HR 5961 Introduced – FY 2019 ARF Spending

Last month Rep. Aderholt (R,AL) introduced HR 5961, the Agriculture, Rural Development, Food and Drug Administration, and Related Agencies (ARF) Appropriations Act, 2019. While there are no specific mentions of cybersecurity in the bill, the Committee Report does briefly address medical device cybersecurity issues.

Medical Device Cybersecurity

The Committee provided the following guidance to the FDA (pg 67):

“The Committee believes that the FDA should address potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in medical devices in general, but especially as the Internet of Things becomes more prevalent in healthcare. The Committee directs the FDA to report back within 120 days on the agency’s plans to understand the ongoing cybersecurity challenges of medical devices and outline a pathway forward. The plan should describe potential solutions and list compensating controls such as continuous inventory, log monitoring, data protection, micro segmentation, and patching on legacy devices to prevent cyber threats from spreading across hospital systems. The Committee encourages the FDA to seek industry collaboration to uncover the extent of the vulnerabilities and threats with a representative pathway to solving this critical issue.”

Moving Forward

The House Appropriations Committee adopted the bill by a near party-line vote of 31 to 20 (two Democrats voting aye). This suggests that there will be limited bipartisan support for the bill when it reaches the floor of the House. Reading the Minority Views section of the Report, however, would seem to indicate that some amendments from the floor might increase the level of Democratic support. This is not important for passage in the House, but a measure of Democrat buy-in in the Senate is a requirement to move a bill to the floor in that body. We will have to wait and see what the Senate version of the bill contains.

In any case, if this bill is to move forward to the President’s desk it will have to traverse a conference committee to work out the differences with the Senate bill.