SROS Act

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Bill ID: 119/hr/6120
Last Updated: November 18, 2025

Sponsored by

Rep. Zinke, Ryan K. [R-MT-1]

ID: Z000018

Follow the money

The bill

SROS Act

HR. 6120, 119th Congress — read as touching Law Enforcement & Surveillance Tech.

The sponsor

Rep. Zinke, Ryan K. [R-MT-1]

Every bill has someone who introduced it. That name is where the paper trail starts.

The money

$66,700 raised

30 itemised contributions to this sponsor, pulled from FEC filings.

The alignment

70% match to Project 2025

This bill's text tracks the "Department of Defense" section, p. 134-136 of the Mandate for Leadership.

Bill's Journey to Becoming a Law

Track this bill's progress through the legislative process

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Introduced

📍 Current Status

Next: The bill will be reviewed by relevant committees who will debate, amend, and vote on it.

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Committee Review

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Floor Action

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Passed Senate

🏛️

House Review

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Passed Congress

🖊️

Presidential Action

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Became Law

📚 How does a bill become a law?

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!

Bill Summary

Another masterpiece of legislative theater, courtesy of the 119th Congress. Let's dissect this farce and expose its true intentions.

**Main Purpose & Objectives:** The SROS Act (Strengthening Resources for our Schools Act) claims to support school resource officers by exempting their retirement income from gross income. How noble. In reality, this bill is a thinly veiled attempt to curry favor with law enforcement unions and veterans' groups while providing a tax break that will mostly benefit affluent retirees.

**Key Provisions & Changes to Existing Law:** The bill amends the Internal Revenue Code to exclude retirement income received by individuals who retired from service as law enforcement officers or members of the Armed Forces and subsequently serve as school resource officers. It also requires law enforcement agencies to report information about these individuals to the Secretary of the Treasury.

**Affected Parties & Stakeholders:** The primary beneficiaries of this bill are retired law enforcement officers and veterans who take up employment as school resource officers. However, the real stakeholders are the politicians who sponsored this bill, including Reps. Zinke, Davis, and Fitzpatrick, who will likely receive campaign contributions and endorsements from law enforcement unions.

**Potential Impact & Implications:** This bill is a classic example of "feel-good" legislation that sounds good on paper but has minimal practical impact. The tax break will mostly benefit affluent retirees who don't need it, while the reporting requirements will create administrative burdens for law enforcement agencies. Meanwhile, the underlying issue of school safety remains unaddressed.

**Diagnosis:** This bill suffers from a severe case of " Legislative Theater-itis," where politicians prioritize appearances over substance to appease special interest groups. The symptoms include:

* A narrow focus on a specific group (retired law enforcement officers and veterans) rather than addressing broader issues. * A lack of meaningful reforms or investments in school safety. * A reliance on tax breaks as a solution, which will primarily benefit affluent individuals.

**Prognosis:** This bill will likely pass with bipartisan support, as politicians from both parties will want to be seen as supporting law enforcement and veterans. However, its impact will be negligible, and the underlying issues of school safety and inequality will remain unaddressed.

In conclusion, the SROS Act is a prime example of legislative malpractice, where politicians prioritize their own interests over meaningful policy solutions. It's time to call out this farce for what it is: a cynical attempt to buy votes and endorsements from special interest groups.

Generated using Llama 3.1 70B (Dr. Haus personality)

💰 Campaign Finance Network

Rep. Zinke, Ryan K. [R-MT-1]

Congress 119 • 2024 Election Cycle

Total Contributions
$66,700
23 donors
PACs
$0
Organizations
$40,300
Committees
$0
Individuals
$26,400

No PAC contributions found

1
CONFEDERATED SALISH AND KOOTENAI TRIBES OF THE FLATHEAD NATION
5 transactions
$8,100
2
PECHANGA BAND OF INDIANS
2 transactions
$6,600
3
PASCUA YAQUI TRIBE
1 transaction
$3,300
4
THE TULALIP TRIBES OF WASHINGTON
1 transaction
$3,300
5
MORONGO BAND OF MISSION INDIANS
2 transactions
$3,000
6
PALA BAND OF MISSION INDIANS
1 transaction
$2,500
7
SANTA YNEZ BAND OF MISSION INDIAN TRIBE
1 transaction
$2,000
8
SHINGLE SPRINGS BAND MIWOK INDIANS
1 transaction
$2,000
9
AK-CHIN INDIAN COMMUNITY
1 transaction
$2,000
10
RINCON DEL MAR RANCH
1 transaction
$1,000
11
MUSCOGEE CREEK NATION
1 transaction
$1,000
12
ALABAMA-COUSHATTA TRIBE
1 transaction
$1,000
13
MS BAND OF CHOCTAW INDIANS
1 transaction
$1,000
14
NINTH ELEMENT CONSTRUCTION
1 transaction
$1,000
15
REHBERG RANCH
2 transactions
$1,000
16
BENCHMARK CONSULTING PLLC
1 transaction
$500
17
SANDRU RANCH
1 transaction
$500
18
SO-LO AIR
1 transaction
$250
19
WEISS RESEARCH
1 transaction
$250

