Committee Hearings – Week of 6-13-21

With both the House and Senate in Washington there is a full slate of hearings on the schedule. Budget hearings are going into the final round as the House is expected to start publishing spending bills in the next few weeks. Additionally, we have one markup hearing of note and three cybersecurity hearings.

Budget Hearings

6-15-21 Senate Energy & Natural Resources – DOE,

6-16-21 Senate THUD Subcommittee – DOT,

6-17-21 House Homeland Security Committee – DHS,

6-17-21 Senate Appropriations Committee – DOD,

Normally, I do not comment much on budget hearings. They are typically high-level spending discussions, particularly at the department level like the ones this week. The DHS hearing could end up with some interesting discussions on cybersecurity spending, but I still do not expect any real discussion of program level spending.

Markup Hearing

On Tuesday the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee will be holding a markup hearing on two bills:

HR 2225, National Science Foundation for the Future Act, and

HR 3593, Department of Energy Science for the Future Act

I have not seen the second bill. The GPO is a long way from publishing it and there are problems (not unusual) with the link on the House.gov web site for the Committee Print.

The interesting thing here is that HR 2225 is being touted as the House answer to S 1260, so I expect to see some significant amendments being offered for the bill to help bulk it up some.

Cybersecurity Hearings

On Tuesday two subcommittees of the House Homeland Security Committee will be holding a hearing on “Cyber Threats in the Pipeline: Lessons from the Federal Response to the Colonial Pipeline Ransomware Attack.” The witness list includes:

• Soya Proctor, TSA, and

• Eric Goldstein, CISA

On Wednesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be holding a business meeting to consider three nominations, including:

• Jen Easterly to be Director of CISA, and

• Chris Inglis to be National Cyber Director.

I expect to see bipartisan support for favorably reporting both nominations.

On Thursday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will be holding a hearing on “Addressing Emerging Cybersecurity Threats to State and Local Government”. A witness list is not currently available.