The idea of an EMP weapon that can wipe out the electrical grid of a country the size of America is Hollywood fantasy. Anything strong enough to cause a surge that large would have first order effects much more catastrophic than electrical outages. That said, just like zombie apocalypse scenarios, the practical concept is more valuable than the exact scenario of how it happens. Being segmented from central command nodes and electrical connectivity is a real threat for the country. There isn’t nearly enough resiliency built into the system, logistics aren’t in place to quickly recover from massive outages, and the system itself is becoming dangerously aged in many places. Nearly all of cloud computing is based on the idea of steady network connections (it doesn’t have to be, but in practice, nobody wants to pay for redundancy). If funding gets through to address these weaknesses because a senator watched a movie about EMP blasts and got spooked, I’m ok with it.