VA Must Report on Emergency Readiness and FEMA Fuel Sharing Barriers Within 180 Days

The Advancing VA’s Emergency Response to (AVERT) Crises Act of 2025 is essentially a massive, mandated homework assignment for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA). It’s not about building new clinics or changing benefits; it’s about forcing the VA to look in the mirror and figure out why its emergency response systems might be failing veterans when disaster hits. Within 180 days of this bill passing, the VA Secretary has to deliver three detailed reports to Congress covering everything from office organization to expired medical supplies and coordination with FEMA. The core purpose here is to clean up the bureaucratic mess that can slow down help during a hurricane, wildfire, or public health crisis.

Mapping the Bureaucracy of Disaster Response

Section 2 of this bill tackles the VA’s internal structure. Think of it as a corporate efficiency review, but for disaster management. The VA must detail the roles and responsibilities of every office involved in emergency response, both during normal times and during a crisis. If the main Office of Emergency Management and the Office of Operations, Security, and Preparedness have overlapping duties—which is common in large agencies—the VA must spell out exactly who does what and how they coordinate. Crucially, the VA is required to analyze whether it should merge all its emergency functions into one central office. For veterans and their families, this matters because unclear lines of authority mean slower decisions, which can translate into delayed care or missed communication when they need the VA most.

Supply Chain Check: What’s in the Readiness Centers?

Section 3 focuses on the VA’s Regional Readiness Centers—the warehouses that stock emergency supplies like medical gear, food, and fuel. If you’ve ever had to manage inventory, you know how hard it is to track what you have. This bill requires the VA to report on the usage and current stock of every center, including how many times facilities have requested supplies since the program started. The most critical part for accountability? The VA must detail how much of the current inventory is expired or will expire within the next month. This provision aims to stop taxpayer money from being wasted on stockpiles that can’t actually be used when a disaster strikes. They also have to analyze each center’s actual capacity to respond to different types of emergencies, like natural disasters versus health crises.

The FEMA Fuel Problem

Finally, Section 4 addresses a common headache during large-scale emergencies: interagency cooperation. Specifically, it targets the ability of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to share resources like fuel and supplies with the VA. The VA Secretary, working with the head of FEMA, has just 90 days to figure out what laws or regulations currently prevent FEMA from giving the VA fuel during a crisis. If the VA can’t get fuel for its generators or vehicles, its hospitals can’t run, and its staff can’t get to where they need to be. The report must identify if Congress needs to pass a new law to fix this coordination gap, ensuring that bureaucratic red tape doesn't stop essential services when the power goes out. This is a direct attempt to fix a known, real-world failure point in disaster response planning.