President signs S. 1003, "Lulu's Law," into law

The president signed into law S. 1003, known as "Lulu's Law", on Friday 26 June, the White House said in a statement.

According to the statement, the law requires the Federal Communications Commission to issue an order explicitly permitting the transmission of wireless emergency alerts to mobile phones in the event of a shark attack — extending a federal alerting framework more familiar from weather and public-safety emergencies to a narrowly defined coastal hazard.

The White House notice constitutes the formal record of enactment. Implementation now rests with the FCC, whose order will give the statute practical effect; no timetable for that rulemaking was detailed in the material available.

Background

Wireless emergency alerts are the jarring, geographically targeted messages pushed to mobile phones through a system the FCC and the Federal Emergency Management Agency have operated since 2012. The framework carries presidential alerts, imminent-threat warnings — tornadoes, flash floods, dust storms — and AMBER alerts for abducted children, delivered through carriers to every compatible phone in a defined area. Whether shark sightings and attacks fit the system's imminent-threat categories had been left to interpretation; the new statute resolves the question by directing the FCC to permit such alerts explicitly.

The bill takes its name from Lulu Gribbin, an Alabama teenager who survived a widely reported 2024 shark attack on the Gulf Coast, one of multiple attacks along the same stretch of Florida Panhandle shoreline in a single day — a sequence that prompted calls for a faster way to warn beachgoers when an attack occurs nearby. Legislation of this kind, narrow in scope and attached to a sympathetic named case, is among the categories of bills that continue to move through Congress with bipartisan support.

What comes next

The statute's practical effect awaits the FCC order it mandates; watch for the commission to open the implementing proceeding and for how it defines the triggering conditions and the authorities — state and local emergency managers — permitted to originate shark-attack alerts. Coastal states with existing beach-hazard programs are the likeliest early adopters once the order issues.