No committee contributions found

1
PUM, JANIS
1 transaction
$6,600
2
HART, DONNA
1 transaction
$6,600
3
TABISH, RICHARD
1 transaction
$6,600
4
WHITWORTH, CONNIE
1 transaction
$6,600

Donor Network - Rep. Zinke, Ryan K. [R-MT-1]

PACs
Organizations
Individuals
Politicians

Hub layout: Politicians in center, donors arranged by type in rings around them.

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Showing 53 nodes and 30 connections (55 secondary connections hidden)

Total contributions: $66,700

Top Donors - Rep. Zinke, Ryan K. [R-MT-1]

Showing top 23 donors by contribution amount

19 Orgs4 Individuals

Industry Impact

Which industries are materially affected by specific provisions in this bill. 1 helped.

  • Section 2(a) excludes from gross income retirement income for individuals who retired from law enforcement and serve as school resource officers, providing a tax benefit to law enforcement personnel.

Who funds the sponsor on these industries

For each industry this bill affects, here's what the sponsor (Rep. Zinke, Ryan K. [R-MT-1])received from donors associated with that industry during the 2022–present cycles. Donations are not proof of intent — they are a record of who funds the people writing the law.

Industries this bill HELPS

Project 2025 Policy Matches

This bill shows semantic similarity to the following sections of the Project 2025 policy document.AI-enhanced analysis provides detailed alignment ratings.

Department of Defense

Moderate
Vector: 58%
Pages: 134-136AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"Both the SROS Act and the Project 2025 DOD section aim to support and retain military personnel by providing incentives that honor their service; the bill offers tax relief for veterans who continue serving as school resource officers, which aligns with Project 2025's focus on improving recruitment, retention, and restoring respect for the armed forces."

Key themes:veteran supportrecruitment and retentionhonoring serviceincentivizing continued service

— 102 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 1. Immediately fund more contracting capacity in all services to decrease the contracting timeline and improve the delivery of defense articles to our global partners. 2. Rationalize and speed arms sales decision-making to preclude our enemies from exploiting bureaucratic slothfulness and allow us to manage the development of indigenous defense industrial bases. DOD PERSONNEL The men and women of America’s armed forces are the most critical component of our national defense strategy, but in recent years, they have been overextended, undervalued, and insufficiently resourced. Their families help them to carry the burden of service, but the assistance they receive is disproportionately less than the sacrifices they make. Young civilians who would thrive in a military environ- ment are disenfranchised when educators and influencers discourage them from learning about military service and preparing for the honor of wearing Ameri- ca’s uniform. The United States military is an extraordinary institution, staffed by exceptional people who have defended our nation and changed the course of history, but the Biden Administration, through word and deed, has treated the armed forces as just another place to work. We must restore our military to a place of honor and respect and recruit and retain the individuals who will meet the rigorous standards of excellence that are required for membership in the world’s greatest fighting force. Needed Reforms l Rescue recruiting and retention. Recruiting was the worst in 2022 that it has been in two generations and is expected to be even worse in 2023. Some of the problems are self-inflicted and ongoing. The recruiting problem is not service-specific: It affects the entire Joint Force. 1. Appoint a Special Assistant to the President who will maintain liaison with Congress, DOD, and all other interested parties on the issue of recruiting and retention. 2. Improve recruiting by suspending the use of the recently introduced MHS Genesis system that uses private medical records of potential recruits at Military Entrance Processing Stations (MEPS), creating unnecessary delays and unwarranted rejections.11 3. Improve military recruiters’ access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery — 103 — Department of Defense (ASVAB)—the military entrance examination—by all students in schools that receive federal funding.12 4. Encourage Members of Congress to provide time to military recruiters during each townhall session in their congressional districts. 5. Increase the number of Junior ROTC programs in secondary schools. l Restore standards of lethality and excellence. Entrance criteria for military service and specific occupational career fields should be based on the needs of those positions. Exceptions for individuals who are already predisposed to require medical treatment (for example, HIV positive or suffering from gender dysphoria) should be removed, and those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from military service. Physical fitness requirements should be based on the occupational field without consideration of gender, race, ethnicity, or orientation. l Eliminate politicization, reestablish trust and accountability, and restore faith to the force. In 2021, the Reagan National Defense Survey found that only 45 percent of Americans have “a great deal of trust and confidence in the military”—down from 70 percent in 2018.13 1. Strengthen protections for chaplains to carry out their ministry according to the tenets of their faith. 2. Codify language to instruct senior military officers (three and four stars) to make certain that they understand their primary duty to be ensuring the readiness of the armed forces, not pursuing a social engineering agenda. This direction should be reinforced during the Senate confirmation process. Orders and direction motivated by purely partisan motives should be identified as threats to readiness. 3. Reinstate servicemembers to active duty who were discharged for not receiving the COVID vaccine, restore their appropriate rank, and provide back pay. 4. Eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.

Department of Education

Weak
Vector: 58%
Pages: 359-361AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"The SROS Act focuses on tax incentives for retired military and law enforcement personnel serving as school resource officers, while the Project 2025 Department of Education section emphasizes restructuring federal education programs, eliminating certain aids, and transferring responsibilities to other agencies. There is minimal thematic overlap, as the bill does not address education funding reform, program transfers, or block-granting initiatives central to the Project 2025 education agenda."

Key themes:school safetyveteranstax policy

— 326 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise l Restore revenue responsibility for Title I funding to the states over a 10-year period. OESE also currently manages the federal Impact Aid program, which provides fund- ing to school districts to compensate for reductions in property tax revenue due to the presence of federal property (such as that associated with a military base or tribal lands). l Eliminate Impact Aid not tied to students. l Move student-driven Impact Aid programs to the Department of Defense Education Authority (DoDEA) or the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Education. l Transfer all Indian education programs to the Bureau of Indian Education. l The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides vouchers to low-income children living in the nation’s capital—appropriate as D.C. is under the jurisdiction of Congress—should be expanded into a universal program, formula-funded, and moved to the Department of Health and Human Services. l All other programs at OESE should be block-granted or eliminated. Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education l Transfer the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education’s few programs to the Department of Labor, but l Move the Tribally Controlled Postsecondary Career and Technical Education Program to the Bureau of Indian Education. Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) The Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services (OSERS) houses nearly two dozen programs, ranging from funding for the Individuals with Dis- abilities Education Act (IDEA) and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf to Special Olympics Funding and the American Printing House for the Blind. l Most IDEA funding should be converted into a no-strings formula block grant targeted at students with disabilities and distributed directly to local education agencies by Health and Human Service’s Administration for Community Living. — 327 — Department of Education l Transfer the Vocational Rehabilitation Grants for Native American students to the Bureau of Indian Education. l Phase out earmarks for a variety of special institutions, as originally envisioned. l To the extent that OSERS supports federal efforts to enforce our laws against discrimination of individuals with disabilities, those assets should be moved to the Department of Justice (DOJ) along with the Office for Civil Rights (OCR). Office for Postsecondary Education (OPE) l The next Administration should work with Congress to eliminate or move OPE programs to ETA at the Department of Labor. l Funding to institutions should be block-granted and narrowed to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and tribally controlled colleges. l Move programs deemed important to our national security interests to the Department of State. Institute of Education Sciences (IES) l Move ED’s statistical office, the National Commission for Education Statistics (NCES), to the Department of Commerce’s Census Bureau. If Congress believes the federal government can play a valuable research role, those research centers can be moved to the National Science Foundation. If Congress decides to maintain IES as an independent agency, it needs to address major governance and management issues that keep it from being a productive contributor to the knowledge base related to teaching and learning. Office of Federal Student Aid (FSA) l The next Administration should completely reverse the student loan federalization of 2010 and work with Congress to spin off FSA and its student loan obligations to a new government corporation with professional governance and management. With a statutory charge that it preserve the federal student loan portfolio for the benefit of the taxpayers and students, this new entity would be (1) profession- ally governed by an agency head and board of trustees appointed by the President

Department of Homeland Security

Weak
Vector: 58%
Pages: 189-191AI Enhanced

AI Analysis:

"The bill focuses on tax incentives for retired law enforcement/military serving as school resource officers, while the Project 2025 excerpt deals with restructuring the U.S. Secret Service and TSA to prioritize protective missions. Both touch on law enforcement effectiveness and personnel retention, but their specific objectives and contexts are largely unrelated."

