S 3207 Reported in Senate – Cybersecurity Coordinators

Last week the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee published their report and amended language on S 3207, the Cybersecurity State Coordinator Act of 2020. The hearing where this bill was marked up was held last March.

I covered the markup in an earlier blog post so there is not much new in this report. The one interesting item is the Congressional Budget Office cost estimate on the bill. This would be a relatively low-cost program, estimated to cost ‘only’ $37 million over the first five years of the program.

They came to this cost estimate by assuming that there would be 56 new employees hired by CISA at an average compensation of $179,000. The CBO estimate does not include any provisions for supporting staff or office space. I am assuming that the CBO expects that the State Coordinators would probably work out of State primary fusion centers. Since there are 52 such fusion centers (one for each state, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands) I suppose the other four new employees would work out of the CISA headquarters office managing the program.

In any case, the limited number of employees being added would seem to emphasize that this is intended to be a relatively low-key operation.