The Pray Safe Act of 2025 requires the Department of Homeland Security to create a Federal Clearinghouse on Safety and Security Best Practices for nonprofit organizations, faith-based organizations, and houses of worship. The Clearinghouse will publish evidence-based safety and security recommendations, provide training materials and assistance, and offer a centralized index of federal grant programs relevant to implementing those recommendations.
For practitioners, the bill matters because it aims to reduce fragmentation: one federal source to find operational guidance, links to grant opportunities, and points of contact inside the government. The Clearinghouse is framed as a practical tool for risk reduction and grant navigation rather than as a new grant program itself, but it builds mechanisms—training, analytics, and interagency coordination—that could change how congregations and small nonprofits plan and finance security upgrades.
At a Glance
What It Does
Directs DHS to set up a Clearinghouse that publishes safety and security best practices tailored to nonprofits and houses of worship, and that compiles and links to federal grant programs for implementing those practices. It also requires a designated DHS point of contact and materials to help organizations apply guidance and access grants.
Who It Affects
Houses of worship, faith-based nonprofit organizations, small community nonprofits, state and local homeland security offices, and DHS grant and protective security staff will be the primary users and partners. Compliance officers and grant managers at those organizations will see the most operational impact.
Why It Matters
The Clearinghouse centralizes technical guidance and grant information that currently sits across agencies and programs, potentially lowering search costs and clarifying eligibility for funding tied to security and resilience activities. It also creates a formal channel for the federal government to recommend evidence-based security measures to religious and nonprofit institutions.
More articles like this one.
A weekly email with all the latest developments on this topic.
What This Bill Actually Does
The bill tasks DHS with creating a single online resource that collects and publishes safety and security best practices tailored to nonprofit and faith-based settings and points users to eligible federal grants. The Clearinghouse is intended to be practical: checklists for event planning, facility-hardening suggestions, tabletop exercise templates, and links to technical assistance.
DHS must also produce training and implementation materials to help organizations carry those recommendations out.
Operationally, the Clearinghouse is set up to be iterative. DHS must collect user feedback and usage analytics, and coordinate with existing advisory bodies and law enforcement partners to identify gaps where federal programs do not match published recommendations.
The bill requires periodic updates to the Clearinghouse that reflect new evidence, implementation experience, and user input, and it asks DHS to make a summary of those updates available to Congress on a multi-year cycle.On the grants side, the Clearinghouse is a referral and index service rather than a grant-making unit. It will link directly to federal grant applications and user guides where available, and it encourages agencies and states to provide program descriptions and contact points to be listed.
The site will also include practical pointers—who to call at DHS for grant questions, how to reach Protective Security Advisors, and where to find local fusion centers—so organizations have a path from reading a recommendation to seeking funding or technical assistance.The bill also lays groundwork for cross-jurisdictional coordination: DHS is to invite information from State and territorial governments about available state programs and to identify, where practicable, the relevant State agencies or gaps. The Clearinghouse is explicitly designed to operate alongside other federal, state, and private-sector guidance rather than replace them, and DHS is instructed to present previously issued best practices from across levels of government and the private sector when relevant.
The Five Things You Need to Know
The Secretary must establish the Clearinghouse within 270 days after the Act becomes law.
When defining evidence-based tiers, the Clearinghouse must prioritize strong evidence that includes at least one well-designed and well-implemented experimental study and at least one well-designed and well-implemented quasi-experimental study.
The Clearinghouse must publish a comprehensive index of all Federal grant programs for which eligible nonprofit organizations and houses of worship may apply, and that index must include the performance metrics required from recipients for each grant.
DHS may host the Clearinghouse on an existing online platform and may coordinate detailees to staff the Clearinghouse on either a reimbursable or nonreimbursable basis.
The statute contains a 4-year sunset: the Act ceases to be effective 4 years after enactment.
Section-by-Section Breakdown
Every bill we cover gets an analysis of its key sections.
Definitions that narrow scope and create discretion
The bill limits covered nonprofits to organizations described in Internal Revenue Code subsection 501(c)(3) and adds a discretionary filter: the Secretary must determine an organization to be “at risk” before it falls under certain program references. That means DHS retains substantive discretion to focus Clearinghouse outreach and resources on groups it assesses as vulnerable. The definitions also clarify that 'houses of worship' are physical locations and that 'safety and security' includes prevention, protection, and recovery across natural, manmade, and terrorist incidents—broad language that leaves room for a wide set of recommendations.
Establishment, staffing, and point of contact
DHS must stand up the Clearinghouse inside the Department and assign personnel with relevant subject-matter familiarity; the law requires at least one designated employee to serve as the primary point of contact for nonprofit and faith-based users. The Secretary can bring in detailees from other agencies on a reimbursable or nonreimbursable basis, which allows flexible short-term staffing but also signals that sustained capacity may depend on interagency cost-sharing or internal DHS budget decisions.