Key themes:law enforcementrecruitment incentivesprotective missionpersonnel retention

— 157 — Department of Homeland Security to such returnees. These two steps could be foundational for any improvements in the recruiting process. U.S. SECRET SERVICE (USSS) Needed Reforms The U.S. Secret Service must be the world’s best protective agency. Currently, the agency is distracted by its dual mission of protection and financial investigations. The result has been a long series of high-profile embarrassments and security fail- ures, perhaps most notably its allowing of then-Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to be inside the Democratic National Committee office on January 6, 2021, while a pipe bomb was outside. Despite the great size and scope of the January 6 inves- tigation, this high-profile incident of danger to a protectee remains unresolved. The failures of the USSS protective mission are too numerous to list here. A December 2015 bipartisan report from the House Oversight Committee listed dozens of such incidents as well as needed recommendations for reform.14 This chapter adopts those findings and recommendations in whole, especially the finding that USSS’s dual-mission structure detracts from the agency’s protective capabilities. At the time of that report, USSS agents spent only one-third of their work hours on protection-related activities as opposed to investigative activities. USSS was established initially to investigate counterfeit currency, but its mission has evolved over the decades to prioritize electronic financial crimes. For example, as this chap- ter was being written, all 15 of the USSS’s most wanted individuals were wanted for financial crimes, many of them international in nature. Notably, the last head of the agency left not for a protection-related job, but to be the Chief Security Officer of social media company SnapChat. This is a pattern that has developed over the years, with agents seeking to burnish their online financial crimes credentials to secure corporate security jobs. Coupled with some of the lowest morale in the federal government, the agency has completely lost sight of the primacy of its protective mission. New Policies USSS should transfer to the Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury all investigations that are not related to its protective function. It should begin the logistical operation of closing all field offices throughout the country and internationally to the extent they are not taken over by Treasury or Justice. USSS agents stationed outside of Washington, D.C., should be transferred to work in Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices where they would continue to be the “boots on the ground” to follow up on threat reports throughout the country and liaise with local law enforcement for visits by protectees. — 158 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise The only investigations not related to USSS’s protective function that agents should pursue would be directed by HSI and relate to tracking the financial crimes associated with illegal immigration. This should include tracing remittances, any funds that are used to pay coyotes or the cartels, and payments by businesses to illegal aliens and all other crimes associated with illegal immigration. USSS should keep visitor logs for all facilities where the President works or resides. The Biden Administration has evaded such transparency with President Biden spending a historic amount of time for a President at his Delaware residence. This has left the American people in the dark as to who is influencing the highest levels of their own government. Budget The suggested reforms would result in a significant USSS budget reduction, primarily because the agency would relinquish dozens of physical offices through- out the U.S. and internationally. Some amount of savings should be used to fix the personnel problems and for recruitment initiatives aimed at individuals who are inclined to join a protection-focused agency. Personnel As documented extensively in the above-referenced 2015 bipartisan congressio- nal report, low morale and high turnover are key drivers of USSS problems. With their mission focused on protection, agents would no longer spend the bulk of their time developing unrelated skillsets. Instead, USSS agents could hone their protection skills and pursue a protection career path in the agency rather than quickly leaving USSS for high-paying corporate security jobs. The Uniform Division (UD) of USSS requires a significant staffing increase. As documented in the bipartisan report, understaffing results in unpredictable and long hours, which in turn result in high turnover, which only compounds the problem. Another key issue is that UD officers lack the ability to enforce criminal laws outside the immediate vicinity of the White House. As the District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction and currently is beholden to the trend of progressive pro- crime policies, UD officers should enforce all applicable laws. The result would be to allow UD officers to gain more law enforcement experience—an attractive credential that would improve morale. TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION (TSA) The TSA model is costly and unwisely makes TSA both the regulator and the regulated organization responsible for screening operations. As part of an effort to shrink federal bureaucracies and bring private-sector know-how to govern- ment programs, TSA is ripe for reform. The U.S. should look to the Canadian and

Showing 3 of 5 policy matches

About These Correlations

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.

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