Promoting Opportunities to Widen Electrical Resilience Act of 2025

Floor Speech

Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of H.R. 164, my legislation with Representative Ezell. This bill empowers publicly owned electric utilities to implement hazard mitigation improvements during disaster recovery.

When disasters strike, they leave a trail of destruction, including damaged energy infrastructure that needs to be immediately repaired to restore power. At the same time, this can present an opportunity to improve the resilience of power infrastructure to reduce the risk of outages or fires in the future.

I have spoken with many FEMA employees, and they feel like they have their hands tied because of rules that are in place that prevent them from being able to fund investments in resilience and infrastructure.

As we are seeing more extreme weather because of climate change, we need to step up and spend taxpayer dollars more efficiently and better. That means that we have to change this law because the current law prevents FEMA from reimbursing utilities for hazard mitigation as they make temporary disaster repairs. This leads to wasted opportunities, more frequent power outages, and higher costs passed on to ratepayers.

Commonsense solutions, like H.R. 164, are more critical than ever to keep energy costs low for American families. This bill maximizes FEMA's resources and helps communities protect critical infrastructure, leading to lower costs for utilities and families in the wake of future disasters. More importantly, it allows us to use taxpayer dollars to invest in resiliency as we are seeing more extreme weather coming at us every single day.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

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Ms. HOYLE of Oregon. Mr. Speaker, the costs of recovering from increasingly frequent severe weather events often raise the price of Americans' electric bills. This bill would help public power make their systems more resilient at the time of repair, increasing efficiency and cutting overall costs.

I can't think of a more important set of bills to be passing at this time as the first bills coming up on suspension. These bills invest in our infrastructure and help FEMA be more transparent and utilize taxpayer dollars more efficiently.

Again, I thank my colleague, Representative Ezell, for prioritizing and moving this bill forward.

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