Evidence tiers and content requirements for best practices
The Clearinghouse must categorize recommendations under evidence-based tiers and provide the research or rationale supporting any determination. The bill specifies content expectations—checklists, facility hardening, tabletop exercises, preparedness and recovery measures—and directs the Clearinghouse to draw from Federal, State, local, Tribal, private sector, and NGO research when available. Practically, this creates an internal standard-setting function: recommendations should be linked to the quality of supporting evidence, and DHS will have to document why a given measure is recommended.
Notifications, grants index, and state coordination
The Secretary must notify a defined set of recipients about the Clearinghouse, including State homeland security advisors, Protective Security Advisors, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces, fusion centers, Governors, and relevant congressional committees. DHS will host a grants overview that links to federal applications and user guides, and it can include State programs when States provide them. This section effectively makes the Clearinghouse the federal navigation hub for who to contact and where to apply—but it relies on agencies and states to supply accurate program details and on DHS to keep the index updated.
Civil rights carve-out, sunset, and external evaluation
The bill expressly disclaims any change to civil‑rights obligations under Title II of the ADA and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which limits the Clearinghouse from authorizing conduct that would conflict with those statutes. The law also includes a 4-year sunset of the Clearinghouse and requires the Comptroller General (GAO) to produce a report evaluating Federal grants and programs devoted to nonprofit and house-of-worship safety and security. The GAO evaluation is a built-in accountability mechanism, but the limited duration raises questions about the Clearinghouse’s long-term influence and institutionalization.
This bill is one of many.
Codify tracks hundreds of bills on Government across all five countries.
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
- Small houses of worship and campus congregations — They gain a single, curated source of practical guidance (checklists, tabletop exercises, facility-hardening recommendations) and direct links to grant opportunities and technical assistance contacts, lowering the search and expertise barriers that often prevent small congregations from accessing funding or implementing improvements.
- Faith-based and community nonprofits with limited compliance capacity — The Clearinghouse’s training materials and a designated DHS point of contact can help organizations translate generic grant language into concrete application steps and implementation plans.
- State and local homeland security offices and Protective Security Advisors — The Clearinghouse centralizes federal guidance and contact information that state offices can use to coordinate outreach, potentially improving uniformity of technical assistance and reducing duplicate efforts.
- Grant officers and program managers across federal agencies — A centralized index and standardized presentation of performance metrics can make it easier to explain eligibility and reporting expectations to applicants, possibly improving application quality and grant outcomes.
- Policy researchers and evaluators — The requirement for evidence tiers and an archive of supporting research creates a public reference that facilitates future evaluation and scholarly work on which interventions actually reduce risk in faith-based settings.
Who Bears the Cost
- Department of Homeland Security — DHS must allocate personnel, maintain the online platform, collect analytics and user feedback, and produce periodic reports; those activities require staff time and technical resources that DHS must fund or reassign.
- Small nonprofits and congregations implementing recommendations — Even when guidance is free, implementation of facility hardening, training, or mitigation measures often carries material costs that small organizations will need to fund, sometimes through competitive grants.
- State and local agencies providing program data — The Clearinghouse depends on states supplying program descriptions and contacts; that adds an administrative task for understaffed state offices and may require additional coordination.
- Federal grant-making agencies — Agencies must supply performance metrics and program data for the Clearinghouse index, adding another reporting channel and potential work to keep public listings up to date.
- Organizations whose practices lack rigorous evaluation — The emphasis on experimental or quasi‑experimental evidence may disadvantage promising community or faith-driven approaches that have not been formally evaluated, forcing them to compete for attention and funding against better-evidenced interventions.
Key Issues
The Core Tension
The central dilemma is whether federal centralization of security guidance and grant navigation will materially improve safety for vulnerable congregations and nonprofits without entangling the government in intra-religious affairs or creating perceived surveillance or favoritism; the bill solves coordination and information gaps but raises real questions about evidence standards, sustainability, and constitutional optics.
The bill creates a centralized, evidence-oriented resource, but several implementation tensions are unresolved. First, the reliance on research-quality tiers privileges interventions that have undergone rigorous study; useful low-cost practices that lack that pedigree may be deprioritized even if they are practical for small congregations.
Second, the Clearinghouse’s usefulness depends on accurate, current grant and contact information from multiple agencies and states—an ongoing data-maintenance burden that the statute does not fund separately. Third, while the bill emphasizes assistance and civil-rights compliance, centralizing federal guidance for religious institutions raises delicate church-state optics and risks that government involvement will be perceived as favoritism or intrusive monitoring, particularly if information-sharing with law enforcement (fusion centers, JTTFs) is visible to communities.
Operationally, the short statutory life span creates a trade-off: the Clearinghouse must demonstrate value rapidly to survive beyond the 4-year sunset, yet meaningful evaluation of program impact and of security interventions often requires longer horizons. The requirement that DHS collect analytics and user feedback helps, but the law leaves open who will pay for sustained subject-matter staff, how the Clearinghouse will prioritize between technical assistance and cataloging grants, and how it will protect sensitive data shared by congregations seeking help.
Try it yourself.
Ask a question in plain English, or pick a topic below. Results in seconds.