Congressional Hearings – Week of 2-24-13

Both the House and Senate will be in town this week and the hearing process begins to heat up with early emphasis on budget matters. We have two homeland security related meetings this week and an organizational meeting from the lineup that might be of interest to readers of this blog.

Coast Guard Mission

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday to look at the “Coast Guard Mission Balance”. The Deputy Commandant for Operations, Vice Admiral Neffenger, is the only scheduled witness. It will be interesting to see how much of the testimony and questioning deals with port security issues.

TSA Budget

The Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee will be holding a hearing on Wednesday on “TSA – Resources for Risk-Based Security”. The TSA Administrator, John Pistole, is the only scheduled witness. The thing to watch for here is how much time is taken up with surface transportation security issues; I don’t expect that it will be much.

Committee Organizational Meeting

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold an organizational meeting on Tuesday. Nothing of real importance will be discussed here, but it will be interesting to watch the relationship between the new Chairman and the Ranking Member. For the last couple of congresses the friendly relationship between Lieberman and Collins had a large influence on the bills that the Committee crafted.

House Floor

Not much going on in the House this week, though that is likely to change as the week goes by. There are only two bills and one resolution currently on the Majority Leader’s agenda for the week. None of them deal with security issues.