Committee Hearings – Week of 04-22-18

With both the House and Senate in Washington this week things start to get busy before the primary season starts to make Congress really political. In addition to marking up the FY 2019 National Defense Authorization bill and budget hearings we have three hearings that may be of potential interest to readers of this blog; HR 4 and cybersecurity.

NDAA Markup

The introduced version of HR 5515, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 was published last week. It has a number of large holes in it that will be filled this week by subcommittee markups. The full Armed Services Committee will not finish the markup process until the House comes back from their spring break the week after next. These two subcommittee hearings may be of specific interest:

April 26^th – Readiness Subcommittee;

April 26^th – Emerging Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee;

Budget

There are still a number of hearings being held looking at the President’s proposed budget. This week there is only one that may be of specific interest here:

April 26^th, DHS, House Homeland Security;

HR 4 Rule

As I mentioned over the weekend, the House Rules Committee will be holding a hearing on Tuesday to formulate the rule for the consideration of HR 4, the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018, later this week. Two hundred and thirty-one proposed amendments have been submitted to the Committee for possible consideration on the floor of the House; the vast majority will not make it. Fourteen of those amendments deal with unmanned aircraft systems and two deal with cybersecurity issues. A large number of the rest deal with airport noise issues, a perennial concern of congresscritters. The bill will probably make it to the floor on Thursday.

Cybersecurity

On Tuesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on “Mitigating America’s Cybersecurity Risk”. The witness list includes:

• Jeanette Manfra, DHS;

• Gregory C. Wilshusen, GAO; and

• Eric Rosenbach; Harvard University

This hearing could go one of two ways; most likely a look at cybersecurity issues in the Federal government (always a problem), or it could look at the cybersecurity concerns in critical infrastructure that we have been hearing about in the mainstream news. In either case it will likely be a high-level policy type discussion rather than focusing in-depth on any actual security issues.