On Thursday the Senate passed S 658, the National Cybersecurity Preparedness Consortium Act of 2021, under the unanimous consent process. There was no debate and no vote (pg S4932). As was noted in the Committee Report on this bill, the language authorizes DHS to deal with the Consortium that it has been dealing with since 2004.
While the House has passed similar legislation in past sessions, there has not been a cyber consortium bill introduced in the House this session. There is a very good chance that the House will take up this bill under their suspension of the rules process as the Senate process demonstrated broad bipartisan support for the bill. I would not be surprised to see this reach the President’s desk before the summer recess.
This bill is a political win-win for Congress. They can look
like they are doing something on cybersecurity without authorizing the expenditure
of any new funds. DHS has already done the heavy lifting on this program, and
it is already included in the budget.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment