The CLUSTER Act expands the types of projects eligible for federal disaster assistance funding under the Stafford Act to include "community hardening"—coordinated efforts to make private residential structures more resilient to disasters. Currently, the Stafford Act's hazard mitigation assistance covers projects like elevating buildings or installing flood barriers, but this bill adds community-wide hardening initiatives to that list. The legislation, introduced in August 2026, would allow communities affected by disasters to use federal recovery funds for coordinated resilience improvements across multiple private homes, rather than limiting assistance to individual property improvements. This change affects homeowners and communities recovering from federally declared disasters who could now access pooled resources for neighborhood-scale protective measures. The bill does not specify new funding amounts or implementation timelines, instead modifying existing disaster assistance programs to broaden what projects qualify for already-available federal support.