of its employees should be classified as holding national security–sensitive posi- tions. Leaks must be investigated and punished as they would be in a national security agency, and the union should be decertified. Any employees who cannot accept that change and cannot conform their behavior to the standards required by such an agency should be separated. USCIS’s D.C. personnel presence should be skeletal, and agency employees with operational or security roles should be rotated out to offices throughout the United States. These USCIS employees should live and work in the communities that are most affected by their daily duties and decisions. NECESSARY BORDER AND IMMIGRATION STATUTORY, REGULATORY, AND ADMINISTRATIVE CHANGES The current border security crisis was made possible by glaring loopholes in our immigration system. The result was a preventable and predictable his- toric increase in illegal and inadmissible encounters along our southern border. This pulled limited resources from the front lines of our nation’s borders and away from their national security mission, releasing a vast and complex set of threats into our country. To regain our sovereignty, integrity, and security, Congress must pass meaningful legislation to close the current loopholes and prevent future Administrations from exploiting them for political gain or per- sonal ideology. Legislative Proposals l Title 42 authority in Title 8. Create an authority akin to the Title 42 Public Health authority that has been used during the COVID-19 pandemic to expel illegal aliens across the border immediately when certain non- health conditions are met, such as loss of operational control of the border. l Mandatory appropriation for border wall system infrastructure. The monies appropriated would be used to fund the construction of additional border wall systems, technology, and personnel in strategic locations in accordance with the Border Security Improvement Plan (BSIP). l Appropriation for Port of Entry infrastructure. Border security is not addressed solely by systems in between the ports of entry. POEs require technology and physical upgrades as well as an influx of personnel to meet capacity demands and act as the literal gatekeepers for the country. This is the first line of defense against drug and human smuggling operations.
AI Analysis:
"The bill is a symbolic naming designation for a post office honoring a first responder, while the Project 2025 policy excerpt focuses on reforming the Department of State to align with a conservative presidential agenda. There is no thematic or policy connection between honoring a public servant via a postal facility name and the stated goal of reshaping diplomatic bureaucracy."
— 169 — Department of Homeland Security 19. U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, Management Directive No. 0810.1, June 10, 2004, https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/foia/mgmt_directive_0810_1_the_office_of_inspector_general. pdf (accessed March 15, 2023). 20. H.R. 5005, Homeland Security Act of 2002, Public Law No. 107-296, 107th Congress, November 25, 2002, https://www.congress.gov/bill/107th-congress/house-bill/5005 (accessed January 18, 2023). — 171 — 6 DEPARTMENT OF STATE Kiron K. Skinner The U.S. Department of State’s mission is to bilaterally, multilaterally, and regionally implement the President’s foreign policy priorities; to serve U.S. citizens abroad; and to advance the economic, foreign policy, and national security interests of the United States. Since the U.S. Founding, the Department of State has been the American gov- ernment’s designated tool of engagement with foreign governments and peoples throughout the world. Country names, borders, leaders, technology, and people have changed in the more than two centuries since the Founding, but the basics of diplomacy remain the same. Although the Department has also evolved throughout the years, at least in the modern era, there is one significant problem that the next President must address to be successful. There are scores of fine diplomats who serve the President’s agenda, often helping to shape and interpret that agenda. At the same time, however, in all Administrations, there is a tug-of-war between Presidents and bureaucracies— and that resistance is much starker under conservative Presidents, due largely to the fact that large swaths of the State Department’s workforce are left-wing and predisposed to disagree with a conservative President’s policy agenda and vision. It should not and cannot be this way: The American people need and deserve a diplomatic machine fully focused on the national interest as defined through the election of a President who sets the domestic and international agenda for the nation. The next Administration must take swift and decisive steps to reforge the department into a lean and functional diplomatic machine that serves the
Showing 3 of 5 policy matches
Policy matches are calculated using a hybrid approach: initial candidates are found using semantic similarity between bill summaries and Project 2025 policy text, then an AI model (Llama 3.1 70B) provides detailed alignment ratings and analysis. Ratings range from 1 (minimal alignment) to 5 (very strong alignment). This analysis does not imply direct causation or intent.