Committee Hearings – Week of 1-24-21

With just the Senate in Washington this week the hearing schedule is very light. There will be Senate confirmation hearings (including DHS Secretary) and one organizational committee hearing in the House.

Energy and Commerce Organization

The House Energy and Commerce Committee will hold their organizational hearing on Friday. Nothing exciting here; just formal announcement of chairs and ranking members of the subcommittees and the adoption of committee rules and jurisdictions of the subcommittees (more on that in the Commentary section below).

Commentary

First, the Energy and Commerce subcommittee jurisdictions: It is always interesting to see how wide the scope of the responsibilities of House subcommittees is crafted. The wording in the E&C jurisdiction document is designed to be expansive rather than restrictive. The term ‘cybersecurity’ is specifically included in the description of jurisdiction in five of the six subcommittees listed; the only exception is the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and their purview is wide enough to incorporate cybersecurity related topics. DHS oversight for all topics specified is included in the scope statement for all but the Consumer Protection and Oversight subcommittees.

Of particular interest in this blog is coverage for the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program. CFATS is not specifically mentioned (it is a relatively small program by federal agency standards) but it would be included in the jurisdiction of two subcommittees; Environment and Climate Change (under the ‘industrial plant security, including cybersecurity’ listing) and Communications and Technology (under the ‘; the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the Department of Homeland Security’ listing).

Last topic: Senate confirmation hearings. The Senate has approved two nominations to date and will almost certainly approve a third today; all with strong bipartisan majorities. Things will start to get trickier. One of the major roadblocks ahead is the current failure to be able to reach an agreement on the organization of the Senate. With a 50-50 split Sen Schumer (D,NY) and Sen McConnel (R,TN) have yet to decide how to split the chairs of the Senate Committees and thus the number of Republicans and Democrats on those committees. Generally speaking the Committees are still operating under their 116^th Congress organization.

With non-controversial nominees (like the first three) this is not a major headache. When we start to look at potentially more problematic nominees (like Alejandro Mayorkas, for DHS) this starts to cause problems. Sen Hawley (R,MO) has placed a hold on Mayorkas nomination because of immigration issues and this will be a topic that will likely resonate in this week’s hearings. While Sen Peters (D,MI) is Chair, the Committee website still shows eight Republican members to five Democrats. I suspect that Mayorkas will be approved by the Committee, but the Hawley hold will still delay the consideration on the Senate floor.