Committee Hearings – Week of 7-16-17

With both the House and Senate in session there is a wide slate of congressional hearings this week. Spending bills are finishing up in the House and the Senate continues to plug away on nomination hearings. There are two cybersecurity hearings of potential interest, one a markup and one addressing energy security.

Spending Bills

The House Appropriations Committee is still working on ginning out their spending bills with two more hearings being conducted during the remainder of the week:

• 7-18-17 (full committee) FY2018 Homeland Security Appropriations Bill and FY2018 Interior Appropriations Bill;

• 7-19-17 (full committee) FY 2018 State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Bill, and FY2018 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Bill;

Cybersecurity Mark-up

On Wednesday the Digital Commerce and Consumer Protection Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will mark-up a staff draft of a bill on highly automated vehicle testing and deployment. The Committee Draft of the bill contains a section on “Cybersecurity of automated driving systems” which I will try review later today.

Energy Security

Later this morning the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing to examine the status and outlook for U.S. and North American energy and resource security. Cybersecurity is certainly going to be part of this discussion. The witness list includes:

• Fatih Birol, International Energy Agency;

• Stephen Cheney, American Security Project;

• Robert Coward, American Nuclear Society;

• Dan McGroarty, Carmot Strategic Group;

• Mark Mills, Manhattan Institute; and

• Jamie Webster, Center for Energy Impact

On the Floor of the House

Today the House will consider HR 3050, Enhancing State Energy Security Planning and Emergency Preparedness Act of 2017, under their suspension of the rules procedure. This means that there will be limited debate and no amendments will be considered. This usually means that the House leadership considers this to be a non-controversial bill with a high-probability of passage (which requires a super-majority). NOTE: The committee report on the bill has not yet been published, it will probably be submitted today, but will not actually be available on the Congress.gov site until later this week.

NOTE: The House Rules Committee called for amendments to HR 2997, 21st Century Aviation Innovation, Reform, and Reauthorization Act. This is the House version of the FY 2018 FAA reauthorization. I have not published a review of this bill yet because there is currently nothing of real interest included in the introduced version. It looks like that will be changing. No hearing is scheduled yet, but it may happen later this week.