S 3072 Introduced – FY 2019 CJS Spending

Last week Sen. Moran (R,KS) introduced S 3072, the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies (CJS) Appropriations Act, 2019. As expected there is no mention in the actual bill of any cybersecurity requirements beyond the financing of each department and agencies internal IT cybersecurity program. The Committee Report for the bill, however, does mention three cybersecurity topics; workforce development, medical device cybersecurity research and research into the industrial internet of things (IIoT). All of those mentions are found under the section of the report dealing with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) on page 21.

Workforce Development

The Report notes that the Committee expects funding for to continue at 2018 levels for workforce development activities and specifically recommends that:

“Within the funds provided, the Committee encourages NIST to fund additional university system-led State and regional alliances and partnerships to focus on meeting the demand for a trained cybersecurity workforce, with a priority being placed on areas with a high concentration of Department of Defense, automotive, and health care related industries.”

Medical Technology Cybersecurity

While no specific funding is mentioned, the Report specifically “directs NIST to partner and work directly with academic institutions focused on computer security and privacy, with expertise in research to develop secure medical technologies, including secure medical devices, secure and privacy preserving medical software systems, and in training future scientists and practitioners in state-of-the-art techniques for supporting secure medical technologies.”

IIoT

The Committee directed NIST to spend “no less than $2,000,000 for the continued development of an IIoT cybersecurity research initiative”. That research effort would be designed to help “industry to improve the sustainable security of IIoT devices in industrial settings, including new designs, protocols, algorithms, system architectures, identity and lifecycle strategies, and system hardware features, as well as proposed security standards. This proposed research will account for human, technical, and economic dimensions.”

Moving Forward

As with the other Senate spending bills that I have looked at so far this year. There was strong bipartisan support for this bill in the Senate Appropriations Committee. The final vote on the bill (pg 150 of the report) was 30 to 1 in support of the bill, with only Sen. Lankford (R,OK) voting against the bill. This would indicate that there should be no problem overcoming the initial cloture requirement to have debate begin on the floor of the Senate on HR 5952 for which this bill will form the substitute language that will be debated in the Senate.