Bills Introduced – 04-19-16

With both the House and Senate in session yesterday there were fourteen bills introduced. Two of those may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

S 2814 A bill to authorize appropriations for fiscal year 2017 for military activities of the Department of Defense and for military construction, to prescribe military personnel strengths for such fiscal year, and for other purposes. Sen. McCain, John [R-AZ]

S 2817 A bill to improve understanding and forecasting of space weather events, and for other purposes. Sen. Peters, Gary C. [D-MI]

As always I will be watching the DOD spending bill for cybersecurity provisions. Maybe this year we will actually see the Cyber Command broken out in the spending bill as a separate item. The appropriations committees have been talking about this for a couple of years now.

For those concerned with electromagnetic pulse (EMP) issues in grid security geomagnetic storms (or space weather) are a major thing. Understanding and being able to forecast geomagnetic storms really could be an important part of securing the electric grid. It will be interesting to see how this bill deals with this and how much money Peters thinks is necessary.