Committee Hearings – Week of 2-6-22

With both the House and Senate in Washington, there is an average list of hearings to be held this week. There is one cybersecurity hearing of note.

Cybersecurity

On Tuesday, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will hold a hearing on “Responding to and Learning from the Log4Shell Vulnerability”. The witness list includes:

• David Nalley, Apache Software Foundation,

• Brad Arkin, Cisco Systems, Inc.,

• Jen Miller-Osborn, Palo Alto Networks, and

• Trey Herr, Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security

Some heavy hitter tech company executives on the witness list so this could get interesting, especially with potentially blame-gaming Nalley. It is a shame that there is no one on the OT side of the tech house on the witness list, but that is probably to be expected.

On the Floor

The interesting item for the House this week is not on the schedule, the FY 2022 spending bill. The current CR expires a week from Friday, but the House is scheduled to be doing remote committee work next week. So we are probably going to see the House take up a CR this week. Even that will probably have an impact on schedules because the schedule for the week shows ‘no votes’ for Thursday and Friday.

News reports (see here for example) indicate that we will probably see another ‘short term’ continuing resolution to allow more negotiations to iron out the differences on the spending bill. The alternative is to do a CR that lasts until the end of September. That would allow the appropriators to start working on the FY 2023 spending package, but it would keep funding at current levels. That would effectively be a spending cut with inflation running the way it is.