HR 2960 Reported in House – FY 2020 EW Spending

Last week Rep. Kaptur (D,OH) introduced HR 2960, the Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2020, and the House Appropriations Committee published their report on the bill. There is no specific cybersecurity language in the bill, but the report includes some interesting information in the section on Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (pgs 96-7).

CESER

This is the second year that this program has been included in the spending bill. The bill provides from $150 million in 2020 spending, up $20 million from FY 2019 but $6.5 million less than the President requested.

The Report recommends that CESER spend $5 million on the DarkNet project. This was not mentioned in last year’s House bill (HR 5895), but it is a significant reduction from the $10 million spending recommendation in last year’s Senate bill (S 2975). The DarkNet project is a DOE project dating back to at least 2017 that would (ORNL, pg 3):

“Define the requirements for a secure energy delivery control system network that is independent of the public internet, and uses existing but currently unused optical fiber, so called “dark fiber”.

Finally, for cybersecurity, the Committee recommends (pg 96):

“The Committee encourages the Department to continue its focus on the development of private-sector partnerships to secure industrial control systems across multiple critical infrastructure entities without duplicating existing private sector capabilities. The Committee encourages continued investment in collaborative threat detection and intelligence partnerships that makes industrial control systems threat analytics and data accessible to the greater industrial control systems community. [emphasis added] The Committee also encourages the Department to collaborate with other federal agencies on these efforts to ensure they are further contributing to the overall success of the federal critical infrastructure security mission.

Moving Forward

It is still too early to see how effective the new Democratic leadership in the House will be at moving these FY 2020 spending bills to the floor for action. I suspect that the House will take up these bills in June and pass them, perhaps with some bipartisan support. How open the floor amendment process will be remains to be seen, but I do expect to see a large number of amendments considered.

The big question remains how well the Senate will deal with their versions of the spending bills. If the Senate can pass bills this year, the question will then come down to how well the conference system can work to effect compromise bills that can then pass in both the House and Senate. I am afraid that we will again see brinksmanship as the order of business at the end of the year with a continuing resolution style omnibus bill being the end game.