Committee Hearings - Week of 2-26-17

Both the Senate and House will be back in Washington this week. The Senate is still working on cabinet nominations and the House has at least one more regulation reversal to deal with. There are a number of hearings this week, but only two that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog; one on cybersecurity and one on the FY 2018 spending for DHS.

Cybersecurity

On Wednesday, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will hold a markup hearing on an as of yet unintroduced bill on “NIST Cybersecurity Framework, Assessment, and Auditing Act of 2017”. There is no draft of this bill publicly available at this time. I expect that the actual bill will be introduced today or tomorrow.

DHS Spending

On Wednesday, the Homeland Security Subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee will hold a ‘Members’ Day’ hearing to start the hearing process that will eventually lead to the introduction of the DHS spending bill. This hearing is where individual members of the House get their chance to tell the Committee what they would like to see included in the DHS spending bill.

On the Floor

There is nothing of specific interest to readers of this blog currently scheduled on the floor of the House. There are two bill that may have a long-term effect on the regulatory process that will make it to the floor near the end of the week; HR 1009, the OIRA Insight, Reform, and Accountability Act, and HR 1004, the Regulatory Integrity Act of 2017. Both of these bills would combine to try to make the regulatory process more regular and ‘accountable’. Most of the changes will be relatively invisible to the public, but they would provide more chances for Congress to interfere in the regulatory process. Regardless of your political view point, it is easy to see that the regulatory process will become more complex and unpredictable if these bills pass.