The DISASTER Act of 2025 amends chapter 11 of title 31, U.S. Code, to require the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to send Congress an annual report that aggregates and itemizes federal disaster-related assistance. The report must accompany the President’s annual budget submission and cover obligations made in the prior fiscal year across a long list of agencies and programs.
The bill matters because it creates a single public source for federal disaster expenditures—broken out by agency, account, disaster, and funding instrument—which proponents say will improve congressional budgeting and reveal opportunities to reduce future costs through mitigation. The requirement also forces OMB to coordinate cross-agency data and to publish the results in a searchable, downloadable format on its website.
At a Glance
What It Does
The bill adds section 1127 to 31 U.S.C., directing OMB to deliver an annual report, timed with the President’s budget, that totals disaster-related obligations and breaks them down by agency, account, disaster, disaster type, spending purpose (response, recovery, mitigation), and instrument (grants, loans). It also requires the report be made publicly available in searchable and downloadable form.
Who It Affects
OMB and the budget offices of virtually every major federal agency named in the bill (USDA, DOD, DHS/FEMA, HUD, HHS, EPA, SBA, DOE, DOT, IRS/Treasury, VA, Justice, Labor, Interior, Commerce, GSA and others). Congressional appropriations and oversight staff, state and local emergency managers, and watchdog groups will be principal users of the data.
Why It Matters
This creates a statutory, recurring dataset tying disaster spending to the federal budget process—potentially changing how Congress assesses disaster costs and funds mitigation. It also institutionalizes cross-agency reporting that today is fragmented across declarations, supplemental bills, program accounts, and mission assignments.
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What This Bill Actually Does
The bill instructs OMB to produce one comprehensive annual accounting of federal disaster-related obligations and to submit it to Congress on the same day the President files the budget. ‘‘Disaster-related assistance’’ is defined broadly to include response, recovery, mitigation, and related administrative expenses. OMB must compile obligations across a specified list of agencies and programs, but the bill also leaves room for ‘‘other authorities as appropriate,’’ which gives OMB discretion to include additional accounts.
The report must provide both aggregate totals and granular breakouts: obligations by agency and account, obligations tied to specific disasters, breakdowns by disaster type, spending classified as response versus recovery versus mitigation, and by funding instrument (grants versus loans). That mix of cross-cutting and line-item detail is designed so users can answer both fiscal-policy questions (how much federal money went to disasters last year?) and program-level questions (which programs provided grants versus loans?).Practically, delivering this product will require OMB to pull data from department budget systems, FEMA mission assignment reports, the Corps of Engineers, SBA disaster loans, HUD CDBG disaster allocations, and dozens of other sources.
The law sets no new enforcement penalties but makes the report public and requires it to be searchable, sortable, and downloadable on OMB’s website—an implicit expectation that OMB will publish machine-readable files and documentation.The report becomes effective with the President’s budget submission for FY2027. That lead time gives agencies and OMB a full fiscal year to align definitions, identify data gaps, and build the publication.
The text does not change how agencies obligate funds; it only requires OMB to collect, reconcile, and present those obligations in a consolidated format for Congress and the public.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The bill creates 31 U.S.C. §1127, obligating OMB to submit the disaster-assistance report to Congress each year on the day the President files the budget.
The reporting requirement takes effect with the President’s budget submission for fiscal year 2027.
The statute names specific agencies and programs (for example, USDA suites of programs, DOD Civil Works and select military accounts, FEMA emergency and major disaster declarations, HUD CDBG, SBA Disaster Assistance, EPA emergency authorities, DOT Emergency Relief) and allows OMB to include other authorities as appropriate.
The report must break out obligations by agency and account, by disaster and by disaster type, by purpose (response, recovery, mitigation), and by instrument (grants versus loans).
OMB must publish the report on its website in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable format—implying machine-readable tables and accompanying documentation.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
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Short title — DISASTER Act of 2025
This is the formal naming clause. It has no operational effect, but gives the bill its public label for citations and for agencies that will reference the statutory text when building internal guidance and briefing materials.
Findings — rationale for transparency
Congress includes findings that frame the bill’s policy purpose: federal disaster assistance is extensive, multi-agency, multi-year, and currently lacks a single public estimate. While findings carry no legal obligations, they signal Congressional expectations that the report will be used to inform appropriations and mitigation policy.
