Senate Passes HR 6157, FY 2019 DOD Spending

Last Thursday the Senate passed HR 6157, the Department of Defense and Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations Act, 2019 by a strongly bipartisan vote of 85 to 7. While the base bill did not contain any language of specific interest to readers of this blog, one amendment passed during the closing debate might be of interest.

Cyber Solarium Commission

Amendment SA 3710 (pg S5698) submitted by Sen. Sasse (R,NE) was included in a block of amendments referred to as ‘the manager’s package’ that were agreed to under the unanimous consent process (no vote, no discussion). The amendment allocated $4 million from the existing Operation and

Maintenance, Defense-Wide account to fund the Cyber Solarium Commission established by §1652 of the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019.

I discussed the Solarium Commission in an earlier post, but it would essentially establish a commission to look at strategic concepts to defend cyber space.

As is becoming typical for Congress, this is not new money for the Commission, nor does it make any hard decisions about where the money will come from. It places that burden on DOD. Granted, $4 million is just a minor blip in the DOD budget, but some other program(s) will have to cut back operations to provide that money.

Moving Forward

Since this is a wholesale rewrite of the House bill, the bill heads back to the House for approval. The House will almost certainly ‘insist’ on their language forcing the bill to a conference committee. There is a decent chance that bill will make it back to the floor of the House and Senate before October 1^st.

Commentary

As is becoming typical for Congress, this is not new money for the Commission, nor does it make any hard decisions about where the money will come from. It places that burden on DOD. Granted, $4 million is just a minor blip in the DOD budget, but some other program(s) will have to cut back operations to provide that money.

I do want to mention in passing another amendment that was included in the manager’s package along with Solarium Commission amendment; SA 3835 (pg 5774) submitted by Sen. Flake (R,AZ). Flake’s amendment would have prohibited DOD from spending any money on the “the development of a beerbot or other robot bartender”. There have been some semi-serious press discussions about this boondoggle spending targeted by Flake’s amendment (see here and here for example), but if you dig down through the links and then read the paper on the MIT research project that started this whole thing, you can see that the research provides a detailed look at how to coordinate complex activities by cooperating robots which have applications far beyond beerbots. I suspect that the research will continue, but using some other sort of application; how about locating and disarming land mines? Of course, that research would have to be classified.