S 3094 Introduced – TWIC Reader Rule Delay

Last month Sen. Sullivan (R,AK) introduced S 3094, the Transportation Worker Identification Credential Accountability Act of 2018. This bill is identical to the language of HR 5739 as introduced. It does not include the periodic reporting requirement added to the House bill by the House Homeland Security Committee two weeks prior to the introduction of this bill.

Moving Forward

Sullivan is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, the Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that he should certainly have enough influence to see the bill considered in Committee.

This bill would almost certainly see the same bipartisan support in the Senate that HR 5739 saw in committee in the House. The major question here is whether or not the bill will make it to the floor in either body in time to affect the implementation date for the rule in question; August 18^th, 2018. If the bill were to pass after that date, it would still have the intended effect, but many of the affected facilities will have already made their expenditures to implement the rule.

I would suspect that there is about a 50:50 chance that this bill will not make it to the President’s desk during this session. This is not due to any specific opposition to the bill, but rather a function of the crowded calendar as the mid-term elections and the end of the session approach.

The House version of the bill may have a better chance of proceeding than does this version as Sen. McCaul (R,TX) is a cosponsor of HR 5729 and he might be expected to provide the necessary influence to move the bill to the floor for a vote. If either bill is considered in a floor vote, it will be under the respective expedited consideration provisions of that house.

Commentary

Neither version of the bill would necessarily have any impact on the current Coast Guard rulemaking delaying implementation of the TWIC Reader Rule on a limited portion of the affected maritime community.

Interestingly the House report from the Homeland Security Committee on HR 5729 was released this week. Nothing really new there, but the final comment in the ‘Need for the Legislation’ section of the report (pg 3) sheds some light on the reason for the bipartisan support for this legislation:

“Despite a requirement to commission a study within 60 of enactment of the law, DHS did not commission the study until 14 months after enactment and has not provided sufficient information to Congress to explain the delay.”

It would seem that Congress is more upset about being ignored by DHS than it is really concerned about delaying the implementation of the rule. This is particularly reflected in the language of the bill that would allow the Coast Guard to implement the bill within 60-days of the required report being submitted to Congress. That 60-days is not long enough to ensure that the report is read, much less allow the Congress to take any action on the TWIC program.