Committee Hearings – Week of 06-04-17

With both the House and Senate back in Washington this week the main focus in Committee hearings will be the FY 2018 budget, but there will be some other hearings that will address cybersecurity issues.

Budget

Budget hearings are really high-level policy discussions with little or no details about program implementation, so there will be little here that will be of specific interest to readers of this blog. The only possible exception will be the DHS hearings because of their focus on cybersecurity.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will meet on Tuesday to look at the DHS budget request. The House Homeland Security Committee will hold their hearing on Wednesday. The written testimony from Secretary Kelly will be virtually identical for both hearings.

Again, with the high-level policy focus of this hearing there will probably be no mention of control system security.

Healthcare Cybersecurity

On Thursday, the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will be holding a hearing on “Examining the Role of the Department of Health and Human Services in Health Care Cybersecurity”. The witness list includes:

• Mr. Emery, Health Care Industry Cybersecurity Task Force

• Mr. Steve Curren, US Department of Health and Human Services

• Mr. Leo Scanlon, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

With no direct testimony from the FDA, it is unlikely that there will be any substantive mention of medical device cybersecurity.

On Wednesday the Energy and Commerce Committee will be holding a markup hearing looking at a number of bills. Of specific potential interest here is HR 2430, the FDA Reauthorization Act of 2017. I have not specifically reported on this bill because there are no cybersecurity provisions in the bill as introduced. There is a remote chance that there could be some medical device cybersecurity provisions added in this markup.