Scope and agencies covered
This subsection defines the covered universe and lists agencies and program areas OMB must include. The list is detailed—covering USDA program lines, Commerce NOAA fisheries and EDA adjustment assistance, DOD military accounts and the Army Corps (civil), HUD housing programs, DHS/FEMA declarations and mission assignments, SBA disaster assistance, EPA emergency authorities, DOE emergency offices, and others. Because the statute names both broad departments and specific accounts, OMB will need to map department-level budget accounts to the named programs and decide how to treat cross-cutting items such as FEMA mission assignments to other agencies.
Required report content and granularity
Subsection (b) prescribes the data elements: total disaster-related obligations, obligations by agency and account, obligations tied to specific disasters, obligations by disaster type, response vs. recovery vs. mitigation spending, and an instrument split (loans vs. grants). That combination forces both vertical (agency/account) and horizontal (by disaster, by purpose) reconciliation—an implementation challenge that will require common identifiers for disasters and clear rules to prevent double-counting when multiple agencies fund the same recovery activity.
Public availability requirement
OMB must publish the report on its website and make it searchable, sortable, and downloadable. The statute does not prescribe formats or metadata standards, but the phrasing creates an expectation of machine-readable files and user-facing search/sort functionality. Agencies will need to supply documentation (data dictionaries, date ranges, definitions) to make the published dataset useful for downstream users.
Table of chapters updated
The bill amends the chapter table to insert §1127. This administrative step ensures the new reporting requirement appears in statutory tables and legal references used by OMB, Congressional Research Service, and legal databases.
Effective date
The reporting requirement begins with the President’s budget submission for FY2027. This delayed effective date gives agencies and OMB fiscal-year time to inventory relevant accounts, agree on disaster identifiers and classification schemes, and build the publication pipeline before the first report is due.
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Explore Government in Codify Search →Who Benefits and Who Bears the Cost
Every bill creates winners and losers. Here's who stands to gain and who bears the cost.
Who Benefits
- Congressional appropriators and oversight staff — receive a consolidated, recurring dataset that helps quantify past disaster obligations and evaluate budget requests and supplemental needs.
- State and local emergency managers and planners — gain access to historical federal spending by disaster and program, which can inform mitigation prioritization and grant-seeking strategies.
- Transparency and watchdog organizations — get a machine-readable, centralized source for auditing disaster spending patterns and identifying duplication or persistent spending trends.
- Taxpayers and researchers — benefit from public access to standardized data that supports analysis of federal disaster exposure, cost drivers, and mitigation returns.
Who Bears the Cost
- Office of Management and Budget — must coordinate interagency data collection, reconcile disparate accounting practices, and publish the dataset in a user-friendly, machine-readable form; these are not explicitly funded in the bill.
- Federal agencies and departmental budget offices named in the statute — must allocate staff time to extract, normalize, and validate obligations data and to develop metadata and crosswalks between agency accounts and the report’s required fields.
- Smaller program offices and mission-assigned partners (including some federal contractors or grantees) — may face new information requests or requirements to tag obligations to disaster identifiers, increasing administrative burden where systems are not modernized.
- Congressional and executive branch analysts — will need to interpret and reconcile the new dataset with existing budget tables and supplemental appropriations, creating short-term workload increases as stakeholders incorporate the new reporting product into oversight workflows.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central tension is between the value of a unified, public accounting of disaster spending—useful for budgeting, oversight, and mitigation planning—and the administrative and technical burdens of producing accurate, comparable data across many agencies with different accounting systems; transparency risks producing misleading or unusable figures unless OMB enforces strong definitions, reconciliation rules, and adequate resourcing.
The statute imposes a clear transparency objective but leaves critical implementation choices to OMB and agencies. It does not prescribe standardized disaster identifiers, dictionary terms (for example, how to classify mitigation versus recovery), or a method to avoid double-counting when multiple agencies fund parts of the same project.
Those technical decisions will determine whether the output is a useful, comparable dataset or an opaque rollup that still requires manual reconciliation.
The bill also sets no funding or staffing authority for OMB or agencies to accomplish the work. Building cross-agency reporting pipelines, publishing machine-readable files, and providing documentation are resource-intensive.
Without explicit resources, agencies may repurpose existing staff, delay the first report, or deliver a lower-quality product. Finally, by mandating public disclosure without granularity limits, the bill could raise privacy or proprietary concerns if datasets include sensitive details; the statute provides no guidance on redaction, aggregation thresholds, or data security standards.
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