HR 4691 Introduced - K–12 Cybersecurity

Last month, Rep Langevin introduced HR 4691, the K–12 Cybersecurity Act of 2021. The bill would require CISA to conduct a study on the specific cybersecurity risks facing K–12 educational institutions and develop an online cybersecurity training toolkit designed for officials at K–12 educational institutions. The bill is nearly identical to S 1917. No funding is authorized in the bill.

The only difference between the two bills (besides the bill numbers, of course) is that this version of the bill does not capitalize the word “congressional” the second time that it is used in §2(b)(2). This is a more appropriate usage than the capitalized version used in S 1917.

HR 4691 was considered by the House Homeland Security Committee on July 28^th, 2021. It was adopted without amendment as part of an en bloc approval of eight bills by a voice vote. This strong bipartisan support should allow the bill to be taken up by the whole House under the suspension of the rules process. This would allow for limited debate, no floor amendments and would require a super majority for passage.

As I noted in my article about S 1917 at CFSN Detailed Analysis - https://patrickcoyle.substack.com/p/s-1917-introduced - (subscription required), this bill utilizes the IT restrictive definition of the term ‘information systems’, thus limiting CISA support to administrative and instructional cybersecurity while ignoring the security of control systems used in the physical plant and security systems.