Committee Hearings – Week of 6-6-21

This week, with the Senate in Washington and the House holding hearings, there is a full slate of hearings scheduled on both sides of Capitol Hill. We have two different hearing on the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack and there is a confirmation hearing on two high ranking cybersecurity personnel in the Administration. Then there are two iffy hearings that I will be watching for.

Colonial Pipeline

On Tuesday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee will hold a hearing on “Threats to Critical Infrastructure: Examining the Colonial Pipeline Cyber Attack”. The sole witness currently scheduled is Joseph A. Blount, JR., CEO of Colonial Pipeline.

On Wednesday the House Homeland Security Committee will hold a hearing on “Cyber Threats in the Pipeline: Using Lessons from the Colonial Ransomware Attack to Defend Critical Infrastructure”. Blount will also be a witness at this hearing. Additionally, the CTO of FireEye/Mandiant, Charles Carmaka, will be a witness.

Confirmation Hearing

On Thursday the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a confirmation hearing for three individuals, including Jen Easterly to be Director, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, DHS; and Chris Inglis to be National Cyber Director. These are two key cybersecurity positions and there is more than a little pressure to move these nominations forward quickly.

Iffy Hearings

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee is scheduled to hold a business meeting on Wednesday. There is currently no agenda available. This is probably going to be a markup hearing, but it could include votes on confirmations related to earlier hearings. I will be watching the website for the agenda.

The second iffy hearing is supposed to be a full committee markup hearing of HR 3684, the FY 2022 surface transportation authorization act bill. I have seen one news report describing the hearing in passing, but there is nothing on the Committee web site or the House.gov web site about the hearing. I will probably do a quick review of the lengthy bill later today, just to be on the safe side.

On the Floor

While there will be House hearings this week, the body will only meet in pro forma sessions on Tuesday and Friday, so nothing is scheduled there.

The Senate will resume consideration of S 1260, the Endless Frontier Act, today with a final vote probably on Wednesday. The vote has been pushed back a number of times already on this bill, so I would not be surprised to see happen again. There are a lot of games yet to be played on this bill.