Committee Hearings – Week of 6-25-17

This week with both the House and Senate in session, we are starting to see movement on spending bills, continued work on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and a couple of interesting markup hearings this week.

NDAA

As I mentioned last week the House Armed Services Committee started their work on HR 2810 in subcommittee markups. This week they will move to a full committee markup on Wednesday. The Senate bill has not been made public at this point.

Senate Armed Services Committee, 6-28-17 and 6-29-17 (maybe 6-30-17)

House Armed Services Committee, 6-28-17

The HASC web site has a link to a brief (16 page) description of HR 2810. There is an interesting one paragraph blurb on cyber issues on page 11.

Spending Bills

The House Appropriations Committee starts public work on the FY 2018 spending bills this week, starting with markups of the individual spending bills by the appropriate subcommittee. We will be starting with the DOD spending bill (actually the Defense Construction and Veterans Affairs bill was marked-up last week) and the Commerce, Justice and Science (CJS) bill this week. A committee draft of the DOD bill is available, but I have not had a chance to look at it.

DOD, House, subcommittee markup, 6-26-17

CJS, House, subcommittee markup, 6-29-17

Other Mark-up Hearings

On Wednesday the House Energy and Commerce will be holding a mark-up hearing looking at a number of bills including HR 3050, Enhancing State Energy Security Planning and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2017. I did not catch this bill when it was introduced on Friday because of the way it was described at Congress.gov. Seeing the title of the bill today got me to take a quick look at the available committee draft (GPO version is not yet available) and it does have cybersecurity provisions (more later). I will be watching this bill.

On Thursday the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee will be holding an executive session that will include the markup of S 1405, the FY 2018 FAA authorization bill. The GPO version is not yet available but the committee draft shows that a number of sections of the bill deal with unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) including a re-write of the model aircraft restrictions on the FAA regulatory authority. There is currently no mention of cybersecurity in the bill.