Congressional Hearings – Week of 3-13-16

Both the House and Senate will be in Washington this week and budget issues continue to dominate the House hearing process. There are two hearings this week in the Senate that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog; one addresses self-driving cars and the second looks at two authorization bills: FAA and FCC.

Budget Hearings

The following House budget hearings may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

Coast Guard – Transportation and Infrastructure Committee

NIST – Science, Space and Technology Committee

Cyber Command – Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee

It looks like the Cyber Command may finally get its own specific mention in the budget and spending bills. Congress has been pushing DOD to do this for a couple of years now.

Self-Driving Cars

The Commerce, Science and Technology Committee will be holding a hearing on Tuesday on “Hands Off: The Future of Self-Driving Cars”. The witness list includes:

• Chris Urmson, Google X

• Mike Ableson, General Motors Company

• Glen DeVos, Delphi Automotive

• Joseph Okpaku, Lyft

• Mary (Missy), Duke University

Reading the hearing summary, it does not sound like the witnesses will be talking about cybersecurity issues or safety standards.

FAA & FCC Authorization

On Wednesday the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will be holding a hearing on the FAA (S 2658) and FCC (S 2644) authorization bills. The FCC bill is a very short and broadly written authorization bill that contains nothing about cybersecurity issues.

I have not had a chance to do a detailed review of the FAA bill yet as it has not been published by the GPO. The hearing web page has a link to a committee draft of the bill. It includes a number of provisions dealing with unmanned aerial systems. In the Next Generation Air Transportation title there is a section (§4109) dealing with cybersecurity.

On the Floor

There is nothing currently scheduled to come to the House floor that would be of specific interest to readers of this blog. As usual the Senate schedule is much more problematic. There continues to be a chance that there will finally be a resolution to the hold being placed on S 2012, the 2016 energy authorization bill, that will allow consideration of that bill to continue to a vote.