Committee Hearings – Week of 3-5-17

Both the House and Senate are in session this week. The Senate continues to work on Cabinet nominations and the House begins to get down to normal business. There will be three hearings this week that may be of specific interest to readers of this blog; one spending bill and two cybersecurity hearings.

DOD Spending Bill

As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post the House will take up the first spending bill of this session; HR 1301, the DOD FY 2017 Appropriations bill. The House Rules Committee will hold a hearing this evening to formulate the rule for the consideration of the bill. It will likely be an open rule with a large number of proposed amendments from the floor. The House is scheduled to start consideration of the bill tomorrow.

Cybersecurity

The House Small Business Committee will hold a hearing on Wednesday on “Small Business Cybersecurity: Federal Resources and Coordination”. The witness list includes:

• Maureen K. Ohlhausen, Federal Trade Commission (FTC);

• Chuck Romine, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST);

• Charles Rowe, America’s Small Business Development Centers (SBDC);
• Jim Mooney, Chevron Federal Credit Union

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection Subcommittee of the House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a hearing on Thursday on “The Current State of DHS Private Sector Engagement for Cybersecurity”. The witness list includes:

• Daniel Nutkis, HITRUST Alliance;

• Scott Montgomery, Intel Corporation;

• Jeffrey Greene, Symantec;

• Ryan M Gillis, Palo Alto Networks;

• Robyn Greene, New America’s Open Technology Institute

Neither hearing is really supposed to address control system security issues, but there is a VERY remote possibility that there might be mention of those issues in the question/answer portion of the hearing.