Committee Hearings – Week of 11-29-20

With both the House and Senate back in Washington for the Lame Duck Session there are a limited number of hearings scheduled. One of those hearings deals with cybersecurity and COVID-19.

Cybersecurity Hearing

On Wednesday the Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management Subcommittee of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on “State and Local Cybersecurity: Defending Our Communities from Cyber Threats amid COVID-19”. The witness list includes:

• Brandon Wales, CISA,

• Denis Goulet, New Hampshire Department of Information Technology,

• Leslie Torres-Rodriguez, Hartford Public Schools,

• John Riggi, American Hospital Association, and

• Bill Siegel, Coveware, Inc.

Pending Legislation

The House has a series of bills that it is scheduled to consider under the Suspension of Rules process, but none are of specific interest here. The Senate is continuing to approve appointments made by President Trump.

There are two pieces of legislation that the 116^th Congress still needs to send to the President. The first (and arguably most important) is the FY 2021 spending bill. Negotiations are ongoing between the House and Senate Appropriations folks. The current spending authorization ends on December 11^th, 2020. The President needs to sign either a final spending bill or another continuing resolution by midnight of that date or the Federal government will shut down. While significant differences remain between the Republican and Democratic negotiators, the bigger question this year is probably will the lame duck President sign the bill agreed to by the negotiators? This bill (either solution) will probably not see the light of public scrutiny this week.

The other ‘must pass’ legislation is the FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act which is likely to include intelligence authorization language. Again, negotiations are ongoing. There will not be any catastrophic results (like a government shutdown) if this bill is not taken up this year. It could be taken up in the 117^th Congress, but it would cause all sorts of problems for continuity in DOD (and Intelligence) operations. Again, the big question is would LD Trump sign or veto a bill passed by Congress.