S 1324 Introduced - Civilian Cyber Security Reserve Act

Earlier this month Sen Rosen (D,NV) introduced S 1324, the Civilian Cyber Security Reserve Act. The bill would authorize DOD and DHS to each establish a separate Civilian Cyber Security Reserve pilot project “to address the cyber security needs of the United States with respect to national security”. The pilot project authorization would end seven years after they were established. Such sums as may be necessary for these projects would be authorized by this bill.

Personnel in either of the CCSR could be activated and they would be given a noncompetitive appointment to temporary positions in the competitive or excepted service. Those appointments would be for no more than six months. While in those temporary positions, they would be considered Federal civil service employee under 5 USC 2105.

Moving Forward

Rosen is a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to which this bill was assigned for consideration. This means that she could have enough influence to see this bill considered in Committee. I suspect that there would be some level of bipartisan support for the bill. If considered, I would expect to see it favorably reported.

This bill is not important enough to make it to the floor of the Senate for consideration. The time necessary to go through the debate and amendment process means that a bill only comes to the floor when it is important enough in the eyes of the Senate leadership to consume those limited resources. I would suspect that there would be enough opposition to the bill to prevent it from being considered under the unanimous consent process.

Commentary

There is an ongoing problem in the government (and of course in industry as well) of finding enough people with cybersecurity expertise to fill all of the positions necessary to maintain an adequate level of cybersecurity knowledge to be able to respond to the daily grind of protecting the governments cyber systems. This bill is not really designed to address that general issue.

What Rosen and her sole cosponsor {Sen Blackburn (R,TN)} are attempting to do with this bill is to provide some level of surge capacity at DOD and DHS to deal with large scale incidents like the SolarWind attacks or the Microsoft email server problems. Having trained and experienced personnel available to be called up on short notice would certainly make that kind of incident response much easier.

A more detailed analysis of this bill is available at CFSN Detailed Analysis, subscription required.