Congressional Hearings – Week of 10-27-13

Both the Senate and the House will be in town this week and the pace of hearings is getting back to normal after the fiscal fiasco has passed. There are four House hearings and one Senate hearing that might be of specific interest to readers of this blog. They include three mark-up hearings, one Coast Guard authorization hearing and one cybersecurity hearing.

Mark-up Hearings

The House Homeland Security Committee will try for a third time on Tuesday to mark-up a group of bills including HR 1204, HR 1791, HR 2952, and HR 3107. I wrote about this hearing in some detail last week on the second attempt to hold this hearing.

The House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will hold a mark-up hearing on Tuesday that will address four bills including HR 3300, the FEMA Reauthorization Act of 2013 that I described yesterday. No word yet on any potential amendments.

The Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee will have a Business Meeting today. It will either include a mark-up of some legislation, consider nominations or both; no agenda has been published.

Coast Guard Authorization

The Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will meet on Tuesday to look at a variety of issues that might be included in a Coast Guard authorization bill. The current ‘Summary of Subject Matter’ published by the Committee does not include mention of any security or chemical safety issues.

Cybersecurity

Wednesday will see a potentially interesting take on cybersecurity when the Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response and Communications and the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protections and Security Technologies of the House Homeland Security Committee (whew, that’s a lot of words) hold a joint hearing on “Cyber Incident Response: Bridging the Gap Between Cybersecurity and Emergency Management”. No agenda or witness list is currently available.