Rules Committee Announces Hearing on DHS Funding Bill

This evening the House Rules Committee announced that it would hold a hearing on Monday, January 12^th to formulate the rule for the consideration of HR 240, Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015. As expected it looks like there will be floor amendments that will be offered to counter the President’s immigration initiatives, but the bill as introduced looks quite a bit like HR 4903 from the last session.

There have been some increases in proposed funding, but in general the bill seems to be very similar to what was introduced previously. I have scanned quickly through the portions of the bill that I typically watch. The table below shows how some of the programs that might be expected to be of specific interest to readers of this blog will fare under this bill.

	HR 4903 – 113th	HR 240 – 114th
Surface Trans Security	$121,303,000	$123,749,000
Infrastructure Protection	$1,139,499,000	$1,188,679,000
BioWatch	$86,891,000	$86,891,000
Port Security Grants	$100,000,000	$100,000,000

From my point of view, of course, what is important about this bill is what is missing. For the first time in a number of years there is not a provision in the bill that will extend the current CFATS program until the end of this funding period. This is, of course, because Congress finally took the CFATS program out of this annual budget dance by passing HR 4007 last month.