HR 4310, NDA, In Conference

It didn’t take the Senate long to respond to the House action on HR 4310, the National Defense Authorization FY 2013. On Wednesday, the same day the bill was returned without action, the Senate passed two additional amendments to the bill and passed it again. On Thursday the House looked at the bill again, didn’t like the Senate version and decided to go to Conference. Neither action took long, less than one hour total in both houses.

As one would expect with a bill this complicated the Conference Committee is quite large, so it will be interesting to see if they can agree on a compromise version of the bill that can pass in both the Senate and the House in the two plus weeks that we have before the 113^th Congress is sworn in on January 3^rd. I expect that they will.

For readers of this blog, the real question is what cybersecurity provisions will remain in the bill if/when it does get through the conference process? Only time will tell.