HR 21 Passed – FY 2019 Consolidated Appropriations

As I noted in an earlier post HR 21, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2019, passed in the House on January 3^rd. While an official copy of the bill is not currently available, a copy is available from the Majority Leader’s web site. The bill would provide full year spending for all portions of the government included in Division C of the Continuing Resolution (HR 6157, 115^th Congress) except for the Department of Homeland Security which is being addressed under HJ Res 1. Thus, if passed by the Senate (a big if) and signed by the President (an even bigger unknown) this would result in the resumption of the operation of all portions of the Federal government except DHS.

While I have not paid any direct attention to the financial numbers included in the 1000+ page bill, it looks like a fairly straight-forward spending bill. For the purposes of this blog, I did not see any provisions that would affect chemical safety or transportation, or cybersecurity issues for control systems. There is one unusual (in this bill) chemical security provision; §202 of Title II of Division G (page 1054) would extend the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program until September 30^th, 2019. This is only unusual in that the bill does not address spending programs for DHS.

It would seem that the Democratic leadership of the House intends for the CFATS program to continue in effect.