Congressional Hearings – Week of 02-08-10

If Congress can get back into town after this weekend’s snow storm, it looks like committee work will start to pick back up. For the chemical security community there will be multiple appearances by Secretary Napolitano explaining the Obama Administration’s DHS FY 2011 Budget request and a Judiciary Committee meeting on counter-terrorism information. Budget Hearings In addition to the two committee hearings on the budget that I mentioned last week there is one more Secretarial appearance on the schedule. The Secretary will appear before the House Appropriations Sub-Committee on Homeland Security on Tuesday at 3:00 pm EST. Once again, there will probably be little mention of the CFATS program funding in this hearing, but someone might ask a question or two about the extension of the CFATS authorization. I expect that the written testimony provided by Napolitano will be the same for all three hearings this week. Information Sharing The House Judiciary Committee will be holding a hearing on Wednesday the 10th at 10:00 am EST entitled: “Sharing and Analyzing Information to Prevent Terrorism”. Currently that is the only information available. I suspect that this might be just another hearing on the lack of information sharing that lead up to the Underwear Bomber fiasco, but it could easily encompass more than that looking at the title. We’ll know more when they publish their witness list later in the week.