Senate ENR Amends and Approves Cybersecurity Bills – 11-19-19

Yesterday the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee held a business meeting to consider three nominations and markup 19 bills. Those bills included three cybersecurity bills that have been covered in this blog. All three of those bills were amended and then passed on voice votes.

S 876, DOE Vet Training

The Committee considered S 875, the Energy Jobs for Our Heroes Act of 2019. A staff amendment was adopted by the Committee rewrote the proposed §1107(f) by removing the grant funding provisions and removed (g) the spending authorization provisions of the bill. A second amendment was proposed by Sen Lee (R,UT) and it was also adopted by the Committee. The Lee amendment provided more detailed information about what was to be included in the Report to Congress required by (h) {changed to (g) by the previous amendment}.

S 2556, Cybersecurity Investment

The Committee considered S 2556, the PROTECT Act. The Committee adopted an amendment in the nature of a substitute. The substitute language:

Adds §219A(c)(2) that adds a prohibition of duplicate recovery to the rate recovery provision; and

Adds §3(a)(2)(E) that adds “an investor-owned electric utility that sells less than 4,000,000 megawatt hours of electricity per year” to the list of entities eligible for the e Rural and Municipal Utility Advanced Cybersecurity Grant and Technical Assistance Program.

S 2714, ARPA-E Reauthorization

The Committee considered S 2714, the ARPA–E Reauthorization Act of 2019. The Committee adopted an amendment. That amendment inserted a new §2(c) and renumbered the subsequent sub-sections. The new subsection amends 42 USC 16538(f). The new language would allow DOE to consider past grant performance during the award of new grants.

Moving Forward

These three bills had significant bipartisan support in Committee, but Lee insisted on being recorded as a Nay vote on each of the bills. This means that he would be likely to raise an objection if the bills were offered for consideration under the Senate’s unanimous consent process. If that were to happen the bills would not be adopted under those provisions and would have to be considered under regular order. None of these bills is important enough to take up the Senate’s time under regular order.

The only other way that these bills could be considered would be as part of a DOE authorization bill.