Committee Hearings – Week of 06-10-18

This will be a busy week in Washington with both the House and Senate in session. Spending bills will continue to be big items of interest as will the Senate consideration of HR 5515, the FY 2019 NDAA. But we also have two CFATS hearings, a roads and bridges hearing that may look at cybersecurity, and a markup hearing that looks at drones and cybersecurity.

Spending Bills

• Tuesday – Senate – Subcommittee - Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies;

• Wednesday – House – Committee – DOD; and

• Thursday – Senate – Committee - Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies;

CFATS

With the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards program set to expire in December these two hearings would seem to be reauthorization hearings, but it is looking increasingly like we will have to rely on the Appropriations Committee and the DHS spending bill to reauthorize CFATS for the short term. But, these two hearings could inform future, more substantial action by Congress.

On Tuesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing looking at “ROUNDTABLE - Examining the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards Program”. The witness list includes:

• David Wulf, DHS;

• Christopher P. Currie, GAO;

• Randall Eppli, Columbus Chemical Industries, Inc;

• Andrew T. O'Hare, The Fertilizer Institute;

• Debra S. Satkowiak, Institute of Makers of Explosives;

• Linda Menendez, Austin Powder Company;

• William Erny, American Chemistry Council;

• Jesse LeGros, Jr., AFGE National Local #918;

• Jennifer Gibson, National Association of Chemical Distributors

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold a hearing on Thursday looking at “The Chemical Facilities Anti-Terrorism Standards Program (CFATS) – A Progress Report”. No witness list is yet available, but we can expect to see David Wulf and Christopher Currie back at the witness table.

The GAO report will be the big item in both hearings. The GAO will find problems (that is after all their mandate), but we will have to watch the questioning to see how serious Congress thinks those problems are.

BTW: The ‘competition’ between Energy and Commerce and Homeland Security in the House to oversee the CFATS program is probably one of the stumbling blocks to a reauthorization bill in this session.

Autonomous Vehicles

On Wednesday the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will hold a hearing on “Examining the Effects of Emerging Autonomous Technologies on America’s Roads and Bridges”. No witness list is currently available for this hearing. It will be interesting to see how much play cybersecurity of these systems gets in this hearing. Unfortunately, I do not expect much.

Mark-Up Hearing

On Wednesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a business meeting to look at a couple, okay three, nominations and markups of seven bills. Three of the bills have yet to be introduced (and probably of little interest here in any case), but two of the remaining four have been covered in this blog:

• S 2836, the Preventing Emerging Threats Act of 2018; and

• S 2392, the Cyber SAFETY Act of 2018

There are problems with the scope of the first bill (both too broad and too narrow in different areas) and there are some critical definitions missing in the second. We will see if HSGAC takes any action to correct those problems.